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Read a good new teen novel about foster kids and group homes. Here's the blurb:
THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO by Brent Hartinger
(for readers 12 and up)
Fifteen years old and parentless, Lucy Pitt has spent the last eight years being shifted from one foster home to another. Now shes ended up at Kindle Home, a place for foster kids who arenґt wanted anywhere else. Among the residents, Kindle Home is known as the Last Chance Texaco, because its the last stop before being shipped off to the high-security juvenile detention center on nearby Rabbit Island--better known as Eat-Their-Young Island to anyone who knows what itґs really like.
But Lucy finds that Kindle Home is different from past group homes, and she soon decides she wants to stay. Problem is, someone is starting a series of car-fires in the neighborhood in an effort to get the house shut down. Could it be Joy, a spiteful Kindle Home resident? Or maybe it's Alicia, the bony blond supermodel-wannabe from the local high school who thinks Lucy has stolen her boyfriend. Lucy suspects it might even be Emil, the Kindle Home therapist, who clearly has a low opinion of the kids he counsels. Whoever it is, Lucy must expose the criminal, or she'll lose not just her new home, but her one last chance for happiness.
In the tradition of S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders and Louis Sachar's Holes, Hartinger writes about a subculture of teenagers many people would like to forget, in a novel as fast-paced and provocative as his first book, Geography Club.
[Edited To Remove the URL to a Retail website.]
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***SPOILER WARNING!!!!***
Brent's a buddy of mine. He worked for many years in a group home much like the one in his book, and I think he nailed it pretty well.
I think the best part of this book is the fact that Lucy saves the day-- even though she's a foster kid. I get really frustrated with my profession as an author at times and the ways that foster kids seem to mostly be presented as "damaged" and "dark" and such. Some reviewers found fault with Brent's happy ending, saying it wasn't realistic, but I thought it was great. No, most teens don't get homes once they make it as far into the system as this kind of group home, but some do. I, for one, like the fact that it ends the way it did.
My only beef-- and I took this up with Brent-- is that all the main characters in this book are there because their parents are dead. No one was there because of neglect or abuse or anything. They all were true orphans. Brent said I was the only person to even bring that to his attention.
Other than that, its a great book.
~B.
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