description: Jack Gantos, bestselling author of the Joey Pigza books, had a peripatetic childhood around the US and the Caribbean. At 18 years old, he was doing a dead-end job on a Caribbean island, looking for adventure and a way to fund himself through university. When he was offered $10,000 to sail a boatload of drugs to New York, he jumped at it. It resulted in a year in a federal prison - and a lot of thinking time. In prison, Jack discovered the library where he was able to indulge his passion for literature and continue to write the journal he'd started in childhood. Denied a diary of his own by prison regulations, he wrote his notes in a tiny hand between the lines of a Russian novel. Becoming ever more determined to get to university, Jack discovered that he didn't have to let one bad choice map out the course of the rest of his life. There are such things as second chances. Paroled after a year in order to go directly to college to study writing, Jack had his first children's book published within two years of being released.
language: English
title: Hole in My Life
titlecomplete: Hole in My Life
characters: Jack Gantos
genres: Audiobook, Coming Of Age, School, Crime, Young Adult, High School, Teen, Adult, Fiction, Biography Memoir
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: Red Fox