Content area
Full text
Tyrell Green is facing a man's share of problems. His father is in prison, his mother is on probation for welfare fraud, and the New York Emergency Assistance Unit can't find his family a decent place to live. Until more suitable housing is available, they have been deposited, along with other families, at the Bennett Motel, a dirty, roach and rat-infested, garbage littered, bloodstained dump. Over the course of one week, iyrell needs to earn more money than a regular job can pay, secure his family a safer place to live, put food on the table, find a new high school and enroll, keep his seven-year-old brother, Troy, alive and safe and out of the custody of New York's Administration for Children's Services, steer clear of drug war gun battles, figure out who he can trust and who he can't, and try to make sense of his love life. All at age fifteen.
Tyrell (Scholastic, 2006) is the creation of BRIO Award winning author, Coe Booth, whose honest and accurate portrayal of families caught in "the system," as Tyrell puts it, comes from years of experience as a social worker in the New York City Emergency Children's Service. Ironically, as Coe began her MFA in creative writing at New York's revered The New School, she had not intended to write about the experiences of the typical teenage boys she encountered as a social worker. She had other stories in mind.
Tyrell Green, her book's protagonist, took her by surprise. As the words flowed out onto the page, Coe had no idea where this teenaged boy's voice was coming from or where it would take her. She hadn't outlined the plot, didn't know where the story was going, and had no idea how it would end.
What she did know was that the manuscript she had been anguishing over for her creative writing class wasn't working for her, and she wanted to turn in a different set of pages for the teacher and the class to critique, something new, something real. The basic idea for Tyrell had been tugging at the corners of her mind for a while, but she imagined him as middle school age, and when the very first line of the narrative flowed...