School Library Journal

Gr 5-9-- Vernon's father is too busy holding his large family together to notice the boy's academic failures, and his siblings are either too young or too preoccupied with their own affairs to help. So, Vernon finds himself hanging out on his Baltimore street corner, quietly desperate about school but powerless to resolve his problems. He and the other neighborhood boys like to taunt Maxine and Roland, an alcoholic and her retarded son. When Vernon supports the woman's argument with their grocer one day, he's embarrassed both by his previous behavior and her kind remarks about his dead mother. He blurts out his troubles and she introduces him to Miss Annie, a retired teacher, who tutors him but asks as repayment that he help Maxine and Roland. With Vernon's assistance, the boy is able to participate in the Special Olympics. When Maxine appears, drunk and abusive, it is the final straw for Roland's teacher and the welfare authorities, and he is removed from his mother's neglectful custody. Giving up his needy friend unlocks Vernon's unrealized anger at his mother for dying and leaving him, but he finds solace in his father, who has been there for him all along. Vernon's story is an interesting and involving one that reveals the enormous capacity of teens for both cruelty and compassion. Its truth reveals that each of us has felt the pain of exclusion and the liberation of acceptance and love. Like Virginia Euwer Wolff's Probably Still Nick Swansen (Holt, 1988) and Dennis Covington's Lizard (Delacorte, 1991), this book provides a much needed insight into the lives of adolescents with special needs. --Alice Casey Smith, Lakewood Public Library, NJ

Horn Book (Thu Apr 01 00:00:00 CST 1993)

Vernon and his friends discover that as seventh graders they are too old to play games with kids on the block and too young to go to work. With nothing better to do, they hang around the street. But Vernon gets a job helping out Maxine, the neighborhood 'crazy lady,' and her mentally retarded son. Vernon's instinctive ability to connect with the boy has an authentic ring to it, as does the narrative's first-person voice and its description of the dilapidated, but cohesive, urban neighborhood.

Starred Review ALA Booklist (Sat May 01 00:00:00 CDT 1993)

Starred Review Growing out of a tangle of love and laughter and grief, this story transcends formula. Right up until the very last line, the drama is in the characters, their sadness and their surprise. The setting is grittily authentic: a poor city neighborhood of brick rowhouses on the edge of a slum. The story's told in the unaffected voice of Vernon Dibbs, a big, clunky kid who's failing seventh grade. He befriends Maxine Flooter--the neighborhood crazy lady, who walks down the street when she's drunk, hollering and cursing--and he helps her care for her tall, skinny, severely disabled teenage son, Ronald. It's Maxine's love for her son that moves Vernon most, since he's grieving for his mother, who died three years earlier from a stroke at her factory sewing machine, the only person who had helped him believe he was special. His father tries, but he can barely manage to keep the home going for Vernon and his brothers and sisters. All the characters (except for an idealized, all-wise teacher) are drawn with compassionate realism and restraint; they are flawed and struggling, both comic and weary. There are heartbreaking scenes: when Vernon visits Maxine in jail; when drunk Maxine publicly humiliates Vernon, shouting out that he's dumb; when Vernon takes Ronald shopping for sneakers; when Ronald says his first word ever; when Vernon and his father finally share their grief. Vernon can't bear to see Maxine's failing struggle to keep a home together for Ronald. In the parting scene, when Vernon has to let Ronald go, the physical wrenching is a metaphor for all that's lost. (Reviewed May 15, 1993)

Kirkus Reviews

Vernon Dibbs is finding junior high tough. The grades that come so easily to others elude him, despite earnest struggles and extra hours of study; he feels he lost the one person who considered him in any way special when his mother suddenly passed away two years ago. Then acquaintance with alcoholic Maxine and her retarded son Ronald leads to some tutoring work, and soon he is also involved in a money-making scheme to send Ronald to the Special Olympics; the solutions to Vernon's problems seem to be within his grasp, and his confidence soars. If the lesson that kindness begets kindness needs to be repeated, this book is all heart; its bittersweet best moment comes when Maxine, aware of her limitations, parts with Ronald so that he can receive better care. A quiet, winning story of a boy and his community making small gains through large efforts. (Fiction. 10+)"