What We Do Is Secret
*Starred Review*  "This is supposed to be about Darby Crash," Rockets tells us at the outset, but most of the secrets the homeless, 13-year-old street kid shares are not about the leader of the formative L.A. punk band the Germs but about himself, instead. In his jittery, oddly addictive, street-smart, pun-spurting, stream-of-consciousness style, he tells us about a single night in the life two months after his sometime lover, Darby, has committed suicide. The beautifully realized setting of this semiautobiographical novel is Hollywood in 1980, when punk has captured the attention and imagination of a crazy coterie of Southern California kids. But punk, Rockets explains, isn't a style; it's a way of life that, in his case, is lived on "home street home." And, for an abandoned-at-birth child of drug addicts, it's an identity. After all, Rockets was one of Darby's boys. But who is he now, and, if he survives this drug-riddled night of hustling, narrow escapes, frenetic music, and death, who might he become? And where will he find love? Like his first novel,War Boy(2000), Hilsbery's second is a hauntingly up-close-and--personal look at the hellish life of a troubled, baffled,differentkind of kid for whom many readers will come to care enormously.Michael CartCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved