FernFolio » prison

Jakeman by Deborah Ellis

fernfolio — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 18:13:54 +0000

Eleven year-old Jacob Tyronne DeShawn’s mother is in prison serving a lengthy sentence, and he and his sixteen year-old sister Shoshona travel ten hours four times a year to visit her. Accompanied by Ms. Granite, a social worker, a rag-tag collection of children and adolescents boards an old school bus after midnight on the Friday of the Mother’s Day weekend for the long journey to Wickham Correctional Institute for Women.
While Jake and Shoshona have made the trip many times before, for some of the children on the bus, this is their first experience with the long waits, the invasive searches, and the barbed wire fences, as well as the harsh and uncompromising attitudes of prison staff. These children whose mothers are in prison know a great deal about poverty and abandonment, the foster care system, and prejudice, and they have all found ways to cope with the loss of their mothers. Shoshona is always in control, and is focussed on doing well in school so that she can become a singer. Jake retreats into the world of Jakeman, the comic book hero he has created in the pages of his notebook. Carolyn has stopped talking. Harlan is always angry.
The prison visits prove difficult. Jake fears his mother won’t recognize him, Shoshona is taken to task for not looking after her younger brother better, and both are blamed for their mother’s troubles – if only they hadn’t always been asking for things. Harlan, still grieving for his mother after her death in prison from appendicitis, confronts the prison warden and is immediately escorted from the prison.
On the way home, Ms. Granite and many of the children become ill from food poisoning and are hospitalized. Left in the care of a nasty bus driver who makes no secret of his dislike for them, Jake and Shoshona and a small group of children start the long trip back to the city. But, when Shoshona realizes that the driver is drunk, the kids on the bus stage a revolt. After leaving the driver lying at the side of the road, they take off to discover if they really are just the sum of everything that is written in their children’s aid files or if, just possibly, they might be a whole lot more.
Written by the wonderful Deborah Ellis, Jakeman is a tough, funny and tender story about the young and unintended victims of the justice system.
FernFolio Editor

I am a Taxi by Deborah Ellis

fernfolio — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:19:36 +0000

I am a Taxi is the story of Diego Juárez, a thirteen-year old boy who lives with his mother and young sister in the women’s prison of San Sebastián. He struggles to support his family by running errands for inmates housed in both the women’s prison and the men’s prison next to it. His parents, poor coca farmers, are serving seventeen-year sentences for trafficking in coca paste, the illegal substance made from coca leaves and used to produce cocaine. Located in Cochabamba, Bolivia, the prisons of San Sebastián are filled to overcrowding with unfortunates who have been caught carrying coca paste, and, worse, innocents, such as Diego’s parents, who were simply unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the right time.
Diego dreams of returning to the family farm and the simple, happy life of his early childhood. He works hard in school, and tries to help his mother with his young sister, Carina. He regularly visits his father in the men’s prison, and strives to ensure that both his parents and his young sister have enough to eat. He worries that his mother, who knits baby coats and sleepers, which Diego sells in the market square, will not be able to earn enough to pay the rent on their tiny cell and that they will have to return to the spot in the prison yard which they occupied for their first two years in the prison.
Preoccupied, one evening, by a schoolmate’s homework assignment he is completing to earn a few bolivianos, Diego fails to notice when Carina wanders off. Though she is found safe and sound, Diego and his mother are called before a prison committee and assessed a hefty fine. But worse, Diego is told that he can no longer work as a taxi. When his friend Mando whispers that he has met some men who are prepared to offer the boys some real money in exchange for a couple of weeks’ work, Diego ignores the warning bells in his head and grabs at the chance to improve his family’s financial situation.
Diego and Mando find themselves working in the illegal coca paste industry. As the dangers mount, Diego begins to wonder whether the two friends will ever escape the coca pits.
I am a Taxi is the tale of coca, a plant that the indigenous peoples of Bolivia believe is a gift to them from Pachamama, Mother Earth, and one they have used for millennia for food and medicine. Diego and the other inhabitants of San Sebastián, as well as many other poor Bolivians, are victims of the war on drugs, caught between poverty and affluent nations’ insatiable appetite for cocaine.
Detailed, evocative and beautifully written, Deborah Ellis’ book will grab you from the first chapter. I am a Taxi is a must read for readers in grades 7 and up.
FernFolio Editor

Kat’s Fall by Shelley Hrdlitschka

fernfolio — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 22:50:45 +0000

Estranged from his mother, neglected by his truck-driver father, and entirely responsible for his eleven year-old deaf sister, Kat, fifteen year-old Darcy struggles to cope with almost overwhelming emotional pain. Despite the efforts of his teacher, Ms. Rose, at the alternative school where he’s been sent because of his unwillingness – or inability – to establish social relationships with others, and the caring of Gem, a classmate who keeps reaching out even when he rejects her, Darcy is unable to stop himself from throwing up walls. He loves and trusts only two people, his sister, Kat, and young Sam, the four year-old deaf girl he baby sits after school each day.
Darcy’s life begins to spin out of control when he learns that his mother, sent to prison for throwing Kat off an apartment balcony when he was four, is going to be paroled and wants to see him and his sister. Their father makes it clear that he expects Kat, with whom he has never felt comfortable and never bothered to learn to communicate with, to go to live with her mother. Darcy is torn between his refusal to have anything to do with his mother, and his fear that he will lose contact with Kat.
Things become far more complicated when Sam makes an accusation against Darcy that leaves him isolated and bewildered. Then a sudden flashback to the day of Kat’s fall from that apartment balcony brings another shocking revelation.
To deal with his feelings of fear and guilt and loss of control and isolation, and although he’s promised Kat to stop, Darcy begins to self-mutilate. It is only when he acknowledges that he needs the help of those who care about him, and accepts that help, that Darcy can put the past behind him and begin to heal.
FernFolio Editor