The Free
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A 21st century response to Walter Dean Myers's classic Lockdown, The Free takes a look inside juvie, where Isaac West is fighting for a second chance.
In the beginning, Isaac West stole to give his younger sister, Janelle, little things: a new sweater, a scarf, just things that made her look less like a charity case whose mother spent money on booze and more like the prep school girls he’s seen on the way to school.
But when his biggest job to date, a car theft, goes wrong, Isaac chooses to take the full rap himself, and he’s cut off from helping Janelle. He steels himself for 30 days at Haverland Juvenile Detention Facility. Friendless in a dangerous world of gangs and violent offenders, he must watch his every step.
Isaac’s sentence includes group therapy, where he and fellow inmates reenact their crimes, attempting to understand what happened from the perspective of their victims. The sessions are intense. And as Isaac pieces together the truth about the circumstances that shaped his life—the circumstances that landed him in juvie in the first place—he must face who he was, who he is . . . and who he wants to be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Trying to make 30 days in juvie go by as quickly as possible, 16-year-old Isaac West learns surprising things about himself in this emotionally charged novel from McLaughlin (Wishing Day). A slick thief whose racially mixed background only adds to his sense of being an outsider, Isaac started stealing to provide for his younger sister, Janelle, since their mother is more concerned with drinking and other unsavory pursuits. He moved on to boosting cars and ended up in the Haverland Juvenile Detention outside Boston after taking the fall for a job that turned violent. The center is akin to a small war zone, with rival gangs rumbling in the cafeteria, but group therapy sessions become a place for Isaac to both listen and unlock a part of himself as the members write out their "crime stories" for the others to perform it's the most macabre theater class ever. McLaughlin never shies from her characters' difficult backstories or the crimes they committed, giving teenagers that society often thinks of as broken a chance to speak, in their own voices. Ages 14 up.
