Richie's Picks: WE WERE HERE by Matt de la Pena, Delacorte, October 2009,
368p, ISBN: 978-0-385-73667-1; Libr. ISBN: 978-0-385-73667-1
"I'd love to stop and catch myself a bite
But I sure hate to leave the road tonight"
-- Todd Rundgren "Little Red Lights"
"And right then something clicked in my head. I realized how alone I was.
Just another random kid in their system. A half-Mexican ghost from
Stockton who messed up his family. I'd spent this year with a bunch of other
ghosts from other nowhere places until they said I could leave, and then I'd
have to go haunt some other spot. And I was trying to think if I could
ever go back home. Maybe when my moms dropped me off she was dropping my as
off for good. My whole family would probably turn their backs on me. And
I'd have to roll solo like this forever.
"Anyways, staring at all those initials, the shit hit me hard. I didn't
have nobody that cared about me anymore.
"Not even my own self."
What happened to land Miguel in the system is a mystery about which we
speculate as his story slowly unfolds. Miguel is an observant kid; a reader
with a stellar grade point average who is given a year in the system and the
requirement that he journal. That journal he writes is this book. It
begins with Miguel locked in a cell in Juvi with a big black kid named Rondell
who Miguel quickly succeeds in provoking. Then, when he is transferred to
the group home in San Jose nicknamed the Lighthouse, Miguel immediately
gets into it with a psycho Chinese kid named Mong who is transported away
from the group home every other day for some sort of undisclosed sessions.
In the days to come, after his original roommate is tossed from the group
home for drug transgressions, Miguel rooms alone. Nevertheless, he will
sometimes awaken in the middle of the night to find that Mong has slipped into
his room and is standing there just staring at him.
Then, a new arrival at the group home is assigned to be his new roommate.
It turns out to be Rondell from Juvi.
The first surprise of WE WERE HERE -- and it is sure a surprise to loner
Miguel -- is that Miguel, Rondell, and Mong will together escape the
Lighthouse and hit the road with plans for reaching some nice place on the coast
in Mexico.
All the while, we are fed bits of the story of Miguel's home life with his
mom and his big brother Diego:
"Growing up, Diego was always the crazy one. Starting fights and jacking
beers from the bodega across town and messing with mad girls. My folks
were always worried he'd be the one who would end up in trouble one day. My
pop used to sit him down every other week so they could have talks about his
grades and his bad behavior in school and his choice of friends. I looked
at Mong and Rondell laying there, staring up in the sky. How strange that
it was me sitting here on this beach with them. Everybody always thought
it'd be Diego, including me and Diego. But it wasn't.
"It was me."
Through Miguel's journal, WE WERE HERE follows these three young men on
the run. For Miguel -- and for readers -- it is an extraordinary journey of
discovery and of coming to terms with what happened at his home.
"I pulled out the journal and read through a bunch of my entries. It was
crazy to look back over my last couple of months. So much shit had
happened. It almost seemed like I had to be making half the shit up, or at least
exaggerating. But I wasn't, man. Every single thing in here is completely
true."
Richie Partington, MLIS
Richie's Picks _http://richiespicks.com_ (http://richiespicks.com/)
Moderator, _http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit_
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/middle_school_lit)
_http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks_ (http://www.myspace.com/richiespicks)
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