Can't Get There From Here by Todd Strasser Jewel dreams of getting rich, marrying into money. Maybe knows that you can't get from the streets to the upper class. Besides, who would want to join the robots, with their rules and their nine to five jobs? It's winter in New York, and we open on Country Club's dead body. When a group of do-gooders from the Youth Housing Project offers to take Maybe's group in, the lady says that 14 kids per day are found dead, frozen. Maggot laughs at the lady, asks her what anyone's got to live for. But Maybe's group continues to die, and Maybe knows that the streets will kill her. Maggot leaves the streets.
When each person dies, a description of that person's life is given. Usually that description includes various problems like ADHD, OCD. But the language is a bit off; the sentenc "Often irritable, emotionally labile, and co-morbid" displays a lack of understanding of the word co-morbid. Conditions are co-morbid; people aren't. Although this book reads as though it were a critique of something, it's hard to see what that something is. Certainly this book offers no solutions. Do you have any?
Solemn reading.
