Harmonic Convergence: Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson

"Do you have late pass for me, Esteban?" Mrs. Laverne asked. "Is everything okay?"

Esteban shook his head. "I don't have a pass," he said, his voice breaking. "We think they took my papi. Nobody knows where he's at."

While Ms. Laverne talked to Esteban, I thought about mine. I thought about handcuffs. I thought about fathers being taken way and uncles coming to the rescue and mothers gone.

Then that Friday afternoon Ms. Laverne does something unexpected. She takes the six kids in her special fifth-sixth grade class down the hall to an deserted old art room and gives them a strange assignment: they're to spend the last hour of class on every Friday there--talking.

"But I don't know what we're even supposed to talk about," Tiago said. "And to who?"

"Schoolwork, toys, TV, me, yourselves--anything. To each other. And it's 'to whom,' Tiago."

Amari said, "You trying to change the art room into the A.R.T.T. room--A Room to Talk."

Mrs. Laverne pointed to Amari. "You. Are. Brilliant."

Haley brings a recorder so they can remember what they talk about. And talk they do, little by little, about ordinary pre-adolescent feelings--Holly's embarrassment after she shows off her new sneakers--shoes the others point out are way too expensive for anyone else in the group to even think about wanting. But then Esteben talks about fears no child should face--his fears that his mother will also disappear and both parents will be deported back to the Dominican Republic. Amari talks about his sadness that he and his friends can't play with their Nerf guns outside because he's black and could be killed by police who think he's a shooter. Ashton is shocked but sad when he realizes that he can do things because he's white that Amari can't do. And it is only on the last Friday that Haley can talk about her memory, about how as the driver, her father was jailed when her mother was killed in an auto accident.

So much can change in a minute, an hour, a year.

And change they do. Esteben leaves with his whole family, and the remaining five realize how much they learned about each other and about themselves. The A.R.T.T. has been what Haley's uncle calls a harmonic convergence. And they will never be the same.

In her latest, Jacqueline Woodson's Harbor Me (Nancy Paulsen/Random House Books, 2018) plumbs the story of six young people who are given the time to bridge the distance between them in the gift of time and privacy to share their lives with each other. The multi-award-winning Woodson's easy, colloquial, but poetic prose shines here, as always, in a story that is both personal and global in its portrayal of young lives shared--and the strength they learn from each other. In their starred review, Kirkus summarizes, "This story, told with exquisite language and clarity of narrative, is both heartbreaking and hopeful. An extraordinary and timely piece of writing."

Going Underground: Hiding by Henry Turner

I'm very good at hiding.

Real hiding happens when everybody can see you, but they don't notice you.

Danny is proud by his ability to disappear in plain sight. Teachers never notice him, even though he's right there in the middle of the class. He knows the answer, he's looking right at the teacher, but he's never called upon. He's the kid nobody quite seems to remember from elementary school. Nobody really sees him except his first girlfriend, Laura. But then she breaks up with him. Wandering the streets, he spots Laura with her family entering a funeral home.

I never meant to go to that funeral at all. My girlfriend Laura had just broken up with me. You get the idea.

Something awful had just happened. Laura had on this very sheer black dress. She looked beautiful, except her face. Her face looked terrible. She felt sad. I could tell.

All I did was dart across the street. Nobody really saw me. When everything was settled inside the funeral home, two men came out, smoking cigarettes. A kid had died. One of the men said he'd ridden his skateboard under a bus. I didn't really want to go to the burial, but I had to see Laura once again. I watched the burial, coming closer and closer. I slid ahead until I was standing two feet behind Laura.

Danny is still obsessed with Laura. Determined to understand why she broke up with him, he hides at night outside her house in her upscale neighborhood, totally unlike his own run-down side of town. Crouching in the shrubbery, he notices an open basement window and slips inside, and hiding in a storage room, he hears Laura's brother come down, close the window, and set the household alarm. Knowing he's trapped inside, Danny chooses to wait until everyone leaves the house in the morning to make a run for it.

But when everyone leaves the next morning, Danny decides to find out everything he can about Laura, to find something that will explain why she broke up with him. He reconnoiters through the lavishly decorated but strangely sterile house until he finds Laura's room. He discovers her hidden diary which reveals Laura's sadness over her inability to please her parents, even facing their disappointment that she didn't make the Olympic trials team.

And then he reads something startling about himself, something incredible but which explains everything, in Henry Turner's psychological thriller, Hiding (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2018). Author Henry Turner spins out the suspense, gradually revealing much about Laura's life, but much more about how his protagonist comes to see his own life. Tightly drawn, this low-key but eerie study of a one boy's personality and his own fate will keep young adult readers wondering until the final revelation--and after.

Between the Dark and the Light: Ask the Dark by Henry Turner

I stopped.

A boy lay on the bank of the stream. He was naked, that boy, 'cept one shoe, with his body on the sand and rocks but his head partways in the water, his hair waving like weeds in the stream. I saw his face, all covered with cuts and blood.

I seen a piece of paper all red and bright, stuck to his dead ass. I bent over and snatched it up. I knew I couldn't just throw it over once I touched it, so I put it in my pocket.

Billy Zeets can't sleep. His dad's hurt, can't work, and their house is being foreclosed, and for some reason the dead, dark of night calls Billy, fitting his mood, and he wanders the streets and backyards and woods while the town sleeps. But when Billy finds the mutilated body of one of the boys in his town who have gone missing, Billy knows that someone else is using the night for darker purposes.

Billy is determined to find a way to make money to help his father, but he's just come out of a wild period, vandalizing and petty-thievery, and he's not high on anyone's hiring list. Occasionally working with Richie, a town n'eer-do-well who pays Billy to help load abandoned scrap metal into his pickup for sale, Billy is tempted to do a little shady junking himself, and on one nighttime expedition, he scales a tree up onto a roof and explores some promising storage boxes in the attic of Miss Gurpy, a once-well-to-do recluse, and finds one box filled with jewelry and vows to come back with a bag to carry it away.

Then Billy finds he's not the only one who knows what's in those boxes.

Coming into the room, I'd shut the door behind me. So what I done was step back maybe a yard, one big swooping step, to where I'd be behind the door if it opened. And all the while I was hearing somebody walking through the house. The footsteps stopped, and then they came on again, toward me. Whoever it was just come in the room and stood there.

Then I heard some shuffling and a light came on. Flashlight was that new kind that only shines where you point it. I don't think I breathed at all. I just stood there, three feet behind him.

All I could think was, If he turns, I'm caught.

'Course, I didn't know then who this fucker was, and that if he turned I was dead.

But working with Richie in a different house, Billy sees those same boxes, and something else. A sack of cement with a piece missing from the label, and Billy knows where that missing piece is--in his wallet where he'd saved it.

A little piece of torn red paper.

On my knees I went over to it, scuffing crost the floor, and where a piece was torn off the bag, I fit the piece.

It fit perfectly.

Now Billy thinks he knows who has been torturing and killing those boys in his town. And then he realizes that the murderer knows who he is and what he knows, too.

Henry Turner's Ask the Dark (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion Books, 2015). is a slow-building cat-and-mouse thriller that is as dark as its setting, taking place mostly in the dark of night and among the dark secrets of his small town. Billy is an unlikely hero, a seeming loser, but dogged and ultimately possessed of great moral courage as he stalks his psychopathic stalker to a climax in a dank cellar that will leave young adult readers breathless. With rough talk for which he often begs "Skuze my language," a protagonist from Hardtimesville who proves that despite it all, Billy Zeets is a winner. Fans of teen suspense thrillers will take to this one, set on the dark side of a leafy little town where there be monsters as dreadful as any dragons.