Customer Reviews

What They Found: Love on 145th Street

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I really enjoyed 145th Street: Short Stories when it came out quite a few years ago, so I was anxious to read this new collection of stories. Once again, Walter Dean Myers takes readers into the world on 145th Street. WHAT THEY FOUND revisits the characters of the previous short stories and updates their lives.

The central theme of WHAT THEY FOUND is love. Each story shares a relationship - romantic love, sibling love, parental love, and more. The stories are flavored with Harlem life as only Myers is able to capture.

There's the frustration of loving a brother who is a constant disappointment to the family. Leading a life of drugs and crime takes its toll on love.

There are relationships in the making and relationships beginning to crumble. Myers describes the tough love of women raising babies alone or trying everything to hang onto the father of a child. Some relationships beat the odds stacked against them, while others continue to exist only in dreams.

The final chapter attempts to explain the frightening need for love while facing the world beyond our own front yard. A young soldier from the Harlem neighborhood struggles to survive physically and emotionally in the middle of the violence in Afghanistan. Love offers an oasis from the horrors of war.

Each chapter shares a story and many of them overlap and intertwine as readers are reacquainted with the neighborhood of 145th Street. WHAT THEY FOUND is a welcome companion to the first collection or stands very strongly on its own.

Reviewed by: Sally Kruger, aka "Readingjunky"

Fifteen short stories and there wasn't one I didn't like. My favorite was Madonna, the touching story of a teenage mother raising her nine month old son alone:
Letha wanted to know what it was like to have sex, then immediately regretted the choice she had made. Her first time wasn't about love, but she had much love for the child that was conceived. Being poor didn't stop her from taking care of Amari. She did the best she could with what little she had because her son meant the world to her. But although she loved Amari more than anything, she thought of herself as 'nothing special'. It took, Billy Carroll, another teen in the neighborhood, to help her to see her good qualities.