Books with author Jess Mowry

Rats In The Trees is Jess Mowry's first book, written in 1989 and published by John Daniel & Co. of Santa Barbara, California in 1990. It's a collection of interrelated stories about street kids, though most about Robby, a 13-year-old boy from Fresno, California who runs away from a foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone, he's befriended by a "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds who call themselves The Animals. Rats portrays the conditions for many inner city kids during the late 1980's -- around the end of Ronald Regan's "trickle-down theory" and the beginning of George H.W. Bush's "kinder, gentler nation" -- which was when crack-cocaine was starting to flood into mostly poor black neighborhoods as if designed to bring down the people and especially to destroy kids. Sadly, all the predictions made in Rats have come true; the ever-increasing dominance of guns drugs and violence, kids killing kids, and the shameful decline in the quality of public education. Rats In The Trees received a PEN Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature in 1990, and was published in the U.K., Germany and Japan. It was also reprinted by Viking in the U.S. This Anubis Edition includes an extra story and original text not available in previous editions.

Rats In The Trees is Jess Mowry's first book -- written in 1989 and published by John Daniel & Company in 1990 -- a collection of interrelated stories about street kids in Oakland, California, though mostly about Robby, a 13-year-old African-American boy from Fresno, California who runs away from an abusive foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone, he's befriended by an interracial "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds with a united passion for skateboarding, who call themselves The Animals.The stories were originally "told stories" for kids at a West Oakland youth center where Mowry worked at the time; and when he began to write them down he kept that gritty rawness. The boys skate with the gear of the times, speak their own dialect of black and skate-punk, relate to a mix of rock and rap, defend their ground and try to be kids while fighting to survive.Rats In The Trees, while not pretending to be a documentary, portrays the conditions for many inner city kids during the late 1980's -- around the end of "Reganomics" and the beginning of George Bush's "kinder, gentler America" -- which was when crack-cocaine was starting to flood into mostly poor black neighborhoods, as if designed to bring down the people, and especially to destroy kids.The times of happy black music of the late 1970s and early 80s were ending. So was the social-awareness and Brotherhood which had bonded, strengthened and sustained black people during the '60s and 70s. The break-dance era was over, and the brutal years of gangster rap, of self-hatred fostering black-on-black crime, and guns, gangs, drugs and violence were beginning as if in retaliation for that brief interlude of relative peace.Robby and The Animals were old enough to remember the days when black people seemed united in a common cause of freedom and justice; and like most black kids at the time they knew they were losing something.Sadly, all the predictions made in Rats have come true, the ever-increasing black-on-black crime, the guns, gangs, drugs and violence in the U.S., kids killing kids, and the shameful decline in the quality of public education.School shootings were also mentioned.Of course, much of the language and many of the expressions, as well as some attitudes toward certain types of people, have changed since 1989 -- or are at least masked by political-correctness these days -- but after reading this book judge for yourself if the U.S. has gotten kinder, gentler or any more enlightened since then despite all the political-correctness and Pollyanna lip-service given to equality.Rats In The Trees received a PEN Josephine Miles Award in 1990, and was published in the U.K., Germany and Japan. It was also reprinted by Viking in the U.S.The stories were originally "stand-alone" stories, and several were published on their own in the U.S. and abroad. The author has done some editing where there were repetitive descriptions of characters and settings. This Anubis Edition includes an extra story and additional material not available in print editions, as well as a foreward by the author.

Like Way Past Cool, Mowry's powerful third novel tells a story of coming-of-age young, black and poor in America; a tale about a 13-year-old boy from the rural South seeking escape from the ghosts of racism still haunting his little town. Bright, handsome Corbitt Wainwright sees no future in Bridge-end, Mississippi. When his father is sent to prison for attacking a racist white man and he himself becomes involved in a deadly dispute over a catfish, Corbitt flees in hopes of finding life better in Oakland, California. Instead, he becomes enmeshed in a net of guns, gangs and crack, black-on-black crime, violent police and urban-flavored racism. Except for Lactameon, a fat, 13-year-old gang mascot, Oakland might have been another dead end for Corbitt. When they eventually come together, the two boys rescue a starving one-eyed urchin named Ethan from death on the streets. Mowry has an unerring ear for gritty street talk, a vivid and graphic sense of place, whether in Mississippi woods or an Oakland alley, and an unflinching view of the side of America -- a world where black youth have few options -- that most more fortunate Americans prefer not to see or deal with. Drawing upon a wondrously eclectic background of rap and rock music, contemporary and classic movies, street slang, books, Voodoo and ghosts, he synthesizes a whole new mix of adventure fiction; perhaps the only "There And Back Again" in African-American literature.

