[CALIBK12] Richie’s Picks: THE JUVIE THREE

[BudNotBuddy at aol.com]

Richie’s Picks: THE  JUVIE THREE by Gordon Korman, Hyperion, September 2008, 
249p., ISBN:  978-1-4231-0158-1
 
"I get by with a little help from my  friends
I'm gonna try with a little help from my  friends"
-- The  Beatles
 
"He turns left and left again, circling  back onto Jackson.  It's  
effortless.  The wheel is an  extension of his hands, just the way he likes it.  Gecko's 
the car, and the car is  Gecko.  Not bad, this  M45…
"Uh-oh.  The bald guy's dead ahead, and he's  managed to flag down a traffic 
cop.  The cop steps right into the Infiniti's path, holding his hand out like, 
 well, a cop.  Gecko slaloms around  him and then floors it.  In the  blink 
of an eye, the Infiniti is halfway down the next block.  Gecko grins into the 
mirror.  The officer and the car owner scramble  helplessly in his wake.
"The smile disappears abruptly as his  rearview changes.  The door of the  
shop bursts open, and out stumble Ruben and his two cronies, weighed down with  
huge armloads of video games.  One  of them actually runs into the traffic 
cop, bowling him over in a spray of  falling cases.
"Gecko shifts into reverse.  Now the acceleration is pressing on his  chest, 
propelling him backward.  Uh-oh.  The light  changes.  A solid line of traffic 
is  coming at him from the other direction.  He presses on the gas, steering 
with one  hand as he peers over his shoulder at the tons of metal hurtling 
toward  him.  The gap disappears in a  heartbeat, split seconds to impact --"
 
I want to meet the kid who isn't  immediately sucked in by the high octane 
opening scene of THE JUVIE THREE.   (It ends with that Infiniti flipped upside 
down and Gecko blacked out  inside.)
 
Gecko, the thirteen-year-old getaway  "man" who is prone to "not thinking," 
subsequently finds himself in the  Jerome Atchison Juvenile Detention Center.   
Meanwhile, Terrance Florian, a teen gang member from Chicago has been a  
resident in an alternative detention program at Lion's Head Island.  And 
fifteen-year-old convicted murderer  Arjay Moran, "a six-foot-five, 260 pound African 
American, built like a  wrestler, with a barrel chest and huge arms," has been 
incarcerated in  Remsenville, an adult correctional facility.
 
The three teens are now being released  into the custody of Douglas Healy.  
Healy has received a New  Directions grant from the Garfield Foundation "to 
create a living situation for  boys in the juvenile detention system."  He will 
be living with and supervising the trio in an apartment on the  Upper East Side 
of Manhattan.  They  will be carefully overseen during every moment as they 
attend a public high  school, participate in community service, take part in 
group counseling, and  share the cooking and cleaning.  There will be no contact 
of any kind for the first six months with family  or old friends, and there 
will be no unsupervised time for getting into  trouble.
 
If any one of the three kids screws  up, then all of them will be forced to 
return to the respective hellish  situations from which Healy has rescued them. 
 Ms.Vaughn, a harsh, skeptical, and  seriously overworked social worker, 
doesn't like this setup one bit, and is  gunning for catching one of them stepping 
out of line so that she can pull the  plug on this misguided experiment. 
 
 
"Yes, there are two paths you can go by,  but in the long run,
There's still time to change the road  you're on."
--Led Zepplin, "Stairway to  Heaven"

 
As two of the teens try to stop the  third's middle-of-the-night attempt to 
slip out of the apartment, they  accidentally but severely injure Mr. Healy.  
Leaving him, in a coma, outside the  entrance to a nearby emergency room, THE 
JUVIE THREE is the story of how  the three teens individually and collectively 
move forward as the time ticks  away on their freedom.
  
"It reminds him of a story he studied in  middle school.  A condemned man  
staves off his execution by promising that, in a single year, he can teach the  
king’s favorite horse to talk.  Someone asks why he would make such a 
ridiculous  bargain.
"He replies, 'A year is a long  time.  I may die.  Or the king may die.  Or 
the horse may die.  Or the horse may  talk.'
"Freedom equals possibility.  The horse may talk."
 
One of those read-it-in-one-gulp books,  THE JUVIE THREE is a smart, sweet, 
breathless romp  through Manhattan that is appropriate for and is certain to be 
a hit  with middle school students.  High action is interwoven with the  
steady peeling away of the layers to reveal what each of these three kids is  
really made of.  I am also really moved by the character of  Healy, a former 
problem kid who has survived his own adolescence and  now hopes to do something for 
the next  generation.       
 

Richie  Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks http://richiespicks.com
Moderator,  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit/
BudNotBuddy at aol.com
http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks





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