Pieces of Me

September 1, 2012
A gritty portrait of teens and children living on the street suffers from a too-tidy ending. Maddie has been living on the street since her mom's boyfriend started hitting her. After leaving a manipulative church service, she meets Q, another street kid, who offers to let Maddie sleep in his car. Though at first suspicious, Maddie says yes: Q will ask fewer questions than the well-meaning shelter director who wants to reunite kids with their families, and the piece of glass Maddie keeps in her pocket will protect her if need be. As Maddie grows to trust Q, the two forge a sort of family together. An abandoned child soon falls under their care; they rent a squalid apartment from an exploitative slumlord; and a skittish 12-year-old, first offered to Q in a poker bet, slowly warms up to them too. Day-to-day existence is rendered in believable and exhausting detail. Maddie and Q acquire food, manage the stresses of caring for a child and attempt to make enough money to get by. Despite both young people's certainty that foster care would be a worse solution than the life they've cobbled together, the book ends with a sudden turnaround that implies that adults and institutions can always save lives like Maddie's. A sadly simplistic finish mars an otherwise complex survival story. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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February 1, 2013

Gr 8 Up-A gritty, realistic look at teen homelessness. Unwilling to endure physical abuse from her mom's new boyfriend, Maddie leaves home and learns how to get by. Life is hard, but she is fiercely independent and wouldn't have it any other way. Then she meets Q. They both have altruistic hearts-something rare on the streets-and they team up for platonic company. When a homeless family asks if Maddie would watch their six-year-old son, she agrees. However, the family doesn't come back for Dylan, and now Maddie and Q have a makeshift family. Eventually, 12-year-old Leo also joins them. Maddie's maternal instincts and emotions are spot-on-she is by turns loving, protective, frustrated, and unselfish. She and Q do what they can to provide some semblance of stability for Dylan and Leo, and perhaps the assumption of parental roles is what turns their platonic relationship sexual. Their resourcefulness is quite amazing. However, Q's means of providing for the others is playing poker, which becomes their downfall when the stakes get too high. With her fragile world falling apart, Maddie realizes that she needs to ask for help for Dylan, Leo, and, ultimately, for herself. This story realistically portrays several reasons children and teens become homeless.-Lisa Crandall, Capital Area District Library, Holt, MI

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2012
Grades 8-12 Homelessness, domestic abuse, and parental abandonment are indisputably weighty topics. Yet in this story of a makeshift family, they seem surprisingly surmountable. Teenager Maddie has run away to escape her mother's latest bullying boyfriend and has been surviving on her own. Despite her initial wariness, she connects with the mysterious Q, who provides company and a semblance of security. When they become the caretakers of six-year-old Dylan (his parents ask Maddie to watch him, then never return), they pool their limited resources and try to formulate a plan for escaping the streets. Ryan has created a thought-provoking portrait of young people living not only on the fringes of society but on the fringes of time as well; much of the book is spent waiting for malls and soup kitchens and libraries to open so that the kids can wash their faces or beat the line to a free meal. After so much self-reliance, the book's ending feels more like a compromise than a solution. But at least it offers hope.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)