Tumbleweed Terrace Desert View Homes, somewhere south of Tucson, Arizona - “A nice place to raise your kids,” as promised by a faded billboard usually used as a vulture perch - is broiling under a blazing sun. The land all around is empty except for cactus and sagebrush, mostly shades of rust and gray, and the only green for many miles are the squares of lawns in Tumbleweed Terrace, which, from a vulture's point of view, probably looks as alien as a place to raise your kids on Mars. Tumbleweed Terrace had burst upon the defenseless desert with snarling trucks and roaring bulldozers, screaming saws and thudding air hammers, during America’s last housing boom, but then a bust had broken its back and the project has languished for over a decade with most of its houses unoccupied - those that have actually been built - while others are still only skeletons of slowly shriveling two-by-four bones. The huge shopping mall has never opened, its doorways boarded with sheets of plywood, its signs of Sears, Footlocker, Best Buy, The Gap, Ross, and Starbucks, fading and never lighted at night. The wide but mostly empty streets, laid out in aesthetic meandering patterns and lined with sun-bleached sidewalks that have never known the rattle of skateboards, wander though acres of blank-windowed empty or only partly completed homes; and there are many dusty lots with only barren concrete foundations and raw earth holes for swimming pools.Dustin Rhodes, and his mom and dad, are not only one of the very few families who live in this nice suburban ghost town - the only dwellers on Trader Rat Lane - but also the only black people. Dustin home-schools online, while his father, a U.P.S. pilot, and his mother, a train dispatcher, are usually away; and Dustin has known mostly solitude for all his thirteen years. though he has a TV and computer, a love of reading books, a "not-dog" named Spot, and most of the coolest video games, including one called Magic Rats, which he frequently plays with a cyber-friend. Perhaps he thinks he's not really lonely, but after he shows kindness to an elderly Apache shaman, someone moves into the house next door. At first they appear to be only a middle-aged man-and-wife, friendly and seemingly nice, but Dustin soon discovers they seem to be hiding someone in their house. Dustin begins to investigate and comes to the conclusion that it must be a boy of around his own age… but why is he being hidden?

Dante, Pook, and Wyatt, 8th-graders in a rundown West Oakland, California school plagued by guns, gangs, drugs and violence as well as inept or indifferent teachers, don't have many choices in life. Dante, 13, was born to a crack-addicted mother and needs an expensive heart operation if he hopes to reach 30. Pook is newly 14 and, though handsome and muscular, with a dream of becoming a doctor, is an outcast because he’s gay. Wyatt, 13, is awesomely fat, though his biggest handicap is being smart in a stupid place. Dante’s father, though loving, is an engineer on a tugboat and often absent from Dante’s life, but Wyatt’s single mother, who owns a little cafe and lives in Dante’s building, provides ample mothering and most of Dante’s meals; while Wyatt’s younger brother, Cheo, provides a little brother figure. Pook, whose crack-addicted parents are mostly indifferent to him, usually cribs with Dante; and all the boys have known each other for most of their lives.The boys also know the odds are against them: they are trapped in an evil Babylon which is ruled by hate, violence and greed; an environment which, both blatantly and subtly, encourages young black men to fight or kill or exploit each other while discouraging any dreams they may have of someday getting out. The elusive magic formula for escape is mostly composed of money, and the only people around them who seem to have any money are hustlers, drug-dealers, and gun-toting thugs. Nevertheless, and thanks mostly to Dante’s strong father and Wyatt’s formidable but caring mother, the boys have thus far managed to stay as good as they can. This becomes obvious when they take in Radgi, a homeless, alley-dwelling 12-year-old.Then, real hope of money appears when Dante and Pook witness a major drug deal on the waterfront at night... a deal that goes bad when cops chase Air Touch, a 17-year-old wannabe gangster sent to make the buy. Air Touch, fleeing in his Dodge Viper, throws his gun and a suitcase-sized package out the window where they tumble beneath a parked truck. Confident because he’s clean, Air Torch pulls over, even though with his powerful car he might have gotten away. But, his thuggish bluster soon crumbles when he finds that the cops want the drug money and aren't enforcing the law. Finding no money, the cops Rodney King Air Touch and leave him unconscious in the gutter. Dante and Pook, hiding beneath another parked truck, snatch up the gun and the package, believing the latter to be full of cash.But their hopes are dashed when, arriving home and getting Wyatt to share their fortune, they discover that instead of bundles of bills, the package contains pure cocaine just off a ship. At first they consider flushing it down the toilet, but then Dante begins to speculate how much money it might be worth. Enough for his heart operation? Enough to put Pook through medical school? Enough for Wyatt to go to college? Pook and Wyatt are hesitant: if they did manage to sell the coke, it would likely be cooked into more crack and end up back in their ‘hood. But Dante argues what’s the difference between paper or powder? Don’t people kill each other for money? Isn’t money evil, even if you need it to have choices in life? For the first time in their lives, the boys’ friendship is put to a test. Finally, though Wyatt is still reluctant and Pook remains troubled, an agreement is reached that Dante will try to find a buyer. But, if this becomes too dangerous, they will flush the stuff and try for the best of the choices they have.And it does become dangerous -- VERY dangerous -- not only for Dante but for all of his friends.

