Title: Who is Eddie Leonard?
First published: 1993
Description: 15 year old Eddie Leonard has no idea who his parents are. The woman Eddie calls his grandmother sometimes tells him that her daughter, his mother, abandoned him at birth. At other times Eddie's grandmother tells him that he was found in a garbage can ... or maybe on a park bench.
When Eddie's grandmother dies suddenly, he wonders if he ever really was related to her -- where did he come from and who are his parents?
That's when Eddie launches his daring plan: he'll find his real family and claim his rightful place. He shows up on the Diaz family's doorstep holding a Missing Child poster and claiming to be their lost son, Jason, the boy in the poster. The Diazes--Connie, Bruce and daughter Miller--are immediately suspicious of this newcomer's motives. But after he sprains an ankle and can't walk, they let him stay temporarily, though they don't know whether to call him Jason or Eddie, the name given to him by the recently deceased woman who raised him and who may or may not have been his grandmother. After Jason/Eddie gets into serious trouble and well after Mazer establishes that the family never quite trusts him, Bruce locates the boy's birth certificate, proving he is not Jason Diaz after all. Mazer does a better job with internal monologue than with dialogue, and there are a few too many scenes in which Jason/Eddie repeats ``I'm Jason. Jason Diaz,'' to the family's skeptical reactions.
Subjects: Fiction, Missing children, Identity, Identity (Philosophical concept)
LC classification: PZ7.M47397 Wk 1993