Gantos, Jack, (2002). Hole in My Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. ISBN: 0374399883. 200 pages.

Summary and Evaluation: Perhaps storytelling is the only profession that doesn't punish a person for being a criminal. Gantos, a well respected children's author pulls a lot of skeletons out of his closet in this memoir about his late teen years. Certainly this book is not aimed for his most young readers, but older readers will certainly enjoy it.

Gantos, an aspiring writer, spends his senior year miles from his family, living in a motel. He is a feverish reader and regular candy shop for small children at the motel. His new independence makes him a pretty regular drinker, and he picks up a pot smoking habit. When he joins his family in St. Croix, he finds a country is political upheaval, with little available in terms of jobs. His best bet out is to take a job smuggling drugs into the US.

Gantos does bad stuff. He drinks too much and does drugs. He smokes pot at Hemingway's house in Key West. He breaks the law--various laws, various times. A part of me wanted to shake him through and through for continuously making bad decisions. At the same time, Gantos writes with such clarity and honesty that he endears the reader to his character. He rarely makes judgment calls about his former self. Instead he explains his reasons in terms of his surroundings and situation. I rooted for him on more than one occasion, especially once he was in prison and found ways to stay out of the general population. There were elements of this section that were particularly graphic.

Through it all he's has the desire to write, but he isn't writing. This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of reading about his teen life. He is reading great books, and keeps talking about wanting to write, but does nothing. Any writer will tell you that reading is a good start to writing, but a writer also needs to write. Only when he goes to prison does he finally begin to write. This becomes a strange but believable irony.

It might be nice to pair this book with Walter Dean Meyer's Monster, as both stories address teens that make poor decisions and then have to work with the consequences of these actions. This would also be an interesting pairing as one is a fiction and the other nonfiction.

Booktalk:I might begin by asking readers what they would do if they were offered $10,000 to help said a ship from St. Croix to New York City. I might then ask them if their decision would change if they knew the boat would have hash that then be smuggled into the country. I could then tell readers that this is a book about someone who was given this option, he said yes, and this is the true story of what happened.