No Way Out

The book No Way Out by Peggy Kern is what I've recently finished reading. There were no information about the author herself on the book, instead, the book advertised the other books in its series: The Fallen and Shattered by Paul Langan, and Search for safety by John Langan. The book is about a high school freshman struggling against the finance problem and ended up working for a neighborhood drug dealer.

The series is called Bluford High.

Harold Davis, a Bluford High freshman, was facing a big trouble. There was medical bills piling up and he was told that he has to be extremely careful about the budget. Urging for money, he didn't wanted, but had to choose to work for Londell James, a neighborhood drug dealer. Showing us the internal struggle in a ighschool freshman's mind when he had to choose one of these and leave the other behind: Working for Londell for the money to help his family or the warn of his gradnma and his friends to never interfere with such a drug dealer.

Harold's grandma, who was Harold's only relative, accidentally injured herself, and she had to get treatments which led to bills demanding thousands of dollars. Despite that his grandma told him not to worry about her business-- the bills for the treatments. Despite the help from Cindy, Harold's good friend, he struggled to do anything to get the money, which also included, working with a drug dealer--Londell James.

Conflicts are within and outside Harold, but the main ones,and the ones that author may want to show most, are the ones within. He had to lie to his closest friends that he was working for such a horrible person, and he had to be in fear about the day that his friends and his grandma found the truth, which led to conflicts between Harold and his friends, who were furious to find that their closet friend was acting strange and avoiding their questions, and later isolated Harold.

Personally, I strongly recommend this book, for it clearly depicted how a high school student struggled in his own mind to work for some people that he should never go near, and how he changed from ignoring helps from his friends from understanding them at last.From the author's extremely detailed description, we could see the hard decisions fighting each other inside Harold's mind, and all the worries and fear he's hiding deep inside his heart, as if we could read his mind and as if we were seeing Harold fighting against his 'enemies' in person.

Book Review by John Z.