Schraff, Anne. Vengeance. (Urban Underground.)

Schraff, Anne.    Vengeance. (Urban Underground.)     Saddleback  200p  $8.95 978-1-61651-961-2 ms/hs       VG    Realistic fiction    

As president of the senior class, Ernesto must handle a lot.  In this book, he sets up a mentoring program that supports struggling ninth graders, encourages his peers to treat a teacher with respect, and offers support to his friend Abel when his father is almost killed in a hit-and-run accident.  Anne Schraff uses two stories to illustrate her moral, which is that vengeance should never be an option in the pursuit of justice. 

Using her usual setting, Chavez High, and her cast of characters, including Ernesto Sandoval, his girlfriend Naomi, and various other regulars of her Urban Underground series, Schraff accomplishes her purpose with one story about bullying and another about leaving the scene of a crime.  In the first story, the granddaughter of beloved history teacher Mr. Davila is bullied while she is walking her disabled grandmother through the streets after school.  Two mean girls mimic the characteristics of Parkinson’s disease, and Angel is devastated and furious too!  To get even, she frames one of the bullies for a crime that she herself has committed, that of spray-painting obscenities all over the walls of the high school library.  In a parallel, yet unrelated, segment of the story, the son of a different social-studies teacher is guilty of leaving the scene of a crime, which seriously injures the father of one of Ernesto’s best friends.  Seeking revenge becomes an issue again, and Schraff assures her readers that revenge is unacceptable.  Although the writing is not world-class, Schraff nevertheless gets teenagers reading.  Her books resonate with a variety of readers, especially with Latinos, since all of the characters live in the barrio.  This book is easy-to-read, fast-paced and contemporary.

  
On page 94, note the punctuation error in the sentence “Dad admires him.”  The sentence needs to end with a period instead of a comma. The Urban Underground series comprises around thirty books, all related to teaching morals and values to inner-city youth as well as other teenagers.  With a setting in a Latino high school, a repeat cast of characters, and easy-to-comprehend content, Schraff engages students and educates them as well! High-school students and middle-school students will like this new volume, and bilingual classrooms should stock it as well!

Revenge–Fiction, High school–Fiction                        -- Martha Squaresky