13-year-old Jarrett Ross has been no more than a ghost for months, a lonely ghost crying in the darkness where no one can see or hear him. A drug dealer put moves on his mom, got her addicted, and now rules their tiny apartment in a ancient West Oakland Victorian house. Jarrett's only refuge has been his room, its door locked with a skeleton key. But one rainy night even that protection fails him when the man breaks open the door. In a fight for Jarrett's life the man falls down a stairwell. Jarrett, battered and bleeding, knows the cops will never believe the man's death was accidental and Jarrett was acting in self-defense. He has to run away!Weak from loss of blood, Jarrett stumbles through dark streets and alleys with no destination except to get away. Finally, he finds himself at the rusty iron gates of small and forgotten graveyard and collapses to wait for death. But instead of the Dark Angel, a chubby homeless boy appears... a boy who also had to run from sins the world made him commit and now dwells alone in this place of the dead. Together, they fight to restore Jarrett's life.

13-year-old Remi DuMont, newly arrived from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where his family lived in poverty, hopes that life will be different in West Oakland, California, where refrigerators, hot running water and television are but three new wonders and some kids are wondrously fat. But when he and his parents move into the second-floor apartment of a spooky old Victorian house in a neighborhood haunted by real-life terrors of gangs, drugs and violence, the last thing Remi expects are ghosts!Every night at 3:13 while his mother and father sleep, Remi hears a train approaching, seemingly headed straight for the house. From his window he sees a murder committed aboard the train as it rumbles past below. Remi, who shares his father's interest in the supernatural, soon realizes that the murderer, the victim, and the train are ghosts; and the murder he sees reenacted each night happened in 1943 when Liberty ships were built in Oakland to help win World War II. Together with his downstairs neighbor, chubby, streetwise, Niya Bedford, also 13, they put together the pieces of this undiscovered crime, which includes the unexplained disappearance of another 13-year-old boy, the son of the elderly and reclusive landlady who lives on the house's dark third floor. In their attempt to solve the mystery by searching for a body they believe to have been buried in the house's basement, Remi and Niya find themselves pulled into the ghostly manifestation where the laws of the living don't apply, becoming ghosts from the future haunting the past and locked in a life-and-death struggle with a dead murderer and time itself.

