Customer Reviews

Grover G. Graham and Me

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Grover G. Graham and Me is a great book about a boy named Ben. He lives with foster parents. His mom left him and he doesn't have any siblings. He has stayed with many different families but he becomes really attached to a baby boy in one of them. I really liked it because you always wanted to read on. Sometimes you were sort of worried about Ben and sometimes it was just a fun and happy story. Also you really got to know about the characters and what they would do. That is why I really liked the book!

Ben is eleven years old and on his way to his eighth foster home. He's lived in seven of them since he was five years old, so he knows all about foster homes and the state's system for homeless kids. And that's why he's worried about Grover G. Graham. Even the name is weird. What kind of mother would give her son a name like that? A mother who left him, that's what kind. Just got up one day and ran off, leaving her son with her boyfriend, who wasn't even Grover's father. Grover entered the system before he was two years old.

Ben has survived the system by keeping his rules. The biggest rule is: don't get close to people. Whenever he has to leave a place, he blanks it out of his mind and leaves a clean slate for whoever is next in the lineup. He keeps three goals in his mind all the time: start with now, stick it out until he's 18, and walk away from the system forever.

But when he meets Grover, another foster kid with Ben's eighth foster family, he forgets his rules before he even realizes that he's forgotten them. He starts to care. And he worries. Especially when he finds out that Grover's mother wants back into her son's life. But the foster family thinks it's great. They're helping her get her act together. They say that she's trying her best, and that Ben should give her a break and stop letting Grover get so attached to him. They say he should let go of Grover.

But he can't. Grover's mother reminds him of his own mother, who dumped him with his great-grandmother when he was a baby. Nobody's been able to find her, and Ben doesn't want to. He won't leave Grover in the clutches of a mother just like her, either. But what can he do? How can he fight the system, which is pushing Grover back? And how can he survive the system himself anymore, now that he forgot his rules?

--- Reviewed by Tamara Penny