Vengeance

April 1, 2013

Gr 8 Up-In Unbroken, David Morales is going home to the barrio after two-years in prison for burglary. With a criminal record, he fears he won't be able to get the job he needs to start a new life. Through a connection with his brother's girlfriend, he lands a position on the staff of a local City Councilman. Here he uses a skill he learned in prison, namely the ability to get along with a lot of different people, to help solve local issues. David regrets his crimes but readers don't learn how he got there, and he makes the transition to life on the outside seem easy-no slip-ups, no transgressions. All of it is a bit too simplistic and in the case of the City Council passing a sales-tax in California that never goes to a vote, inaccurate. In Vengeance, Ernesto Sandoval is on a mission to solve all the problems at Chavez High. As the senior class president, he's started a big-brother, big-sister mentoring program that pairs seniors with "at risk" freshmen. When a spate of bullying against a teacher; his wife, who suffers from Parkinson's; and his granddaughter, a little sister in Ernesto's program starts online and in person, Ernesto, his girlfriend, and their friends are determined to make it stop. Someone vandalizes the library, and Ernesto is on another mission. This short story is told in a disjointed narrative that veers off on unrelated tangents, including an out-of-nowhere climactic ending in the final fourth of the book. Ernesto is an empty shell of a character; he's too good to be true and just uninteresting.-Shawna Sherman, Hayward Public Library, CA

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