Dog Ear

As a Garden State Teen Book Award reviewer, expect to see a lot of YA book reviews in the coming three months. The first is Almost Home, a book that, like its title and characters, gets very close but never quite reaches its destination.

It is the story of Eeyore, Rusty, Squid, Scabious, Critter, Laura, and Tracy (who ties the characters together). They are homeless teens living on the streets of Los Angeles. Each has a reason for leaving home (abuse, boredom, abuse) and each has a chapter to tell his/her story. The plot is solid. The stories are loosely connected by Tracy.

What doesn’t work is the language. The chapters are told from a first-person perspective but the voices are not unique. Each character thought like the former; their language similar. Their word choice and phrasing when speaking about sex and drugs was too circuitous when I expected these gritty teens to be direct. There was a lot of introspection, which didn’t work for me. I would have liked to see more of their behavior instead of being force fed monologues about how each character feels. For example, the tidbits we see about Squid and Rusty through the narratives of Tracy and Critter are more than revealing enough about how each feels about the group. Their own rantings were too much.

Not as well written as, say, Story of a Girl by Zarr, which I think nailed the lower-middle class perspective and had a great story to boot (not that I am comparing the two plots), but it was an engaging read all the same.

Grade: B.