The violent world of the underclass and the daily battle with hopeless poverty, drug addiction, and other urban horrors come vividly to life in a collection of stories about being young and desperate in the South Bronx. A first collection. Original.
It is 1966, and the times, they are a-changin’. Fifteen-year-old Stephen is on his way to a summer program in France when he meets two glamorous new friends of his older brother, Rob, who has been missing for 18 months. They persuade Stephen to travel to Istanbul with them, to find his brother. And what a world opens up to him: a world of beautiful girls, drug busts, fascinating cultures, fast-moving friendships, and betrayals. As he travels further into Asia, the nature of Stephen’s journey changes: The search for his brother is replaced by an inner exploration, in which he must confront his own past, and his own dark secret.
Thoughtful Pete, tough Pauly, twins Eric and Nicole, strange Raymond: As kids they were tight; now they’ve grown up–and apart. They agree to get together one last time, but, twisted by personal histories and fueled by pharmaceuticals, old jealousies surface. The party’s soon over, and the group splinters off into the night. Into the noise and heat and chaos of the carnival. Days later, a girl goes missing. The prime suspect in her disappearance? One of their own, one of the old gang. Pete doesn’t know what to believe: Could one of his childhood friends really be a cold-blooded killer?
The House of the Scorpion By Nancy Farmer is about Matthew who is a clone of El Patrón, a powerful drug lord of the land of Opium, which is located between the United States and Mexico. For six years, he has lived in a tiny cottage in the poppy fields with Celia, a kind and deeply religious servant woman who is charged with his care and safety. He knows little about his existence until he is discovered by a group of children playing in the fields and wonders why he isn’t like them. Though Matt has been spared the fate of most clones, who have their intelligence destroyed at birth, the evil inhabitants of El Patrón’s empire consider him a “beast” and an “eejit.” When El Patrón dies at the age of 146, fourteen-year-old Matt escapes Opium with the help of Celia and Tam Lin, his devoted bodyguard who wants to right his own wrongs. After a near misadventure in his escape, Matt makes his way back home and begins to rid the country of its evils.
For twelve-year-old Diego and his family, home is the San Sebastian Women’s Prison in Cochabamba, Bolivia. His parents farmed coca, a traditional Bolivian medicinal plant, until they got caught in the middle of the government’s war on drugs. Diego’s parents are locked up, but he can come and go to school, to the market to sell his mother’s hand-knitted goods, and to work as a “taxi,” running errands for other prisoners. But then his little sister runs away, earning his mother a heavy fine. The debt and dawning realization of his hopeless situation make him vulnerable to his friend Mando’s plan to make big money, fast. Soon, Diego is deep in the jungle, working as a virtual slave in an illegal cocaine operation. As his situation becomes more and more dangerous, he knows he must take a terrible risk if he ever wants to see his family again.
It is 1969, and Stephen meets up with old friend Astrid and her lover Spencer, and stays with them in the hippy household “The Hollies.” Peace and love are tangible, until his passionate attraction for another girl in the household goes sour. He drifts into the radical arts scene and far-left politics, and finally into a squalid squat in London. A return to the idyllic “The Hollies” seems a good idea, but now the house has become a commune, and Spencer is the guru.