Six Out Seven
by By Mowry, Jess
Category: Fiction , General

On the day Corbitt Wainwright's father is imprisoned for attacking a white man, the thirteen-year-old's adolescence is abruptly cut short. 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. But Corbitt refuses to accept his allotted role, and after a deadly confrontation with his father's accuser, he sets out for California, the land of opportunity and racial equality.What he finds on arriving in West Oakland is another world altogether, a world populated by gangs and crack dealers, violent cops and street kids, where opportunity seems to run even thinner than it does back home. But when he falls in with some local home boys and helps them overcome one of their many predators, Corbitt discovers the power of his African heritage. He learns, finally, to trust his own strength.Peopled by a remarkable cast of characters and written with the gut-wrenching immediacy, cutting-edge street slang, and haunting lyricism that have marked Jess Mowry as a bold new voice in fiction, Six Out Seven is a brutally honest novel about what it means to be a black teenager in the United States today. Wryly funny, deeply committed, it is a portrait of America no reader should miss.