The Trouble in Me
by Jack Gantos
Middle School, High School   Farrar   208 pp.
9/15   978-0-374-37995-7   $17.99   g

By the summer before eighth grade, young Jack Gantos didn’t think much of himself. He had the “milky physique of a very soft boy” and looked like a “boneless squid.” His “mouth bully” of a father called him “ass-wipe,” “shithead,” and “brain-dead.” About to start at his sixth school in eight grades, he had no friends, and girls paid him no mind. He was a “drifty kid who was lost at sea…easily led off course.” Bored with his own life, he tried to be somebody else and fell into the orbit of juvenile delinquent neighbor Gary Pagoda. Suddenly, he felt alive doing stupid stuff with Gary — diving into a pool of flames; being catapulted from a tree, over a house, and into a swimming pool; roller-skating down a sheet-metal slide through a hula-hoop ring of fire. Gary was Peter Pan; Jack, his shadow. Jack could feel Gary molding him into “an Adam or a golem or some magical creature that had once been a handful of dirt but was now under his spell.” Gantos effectively narrates his own story in this memoir, reviewing portions of his life to identify the character flaw that led him to abandon his “better self” in favor of later becoming a drug smuggler who ended up in a federal penitentiary. As explained in the afterword, this volume acts as a preface to Hole in My Life (rev. 5/02), and readers who read both will experience the full arc of Jack’s wild behavior, severe consequences, and, ultimately, redemption.

From the September/October 2015 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.