Book #123: Lockdown

Title: Lockdown
Author: Walter Dean Myers

Lockdown tells the story of fifteen-year-old Reese, who's in a juvenile correction facility in New York state because he stole a prescription pad from a doctor's office and sold it to a drug dealer when he was thirteen. Now he's doing his best to stay out of trouble with the other boys and figure out what his life will hold when he gets back on the streets of Harlem.

Myers does a great job creating a sympathetic character in Reese. He's probably the kind of boy that most suburban teenagers would be reflexively afraid of-- he's in juvenile detention, he tends to get in fights, he has a smart mouth, but he's also concerned about his little sister, and his future, and finds a lot of satisfaction from his work-release job in a nursing home. Like Mockingbird, Lockdown feels like an "issues" book. While Mockingbird was concerned with school shootings and Asperger's Syndrome, Lockdown explores the plight of kids caught up in the juvenile justice system, and he seems to conclude that there's not much hope or justice for many of these kids. There were a lot of things I liked about Lockdown, but I think the thing I liked best was the narrator-- he does a great job with Reese and with the other characters in the novel.