description: Jean is a teacher at a detention home for juvenile offenders. When Maurice, a 15 year old delinquent, stalks into her classroom, Jean dreads, but knows, that she must deal with his rage. Through they begin as enemies, she wins him over as she struggles to help him learn how to read. On Leave from Morton Hills, Maurice meets Loreen, a young girl who knows and hates the same poverty that Maurice faces. Loreen believes her only hope of escaping the violence, drugs, and poverty is to get educated and to meet someone who hopes for a better life. Though Maurice knows he can never be that person Loreen describes as, "a man who's gunna be somthin' someday," he comes to love Loreen and the infant nephew who Loreen tries to raise. Despite Jean's help, the help of Loreen, Maurice's Aunt Flo, and a young man hired to tutor him, Maurice keeps making the wrong choices. His poor choices take him to the drug world, an act that nearly kills Loreen's nephew, and finally to an abandoned building where he's been forced to hide from the drug dealers who are threatening to kill him. Maurice doesn't seem to see how his choices keep leading him away from the opportunities handed to him by those who love and care about him. His dream, as he writes about in his poem to Jean, is to go to the other side of the sun where there are, "No drugs and hurt and no noise and pain," and where "Mamas hold their babies and life is good." Through the other side of the sun is never within his reach, Maurice ends up a hero when he goes one last time to say goodbye to Loreen and the baby Marvin.
language: English
title: The other side of the sun
titlecomplete: The other side of the sun
ratings_count: 2
publisher: Kids In Between