From School Library Journal
Grade 9 Up–Seventeen-year-old Luz Cordero is very, very angry. After a cop shot and killed her brother on a Bronx rooftop, she started a riot at a police-brutality demonstration and landed in a group home for troubled youth in Harlem. This book is the diary of her second year without Julio as she comes to terms with his death, her rage, and the cop himself. Pagliarulo knows the cadence and music of Bronx speech, and Luz spits foul, staccato street language with appropriate venom. As her rage softens, she expresses herself with broader vocabulary and emotion, which rings true only to a point. She's so often the author's mouthpiece on inner-city horror that she loses shape as a character. Her stages of grief are textbook, and sometimes her diary reads like a social-work case study. The novel has neither a brisk pace nor stunning prose to keep pages turning. The author's hyper-violent, crack-infested, gang-fighting Harlem is superreal, and sometimes seems more like that of the '80s than today. Three other teens live with Luz–a cutter, an out-loud bisexual, and a biracial musician–and they are well drawn in light strokes. Luz seems the most real, and the novel least stilted or preachy when she interacts with them. Though the mood is believably somber, Luz's pain may not be enough to keep readers engaged.
–Johanna Lewis, New York Public Library Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Gr. 7-10. Full of rage at her brother's death, her mother's imprisonment, her minority Puerto Rican American status, and authority in general, Luz Cordero is working hard to keep herself from self-destructing. After a particularly violent protest, in which she personally works the crowd into a frenzy, she is sent to St. Therese Home for Boys and Girls, where she finds friendship, Sister Ellen, and eventually herself by confronting the truth behind her brother's death. While Pagliarulo seems to pack every minority social issue into a single novel, he cannot be faulted for his articulation of adolescents' rage at unfortunate circumstances and the destructiveness when that rage is misdirected at those in authority who try to help. It is the challenge of redirecting that rage into "a different kind of heat"--one that solves problems rather than creates them--that Pagliarulo depicts so graphically. It's an important perspective that YA readers need to hear.
Frances BradburnCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
