Dear Martin

Dear Martin

YA/adult fiction
"Jus swallows, head spinning, unable to get his bearings. The
sting of cold metal around his wrists pulls him back to reality.
Handcuffs.
It hits him. Melo's drunk beyond belief in the back seat of a
car she fully intended to drive, yet Jus is the one in handcuffs."
Jus (Justyce), protagonist of Nic Stone's Dear Martin, is not
having a good night. At three in the morning he gets a call that his
on and off girlfriend is in need of rescue. She's too drunk to stand
on her own two feet, but adamant about driving herself home, fighting
his attempts to take care of her. Suddenly he's being arrested by a
police officer who won't listen to reason.
"'You keep your mouth shut.' The cop squats and gets right in
Justyce's face. 'I know your kind: punks like you wander the streets
of nice neighborhoods searching for prey. Just couldn't resist the
pretty white girl who'd locked her keys in her car, could you?'"
Although he grew up in a tough neighborhood, Justyce is a full
scholarship student at a prep school, fourth in his class. He's aced
SATs and ACTs. He's Ivy League bound...
...Only the cop who busts him and beats him up sees nothing
beyond skin color. Suddenly Justyce is chillingly aware of the racism
at his school and his best friend, Manny's seeming acceptance of it
all in order to fit in with white peers. He starts a journal
formatted as letters to Martin Luther King Jr. In his first entry he
includes the following paragraph:
"Last night changed me. I don't wanna walk around all pissed
off and looking for problems, but I know I can't pretend nothing's
wrong. Yeah, there are no more 'colored' water fountains, and it's
supposed to be illegal to discriminate, but if I can be forced to sit
on the concrete in too-tight cuffs when I've done nothing wrong, it's
clear there's an issue. That things aren't as equal as folks say they
are."
At that point Justyce has no clue that another close encounter
of the pissed off white cop kind will change his life drastically and
tragically.
In her debut novel Stone has all the bases covered. Her plot is
spellbinding and thought provoking. Her voice and characters are
authentic. Her format is killer. In addition to the interspersing of
action and reflection, there are chapters done entirely in dialogue at
just the right places.
On a purrrsonal note, I'm spending a lot more time than usual in my
cat assisted reading. True Joey and I did plenty other stuff like
playing with his toys and stuff he decided was toys. He loved to help
me with stuff like laundry and decorating the Christmas tree. But the
reading was special. We developed cat assisted reading. We engaged
in at least some nearly every day. Some days like those right before
Christmas we binged.
Reading will never be quite the same.
A great big shout out goes out to my purrrfect little reading buddy.
jules hathaway


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