The year is 1860, in the months before the start of the American Civil War. The industrial revolution has brought railroads for fast transportation. Steamships and riverboats sail the seas and ply the inland waterways. Telegraph provides instant communication. Machines are beginning to replace much dreary human labor... though mostly in the Northern states.But, thirteen-year-old Skyler Knight returns from a year at a New Orleans school to the tiny Louisiana bayou town of Knights Crossing - named after his family - to find that nothing seems to have changed. This is mostly a relief: there were too many new ideas in New Orleans; too much change happening too fast for his liking. For the first time in his life Skyler had to deal with free black people... blacks who behaved as if they were equal to whites! Skyler, raised on his family's huge plantation of Diligence, was brought up to believe that black people were animals. Intelligent animals, yes, but certainly not human beings.Yet, Skyler is beginning to wonder about that - thanks to some "bad ideas" overheard in Bohemian cafes - to at least subconsciously question the morality of slavery. These are dangerous ideas for a boy who will inherit a hundred slaves.Still, it's good to be home where things never change. Skyler is looking forward to losing his sissified city clothes and going bare-chested in buckskin trousers; to riding his horse and fishing; to hunting with his big Smith rifle and swimming with the slave kids again.But, something new HAS come to Knight's Crossing. After getting off the train, Skyler encounters two black boys of around his age. One is Cartwright, a handsome, muscular boy who was purchased to be a companion for a wealthy plantation-owner's son. The other is an enormously fat boy named Loki - called Lucky - who belongs to Seth Franklin, a little-known and reclusive man who owns the small plantation of Content deep in the bayou. There are rumors that Franklin is too kind to his slaves; that he's allowed them to get fat and lazy. ...And worse, "uppity." Lucky seems to confirm all these rumors. Besides being barely able to waddle, he sasses Skyler to distraction until Skyler wants to whip him, though he's never whipped a slave before.Skyler's buggy arrives, driven by Jupiter, a wise old slave who has probably had more to do with raising Skyler than Skyler's own parents. A storm is brewing, and despite Lucky's sass, Skyler and Jupiter take him to Content. As if Lucky himself hasn't been enough proof that there's something strange about the place, spending a stormy night at Content only adds to the mystery.But Skyler's curiosity about Franklin's "system" - how Franklin can be so kind to his slaves and still make a profit - is sidetracked when Skyler meets Lucky's fraternal twin, Lucinda, who seems to run the Big House. Lucinda arouses feelings in Skyler that are totally improper for a young white southern gentleman... at least toward a slave girl. If Skyler wasn't confused enough, he is flabbergasted when Lucky asks Skyler to buy him and his sister! Although amazed by this request, Skyler is also puzzled... why would Lucky want to leave a place where he seems to do nothing but eat and sleep? And, what use could he possibly be to Skyler, disregarding the fact that he seems very smart... and he can read!With a head full of confusion, as well as thoughts of Lucinda, Skyler comes home the next day to find that his father has a gift for him... Cartwright.Cartwright has never been "housebroken," working all his life in his former owner's blacksmith shop. Unlike Lucky, Cartwright is eager to please his new master, though Skyler will have to polish him up and teach him to be a gentleman's servant -- a squire to a knight -- but Skyler begins to wonder if it's Cartwright not himself who is really worthy of knighthood.

