Exit Strategy

February 8, 2010
Potter’s debut is set in Blaine, Mich., a fictional Detroit suburb dependent on its automotive assembly plant for jobs. Zach is desperate to leave after his senior year, hoping to avoid the fate of his parents, who have lived and worked in Blaine their whole lives. In the meantime, he becomes determined to expose his football coach, who he suspects is supplying steroids to athletes, and his best friend Tank’s father, an undercover cop who he thinks is mistreating his children and having an affair. Zach’s righteous motivations are not quite clear; he tells readers, “I’m about the farthest thing from a hero as one can get,” and he has no problem stealing and reselling beer from his party store job (“by the end of my second week, I’m doing physical labor for no more than two hours per shift... which eventually leads to a lot of smoking, drinking, and stealing”). The working-class setting feels well realized, but secondary characters and subplots—Zach’s parents’ strained marriage, his attraction to Tank’s newly hot twin sister—are less so. Ages 12–up.

February 15, 2010
Grades 9-12 A Detroit suburb on the skids makes an appropriately seedy setting for this decidedly dark comedy featuring plenty of drinking, smoking, risky behavior, and lives gone wrong. The summer before his senior year proves to be a real eye-opener for Zach as he watches his parents marriage dissolve after both get laid off; falls in love with Sarah, the twin sister of his hulking and fiercely protective best friend, Tank; finds evidence that Tanks savage mood swings and bursts of violence are due to steroids supplied by an idolized high-school coach; and learns that Tanks supposedly upright father, an undercover cop and the storys closest approach to an adult role model, has a stash of porn magazines and is taking another mans wife to sex parties. Though Zach promises no happy endings at the outset of his present-tense narrative, by the close he has made at least a few good choices (after several wince-worthy poor ones), and his determined goal to find a way to escape his town and its traps still looks attainable.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)