Chameleon

Chameleon

By: Charles R. Smith Jr.

384p

Candlewick Press

ISBN-10: 0763630853
ISBN-13: 978-0763630850


Annotation:
The summer before starting highschool in inner city Los Angeles, fourteen year old Shawn grapples with his first experience of love, the complicated bonds of friends and family, and the reality of street gang violence.

Summary:

Shawn is an intelligent and athletically gifted teenager on the cusp of his high school career, who is enjoying his last days of summer. Living in Carson, and traveling to Compton every weekday to be watched over by his alcoholic aunt offers Shawn a lot of free time. Time that is spent playing basketball with his group of friends and maneuvering through the dangerous streets. His days are plagued with the quest for free food and constant “color checks” to make sure that neither he nor any of his friends are wearing any red or blue for fear of being attacked.

During his summer, he is forced to reconsider his future after he and his friends are beat-up by a group of Pirus (red) after being mistook for Crypts (blue), when he is offered the opportunity to go to his local high school that is free of gang activity and therefor free of the stresses, instead of the school in Compton, he has a decision to make. Spending the rest of the summer trying to make the decision that could affect the rest of his life and more importantly his love life with his crush Marisol.

This book is well written even if the main character is wise beyond his years. Smith does drop cultural slang and young adults may be interested in this novel because of the local setting. Teen readers who enjoy the writing styles of Walter Dean Myers will quickly fall in love with Smith's writing style. This novels with hip-hop slang and realness that is hard to find in many other teen novels.