More Than Good Enough

Gr 8 Up—Trent Osceola has been kicked out of his fine-arts magnet school after failing all of his exams because he never went to class. His father has just gotten out of prison for writing bad checks, and his mother, disgusted with her son's academic performance, kicks him out of the house and tells him to live with his father on the Miccosukee reservation. Life there is rough; his father is either drunk or making protein health/body-building drinks. Although he could go to school on the Rez, the teen decides to attend the public high school in the zone of his mother's address. On his first day there, he recognizes the girl doing the announcements on the morning show as his best friend growing up, Pippa. Hoping to reconnect with her, he talks his way into a film class she is taking and becomes her partner for a class project on their lives. Trent desperately wants to have a relationship with her; to recapture the ease of what they had as children, but his self-destructiveness and his disturbed life on the Rez stand in the way. What could have been an interesting novel about a half-Native teen adapting to life on the Rez, one foot in and one out of the culture, has few elements to distinguish it from any other book about a young male from a broken family who is uninterested in school. His musical talent is mentioned but never pursued, as is the film project. Too much time is spent in the setup and the ending is rushed, giving short shrift to what should have been the focus of the novel-the film project and Trent's acceptance of his heritage.—Suanne B. Roush, Osceola High School, Seminole, FL