Harry Sue
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Harry Sue Clotkin is tough. Her mom's in the slammer and she wants to get there too, as fast as possible, so they can be together. But it's not so easy to become a juvenile delinquent when you've got a tender heart.
Harry Sue's got her hands full caring for the crumb-snatchers who take up her afternoons at the day care center, and spending time with her best friend Homer, a quadriplegic who sees life from a skylight in the roof of his tree house. When Harry Sue finds an unlikely confidante in her new art teacher, her ambitions toward a life of crime are sidelined as she comes to a deeper understanding about her past--and future.
Sue Stauffacher has once again crafted a fast-paced middle-grade novel filled with quirky but lovable characters, a narrator impossible to ignore, a completely original plot, and a whole lot of redemption.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Listen up, Fish." Harry Sue tells her story in "joint jive" she's learned from her quadriplegic best friend's home health aide, an ex-con. She plans to be fluent in "Conglish" ("a combination of joint jive and English," explains the opening glossary) by the time she completes a crime spree that'll land her in prison alongside her drug-dealing mother. Mary Bell went to the slammer seven years earlier, leaving Harry Sue in the care of her racist paternal grandmother. Granny runs a day care for "crumb snatchers," as Harry Sue calls them, a place that's about as loving and reputable as the group home Luther oversees for his mother in Christopher Paul Curtis's Bucking the Sarge. Both books also share Michigan settings and over-the-top, overstuffed plots, in which hilarity goes a long way to offset implausibility. Like Luther, Harry Sue, at 11, is a bit too competent to be believed. When she reads aloud to quadriplegic Homer, it's Kafka. The prison metaphor applies not only to Granny's abode ("You see, Granny and I were locked in a war for control of the joint"), but also to Homer's tree house, which is accessible to others only by a rope. Stauffacher (Donuthead) juggles many balls in this lengthy, ambitious but briskly paced novel (another subplot involves a Sudanese substitute art teacher who was one of Africa's Lost Boys), and it's a measure of her skill that she very nearly succeeds in keeping them all in the air. Ages 8-12.
