patse

Technically I would give this book two and a half stars but I really didn’t think it was worth a full three, as I ultimately had too many issues with it. The biggest success of this book is how well Strasser shows how the homeless kids live by begging for spare change and eating whatever food they can find even it isn’t the healthiest, like doughnuts. A particularly good scene, I thought was when Rainbow and Maybe, desperate to feel clean, tried washing themselves in a library bathroom. It all really showed the extent that someone will go to survive and how bad their home lives must have been for them to live out on the streets of New York City. One thing that annoyed me as the reader, were the street names. They were confusing especially in that they weren’t gender specific, as in the case of Maybe’s name. I was four chapters in before I knew for sure that Maybe was a girl. The author also didn’t give any hints as to why Maggot or OG got their names either. I have my own ideas, but really nothing was explained as to their street name origins. This will probably sound horrible, but another problem that I had with this book was that I never felt any connection to the characters; this is probably because there are too many of them and the fact that Maybe spends a lot of her time wandering the streets alone. Yes they are homeless because they wanted to escape horrible lives, but I didn’t really get a good sense of each individual personality, each character just seemed to be filling a different label of a homeless person such as 2Moro who sells herself to get money and Maggot who has major issues with authority and just wants the world to f*** off. But since they are homeless, this helps to show how desperate one can be just to survive day by day and the attitude of being viewed as nothing. On a side note, Jewel reminded me a lot of Angel from the musical, “Rent” and coincidentally, Maybe and the other homeless kids hang out in Alphabet City which is also the setting of “Rent”. The book honestly gets better after Rainbow dies because then Maybe, the last of her street “tribe” and helps Tears get back to her family as she knows that she doesn’t belong on the streets. While Tears (real name is Nikki) is returned to her grandparents, the future is uncertain for Maybe (her real name is Jesse, another reason why I thought she was a boy when I saw it in the back of the book) but there is a definite tone that things are looking up for her and will get better as she realizes that she can’t live on the streets, she can only die there like the rest of her “tribe”. True, she doesn’t get the loving family at the end like Tears does, but I was glad for this as it kept the book realistic and let the reader decide what happens to Maybe in the end.

2022-11-14 15:04