RunAway: A Survivor

Rating:
Summary: Runaway Dreams
Review: Reading Runaway-A Survivor is like eating a box of assorted candies. Some are sweet, others are sour and at least one is so delicious it tastes like a bite of Heaven. This is not a sweet book, however. It's a bite of ultra-harsh reality. It seems so true-to-life that it must be based on real-life stories. The use of language alone is enough to convice even the most cynical reader that the author has had firsthand experience with the gritty street kids. You can't help but flinch at the outrageous difficulties the protagonist, teenaged Johnny, confronts. In some ways this is an adventure, in another way it is a serious drama, but other times the plot has a light sprinkling of humor. It's hard to categorize this book except to say that it entertained me and shocked me and made me experience emotions I didn't even know I posssessed.

Rating:
Summary: Real Street Life
Review: The street life for 16-year-old Johnny is a nightmare of crime, sexual exploitation, drugs and violence. It's not a life that he chose, but one that he was jettisoned into when he was forced to run away from an abusive foster parent. The plot thickens when Johnny lands on the cold midnight streets and alleys of Atlanta. Here, Johnny's core belief in his own worth as a human being is tested and he finds a simple goodness in a few runaway friends and in himself. He realizes that he can be more than a bought item that adults use and then dispose of without the slightest regard for him. The writing is gritty, edgy, full of violence and anger, but tempered with an almost poetic undercurrent that lessens the meanness and pain. The characters step from the pages fully developed and so believable that the reader cannot help but recognize these children as once being their neighbors, or maybe even being their own. This book will stay with you a long, long time.