Genre: YA
Rating: 4
Mark is a troubled delinquent teen from Hobbs, NM with a stoner father a dead twin brother, and an absent mother. He gets caught one day stealing and leads the police right to his house, where they arrest his father on drug charges. Mark gets sent to a reform camp of sorts in Puerto. He makes immediate plans to run away but gets caught. As he serves his time, he makes new friends. But the losses of his life soon become overwhelming, and he has to learn what it means to be a real hero.
This book is a quick read -- less than 200 pages. The pace is slow, but it gave me a feeling of peacefulness as I was reading. Mark really isn't that bad of a kid. It's very easy to see how the circumstances of his life and the people he should be able to count on have really damaged his ability to make good choices, and this is something he learns and takes responsibility for over the course of the book.
I was pleasantly surprised at some of the "side stories" that were woven throughout this book. It's not all from Mark's POV. There's a bear who lives near the camp whose story is actually really tragic and elicited some emotions from me. The Tim character was fun to read about. There is kind of a surprise "villain" near the end that I did NOT guess correctly. The story itself isn't super suspenseful, but it's written in such a way that you want to follow Mark on his journey. Without spoiling anything, this book deals with the topic of loss very heavily and doesn't have a particularly happy ending, but the messages are solid and the emotions are strong.
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