"If you could do it all over again and change something, what would it be?"

myzticrhythmz@evpl — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:23:00 GMT

This is the big question for Jeremy Dance, aka Lil J, in Walter Dean Myers' Dope Sick. Lil J is a 17-year-old on the run, part of a drug deal gone wrong in which an undercover cop's been shot. He finds himself hiding out in an abandoned building in the company of Kelly, a weird vagrant with a television that can show Lil J's past, present, and maybe his future. It's Kelly who asks Lil J the question about what he would change in his life if he could, and much of the book covers Lil J revisiting his downward spiral: a painful home life, drugs, jail time, fathering a child.

This is a fascinating book where a kid from the streets is compelled to stop at a pivotal point in his life and consider that he may actually have options. He wasn't a bad student, has a gift for the rhythm of rap, and seems to care for his son and the child's mother.

Walter Dean Myers has taken a very contemporary, real-life situation and infused it with a bit of mysticism and fantasy. He also leaves the reader with some questions: Who was Kelly?A real, "spooky" guy? A ghost? A drug-induced hallucination? Will Lil J be able to turn his life around?

And by all means, stick around for the ending. It's not what you'd expect.

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"If you could do it all over again and change something, what would it be?"