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Overview
Rats In The Trees is Jess Mowry's first book -- written in 1989 and published by John Daniel & Company in 1990 -- a collection of interrelated stories about street kids in Oakland, California, though mostly about Robby, a 13-year-old African-American boy from Fresno, California who runs away from an abusive foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone, he's befriended by an interracial "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds with a united passion for skateboarding, who call themselves The Animals. Rats In The Trees, while not pretending to be a documentary, portrays the conditions for many inner city kids during the late 1980's -- around the end of "Reganomics" and the beginning of George Bush's "kinder, gentler America" -- which was when crack-cocaine was starting to flood into mostly poor black neighborhoods, as if designed to bring down the people, and especially to destroy kids. The times of happy black music of the late 1970s and early 80s were ending. So was the social-awareness and Brotherhood which had bonded, strengthened and sustained black people during the '60s and 70s. The break-dance era was over, and the brutal years of gangster rap, of self-hatred fostering black-on-black crime, and "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" were beginning as if in retaliation for that brief interlude of relative peace. Robby and The Animals were old enough to remember the days when black people seemed united in a common cause of freedom and justice; and like most black kids at the time they knew they were losing something. Sadly, all the predictions made in Rats have come true, the guns, gangs, drugs and violence in the U.S., kids killing kids, and the shameful decline in the quality of public education.
| ISBN-13 | 9780997799408 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0997799404 |
| List Price | $4.99 |
| Format | - |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2011-09-13 |
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