Some might say 14-year-old Brandon Williams is an over-privileged snowflake. He lives in a million-dollar house overlooking the ocean in Santa Cruz, California, gets a weekly allowance equal to the take-home pay of many service industry workers, and has gone to a private, all-white school from Kindergarten through eighth grade. Health-nazis would call him “obese," but Brandon is only slightly chubby, and handsome by Caucasian standards, though his looks are nothing special in a sunny, seaside environment of blond and blue-eyed surfer dudes. Brandon should be happy - or at least think he is - but he’s not. Like many young teens he’s sure there must be a better world somewhere, a "there" that's better than "here," and he's tried to find it in fantasy games, and has even created a website world with his best friend, 12-year-old Tommy Turner, a cheerful fat boy who lives next door. He's also tried to dull his angst in various chemical ways, and has wasted a year of his youth staying high. Brandon hopes to be a writer and use pen and PC to right wrongs in the world. Being who he is and living where he does, he’s never experienced discrimination or hate based on appearance or race. Despite the protests of his liberal-minded and loving, but career-oriented and somewhat distant parents, Brandon decides to attend public high school. He isn’t completely naive, thanks to his older brother, Chad, who also attends public high school and is now a senior; but Brandon’s first day is a reality-shock as he discovers what public education in the U.S. is all about... pounding just enough knowledge and mainstream values into kids’ empty skulls so they can get their McFreakin’ diplomas and become productive Proles. Since no one knows Brandon, he naturally falls in with the outcasts, who include Travis White, one of the school's few black students and also the fattest at five-hundred pounds. Other new friends include Danny Little-Wing, a Native-American boy from an almost forgotten local tribe and the second-fattest dude at school; Carlos, a fat gang member; Zach, a pot-bellied gainer; Rex Watson, a smaller-than-average boy with higher-than-average intelligence who was kicked into high school a year early; and dismal Jason Gray who is really not “obese” but who has been taught that he is and therefore to hate himself. There is also chubby Bosco Donatello, a world-class surfer though indifferent to his fame and seemingly oblivious to the present as if he’s been transported through time from 1963. Brandon has never been hated, and there is a question of whether a person can empathize with the suffering of others unless he or she has suffered. Along these lines Brandon discovers that most of what he “knows” about black people (and fat people) is only what he’s been taught. Brandon also delves into the mostly cyber universe of teen and pre-teen gainers, a rapidly growing (no pun intended) counter-culture that few young-adult authors, educators, and "experts" on youth seem aware of... or perhaps don't want to admit exists. Phat Acceptance is a mix of issues, including consumerism, advertising, propaganda, xenophobia, and how kids are brainwashed from the time they first turn on a TV into buying what they’re told to buy, wearing what they’re told to wear, eating what they’re told to eat, looking how they’re told to look - which now includes weighing what they’re told to weigh - and hating who they’re told to hate. It also illustrates how the “war on childhood obesity” gives haters a group of people whom it’s socially acceptable to hate, as well as how sheep-like people are in accepting how “unhealthy” they are because they're being told they are by a health and fitness industry with multi-billion dollar profits. The result is a new religion of "health" and a new holy war against those who won't worship.

Mike Saunders, an African-American boy of 13 raised by his novel-writing dad in the nice suburban environment of Thousand Oaks, California, is dismayed when his father's uncertain income forces a move to a tumbledown shack in the desolate sweltering desert of Coyote Valley, Arizona. The property, such as it is -- electricity unreliable, and only a windmill for water -- was bequeathed to Mike's dad by Mike's great-uncle, who died at the age of 107 after spending most of his life searching for a ton of gold bars stolen in a train robbery in 1897 and reputedly still buried somewhere. Except for its rusty narrow-gauge track, the Coyote Valley and Codyville railroad, abandoned in 1917, has almost been forgotten. But Mike, though having an interest in steam trains, is much more concerned upon his arrival to find there's only dial-up web service, along with only two TV channels. Even worse from Mike's perspective, the only two boys within twenty miles are Carson, 12, a blond-haired "out-of-shape gamer" whose mom works at a saloon in town; and Little Coyote, 13, an enormously fat Apache boy who lives in a shack no better than Mike's at what had once been a water stop on the abandoned railroad, and whose sister cooks in a cafe. Mike isn't sure he wants to befriend either boy. But, as the story unfolds, revealing desert legend and lore, crusty old wild west characters, an adventure in an abandoned mine, a steam locomotive resurrected, and a hundred-year-old mystery solved, Mike learns that true friends come in all shapes and sizes, and souls aren't judged by BMI, or how much wealth one accumulates while breathing the air of this earth.

The thirteen-year-old Corbitt Wainwright's adolescence is abruptly cut short when his father is imprisoned for attacking a white man. Tragically, dreams of success through good grades and hard work are wiped aside as white society shows him, out of both kindness and malice, that poor black kids in Mississippi don't have much of a hand in creating their own destinies. Refusing to accept this allotted role, and after a deadly confrontation with his father's accuser, Corbitt sets out for California, the land of opportunity and racial equality. Upon his arrival in West Oakland, a whole other world awaits. This is a world populated by gangs and crack dealers, violent cops and street kids, and one where the future seems even bleaker than it does back at home. Against the odds, he helps some of the local homeboys overcome one of their many predators and discovers the power of his African heritage. Finally, he learns to trust his own strength.Filled with a remarkably diverse cast of characters and written with gut-wrenching immediacy, cutting-edge street slang, and a haunting lyricism, Six Out Seven is a brutally honest novel about what it means to be a black teenager in America today.