num_pages: 208
description: Becoming a writer the hard way In the summer of 1971, Jack Gantos was an aspiring writer looking for adventure, cash for college tuition, and a way out of a dead-end job. For ten thousand dollars, he recklessly agreed to help sail a sixty-foot yacht loaded with a ton of hashish from the Virgin Islands to New York City, where he and his partners sold the drug until federal agents caught up with them. For his part in the conspiracy, Gantos was sentenced to serve up to six years in prison. In Hole in My Life , this prizewinning author of over thirty books for young people confronts the period of struggle and confinement that marked the end of his own youth. On the surface, the narrative tumbles from one crazed moment to the next as Gantos pieces together the story of his restless final year of high school, his short-lived career as a criminal, and his time in prison. But running just beneath the action is the story of how Gantos – once he was locked up in a small, yellow-walled cell – moved from wanting to be a writer to writing, and how dedicating himself more fully to the thing he most wanted to do helped him endure and ultimately overcome the worst experience of his life. This title has Common Core connections. Hole in My Life is a 2003 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
language: English
title: Hole in My Life
titlecomplete: Hole in My Life
characters: Jack Gantos
genres: Teen, High School, Young Adult, School, Audiobook, Adult, Crime, Fiction, Biography Memoir, Coming Of Age
ratings_count: 7742
places: The United States of America
awards: awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Sibert Medal, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Massachusetts Book Award
category: Children's/Young Adult Literature, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Michael L. Printz Award, awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Rhode Island Teen Book Award, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Lincoln Award
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)