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The Role of Caring Adults in Helping Boys Become Men:
Two Reviews
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2012-09-23 08:41:39
I’m nearing the end of a working draft of another young adult novel, this one about a 15-year-old boy from the wrong side
of the tracks who loses his place in an elite academic program after a beating by three of his more privileged classmates
leaves him with a severe concussion. As he approaches a crisis point, my protagonist, Nate, suffers from a dearth of caring
adults who can show him the way. It’s not that adults don’t care. His mother and stepfather teach him survival skills, but
they don’t want him to take the risks that will allow him to move beyond the world they know. His supervisor at the
community center where he tutors younger children takes a tough-love approach to his mistakes, which makes him question
how much he can trust her. A teacher reaches out, but ashamed at his failure, he avoids her and she doesn’t push him. As a
result, Nate is falling through the cracks at a time when he needs to build his own future and be a role model for and
TAP OUT
4
champion of a friend’s gifted younger brother. Two brand-new YA novels by local authors
offer models of presenting teenage boys in crisis who find caring adults to show them the way. Eric Devine’s Tap Out,
published by Running Press Kids, features a 17-year-old boy from a hardscrabble mobile home park similar to the one
where my protagonist lives. Unlike Nate, however, his main character, Tony Antioch, does not have a stable home situation.
His mother is a drug addict who has hooked up with a succession of abusive boyfriends throughout Tony’s life. The most
recent one, Cameron, is connected to a meth-dealing motorcycle gang, and through Cameron’s nephew, a high school
classmate of Tony’s, Tony is forced to join the gang. When Tony disrupts a math class to get detention and avoid Cameron’s
nephew, he ends up in the office of the principal, Big O, who makes him a deal. If Tony signs up for the mixed-martial-arts
club run by Big O’s friend, Coach Dan, the principal will help him apply to college. Tony’s best friend Rob, one of Big O’s
other “projects,” is a star of Coach Dan’s club, and through these two adult leaders, Tony learns to stand up for himself and
care about his future. Unfortunately, the gang’s tentacles reach very deep into the boy’s life, and after Cameron puts his
mother in the hospital, Tony finds few options to pay the medical bills or to protect her and himself. Devine shows that
gangs don’t only exist in urban areas and among racial and ethnic minorities, and in that way his depiction of Tony’s world
counteracts a common stereotype. And while the families of “Pleasant Meadows” are shown as dysfunctional in the vein of
Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (the book that was purported to have in part
inspired Mitt Romney’s “47%” comment), neither Cameron nor his nephew hail from the park. (On the other hand, Rob
from the park comes from a stable two-parent family.) More importantly, this novel, with its fast pace and vivid action, will
appeal to that tough audience of teen boy readers. Boys will recognize the difference that caring adults can make and
perhaps be motivated to become that kind of adult. While Devine portrays a working-class teen struggling to survive, Brett
Hartman in Cadillac Chronicles (Cinco Puntos Press) gives us a middle-class youngster who appears to have lost his way.
Turning 16, Alex Riley has no friends, an extremely strained>™ all relationship with his mother, and
no contact with his father since he was a toddler. Alex’s mother is a rising star in Albany politics, and to burnish her resume,
she agrees to take in an elderly man—a retired GE engineer with multiple health problems—in a program that serves as an
alternative to a nursing home. Lester Bray is black, and Alex doesn’t know what to make of that, as he’s never seen a person
of another race up close. However, the lonely boy and the crusty old man bond over male talk and Alex’s sensitive drawings,
and they both become thorns in Mom’s side. When she decides the arrangement isn’t working out, Lester and Alex conspire
to run away in Lester’s pristine vintage Cadillac. The two head south in search of Alex’s estranged father and Lester’s
estranged sister. On the way, Alex learns to drive, and the two confront a racist cop and their own prejudices related to age,
race, and sexual orientation. Alex grows on the journey as a result of his close relationship with a caring adult. Readers see
him happy for the first time, developing a new sense of competence that a controlling parent had robbed him of, and able to
see that relationships are not as clear cut as his mother and his peers have made him think. Alex’s psychologist—a rather
unprofessional man—believes that the teenager could one day become the perpetrator of a school shooting like the loner at
Virginia Tech. Through Lester, Alex makes the kind of connections that convince him he is not going to become a school
shooter, and that, despite his social anxiety and awkwardness, if he makes an effort to make friends, he will succeed. In the
course of Cadillac Chronicles we, like Lester, grow to like Alex and believe in him as he comes to believe in himself. This
road-trip novel is full of humor and surprises that make it a delightful read for teenage boys and many girls as well. Eric
Devine will be speaking about Zap Out and signing copies at The Little Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza on Saturday,
September 29 at 3 pm. Cadillac Chronicles will be available in bookstores beginning in October. Watch for Brett Hartman’s
launch event coming soon.
