Rats In The Trees

by Jess Mowry

Book Overview

From the author of the hip novel Way Past Cool come these moving, streetwise stories about wayward boys. Mowry captures with moving accuracy and rare insight the bravado, humor, and compassion born in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0998557951
• ISBN13: 9780998557953
• Release Date: January 2017
• Publisher: Anubis
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A hard book to find but worth the search

This might not be an easy book to find but it is worth looking for. It is the first book written by Jess Mowry and it very accurately describes what it was like to be a young black street kid in the late 1980s. It is a collection of stories that are related to each other almost like chapters in a novel and is about the life of thirteen=year-old Robby who runs away from Fresno California and hooks up with a gang of street kids in Oakland. It is very interesting to see how life was like for these kids back in the day before it became media cool to be a gangster and everybody had to have cool black threads that are usually made in China. In a lot of ways this book is a prediction of what would happen in the next decade of the 1990s. The stories are told in a simple and clear style of writing with no tricks that tells things like they are and lets the reader make his own judgements about them. I agree with the man who reviewed Jess's newest book Bones Become Flowers that if more people had listened and used their own sense ten years ago we might have saved a lot of our kids from gangs and drugs, and if kids had read this book they also might have saved themselves. I like the way things are presented in this book with no preaching. Robby's life is hard and violent in many ways but he is a young man with a good heart and his fight for dignity and survival is no different from that of other black kids today.