School Library Journal Review
Gr 9 Up-This episodic, meandering novel about seven runaway teens struggling to survive on the Hollywood streets is filled with the rough language and gritty details of drug use and sex (including prostitution) that accompany such a lifestyle. Most of these kids have fled abusive homes, although one girl has simply gone in search of more excitement than her small town offers. Most disturbing is the depiction of a 12-year-old who adopts the name Eeyore when she takes to the streets to escape the sexual abuse of her older stepbrother and the bullying of schoolmates. Although Eeyore's comfortable home is in the nearby Hollywood Hills and her stepmother frequently shops at the Whole Foods market where the girl and her new friends go Dumpster-diving for food, there is no evidence that her parents or school authorities are making any effort to find her. Several times, she returns home to take food and money, but even when she surprises her stepmother during one of these forays, the woman doesn't ask where she has been. Instead, she berates Eeyore for leaving home to be with a dirty, homeless boy, threatens to call the police, and then does nothing as the girl and her friend leave. Readers will find this and many other aspects of the story deeply distressing.-Ginny Gustin, Sonoma County Library System, Santa Rosa, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
The streets of Los Angeles offer an escape to a group of teenagers. Boredom, family issues and sexual abuse led them away from home, and now seven teens struggle to survive on the streets. Through Tracy, a junk-addicted porn star, Eeyore, Rusty, Squid, Critter, Scabius and Laura form a rough community with its own dynamics and hostilities. When 12-year-old Eeyore gets caught up in drugs and prostitution, Tracy has a chance to redeem them both. Rather than alternating the narrator each chapter, Blank gives each voice its own section in turn. With characters ranging in age and experience, the narrative cohesion could easily deteriorate, but skillful blending by the author prevents such muddling. Calculated emotionless presentation of the street-sex trade helps communicate the bleak circumstances in which many homeless youths find themselves; this contrasts nicely with the burgeoning relationships that develop between the teens, especially Squid's passion for a family. The author's note offers resources for both at-risk and street teens. Examining the ties that bring people together and force them apart, this is a harsh and honest view of homeless teen life in the city of angels. (Fiction. YA) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Smashed glass, crumbled concrete, holes in fences. It's all about finding the cracks in things and shoving them open till they're big enough for you to squeeze in. Blank's harrowing first novel for young adults follows seven homeless teens through the streets of Los Angeles. Their reasons for leaving home are complicated and grim: incest, abuse, abandonment by adult lovers. Each chapter, narrated in a different teen's voice, gives a graphic, unsparing view of the teens' brutal, dangerous realities: families are unsafe; girls and boys sell their bodies for money and drugs. The voices share a uniform style that results in an indistinct sense of the characters, but Blank writes with gritty, urban poetry that reveals the heartbreaking fracturing of selves, from vulnerable child to hardened street kid, that allows the teens to survive. As in Catherine Ryan Hyde's Becoming Chloe (2006), also about homeless teens running from abuse, the characters in this accomplished, disturbing debut find hope by speaking devastating secrets aloud and feeling heard and believed.--Engberg, Gillian Copyright 2007 Booklist
