Title: Price, Charlie. Desert Angel. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2011. Print.
Overview: Angel is on the run. That's okay, running is something she's learned to be good at. With a string of mother's abusive boyfriends in her life from an early age she's learned to be tough and protect herself. Always have water, find a safe place to hide, fit in. These are just some of the things that Angel has learned and after Scotty, her mother's current boyfriend, kills her mother Angel has to put all of her knowledge into action to stay alive.
Critical Analysis: This is a book that had a great potential to be one of those books you read in one sitting. It wasn't. I found that the plot lagged and things happened slowly. After reading Dead Connection and loving it so much I dove into Desert Angel preparing to devour it the way I had with the previous Charlie Price novel. That just didn't happen. The characters seemed to all be alike with no real discerning qualities to separate one from the other. Scotty was at least mildly interesting though instead of showing what he was doing from his point of view a paragraph was tacked onto the end of random chapters saying what Angel had missed (cigarette butts where they shouldn't be, a car that hadn't been there before) in an effort to tell us what Scotty was doing at that time. I really hoped to love this book, but I was very disappointed.
Book Recommendations With Similar Themes:
1. Jump the Cracks by Stacy DeKeyser. 15-year-old Victoria is on a train to visit her dad. When, big surprise, he doesn't show up to pick her up from the train station she's there to see a teen mom stash her dirty and bruised little boy in the train bathroom then run. Fed up with parents who don't take care of their children like they should Victoria picks up the little boy and boards the next outbound train, determined not to let another child fall through the cracks.
2. So B. It by Sarah Weeks. Heidi's mother is mentally disabled. The woman only knows 23 words, one of which is the word "soof." Heidi's never been able to find out what the word meant no matter how many times her mother repeated it. All she knows is that this word is important to her mother and she needs to find out why. Taking the little that she owns she heads across the country and finds out not only what "soof" is, but things about her past she never imagined.
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