25 April 2005 FADE TO BLACK by Alex Flinn, Harper Tempest, April 2005, ISBN: 0-06-056839-9, LIB ISBN: 0-06-056841-0

One evening later this week Brook Haven Middle School will host its annual Open House. I spent a day in Shari's classroom late last week working hard to clean up the disaster zone in preparation for the occasion.

Shari is the school's drama teacher as well as one of the eighth-grade English teachers. Her drama students are notorious for leaving their thrift store purchased costuming and props in the classroom long after the performances are all complete. I filled four huge cartons to overflowing with those items that we're not likely to need for future productions. They went to the lost and found. A couple of cartons of the "good stuff" went into the prop room.

You would think that an English classroom should have a collection of some decent books in it, but Shari and I sort of go to extremes. Fortunately, I had brought a bunch of paper bags with me. I filled nine of them with old ARCs (advance reader copies) that I no longer cared about owning. A coordinator at juvenile hall will collect them in a couple of days and they'll get a whole new life.

As I collected and neatly stacked the classroom sets of books (SPEAK, THE LAND, THE MISFITS, WITNESS, THE LAST BOOK IN THE UNIVERSE, LEFT FOR DEAD, 19 VARIETIES OF GAZELLE, BRONX MASQUERADE, etc.), and filled those shopping bags for juvenile hall, and filled a shelf in the office with the latest paperback purchases and 2005 ARCs, I also accumulated a very small pile of books to take back home. ("Like coals to Newcastle!" someone knowledgeable of our home might exclaim.) A few were ARCs of books that had gone on to win major awards. A couple were Richie's Picks titles that I wanted to have an extra copy of for booktalks. And I grabbed my copy of MORE THAN WORDS: THE SPEECHES OF MARIO CUOMO, which I used to delve into occasionally for inspiring "patriotic observances."

Two ARCs on that stack for home were literally falling apart. One was Brenda Woods' EMAKO BLUE, which we just bought a new copy of for the classroom. It's been passed nonstop from kid to kid for a year now. The other, which from overuse is now a collection of loose pages nested in a cover, is Alex Flinn's FADE TO BLACK. Finally getting my own chance to read it last night, I had to grip it with two hands so that it wouldn't fall all over the room.

"Night is when I think about dying. That's what I'm doing now, after midnight in the quiet hospital."

It didn't take long to see why Shari's students have been enthusiastically turning each other on to FADE TO BLACK since its arrival in the classroom in January. Central to the story is a hate crime involving a baseball bat and the shattered windows of an occupied automobile. There is a victim, Alex Crusan, a HIV-positive high school student whose family recently moved from Miami to the small town of Pinedale. There is a witness, Daria, a fellow high school student with Down Syndrome. Then there is a football player, also from Pinedale High, Clinton Cole. We learn quickly from Clinton himself that he'd thrown a rock through a window of the Crusan house the night before. Did Clinton also, as Daria tells police, attack Alex's car when Alex was stopped at a red light early on the morning of October 27th?

What Alex Flinn does so well here is to create three realistic and complex teen characters, all of whom have some secrets. She also writes so articulately about the elephant in the room: the continued fear and ignorance in America surrounding HIV and AIDS.

" 'They told us before he came here that you couldn't get sick, just being near him. But I don't believe it for a minute. I mean, what if he cuts himself? He doesn't have those purple, blotchy things you always see on people with AIDS on TV. But still, there's all these molecules and particles and things, junk in the air. And what about dust mites?' I remember once, they told us in science class that dust is all people's skin and junk. Excuse me, but I don't want that guy's skin particles on me."

In an exceptional article, "How a Young Adult Novelist Researches," published in VOYA and accessible online at http://pdfs.voya.com/VO/YA2/VOYA200412AuthorTalk.pdf , Alex discusses a 2003 Minnesota AIDS Project study "in which researchers found that 43 percent of those surveyed did not know or were uncertain about whether HIV could be transmitted through a cough or a sneeze, and 38 percent did not know or were uncertain whether it could be transmitted from a toilet seat." Having done her homework, the author creates a consistent tone throughout the book that is revealing of the myths and the reality and how students are affected by them.

"All the days

after,

he said hi

just hi

and I

liked him."

Alex Flinn has been steadily gaining a reputation among adolescents for creating high interest, realistic YA fiction that incorporates issues that matter to them. FADE TO BLACK will continue the spread of that reputation. I've got a dismantled ARC as testimony of that.

Richie Partington

http://richiespicks.com

BudNotBuddy@aol.com