FREE: CAVE UNDER THE CITY by HARRY MAZER

The listing, CAVE UNDER THE CITY by HARRY MAZER has ended.

HARDCOVER book, 152 pages, ISBN 0-690-04557-3\
Grade 5-8

In this gripping story set in the Bronx during the Depression, Tolley (about 12) and his brother, Bubber (about 6), are thrust into an odyssey of survival when their father has to leave town to seek work and their mother and grandmother are both too ill to care for them. Rather than be separated or sent to a children's shelter, the two flee to the streets where they are forced to take care of themselves through wit, endurance, and often painful compromise of their values. When Tolley becomes ill, Bubber leads him home, where they find that their father has returned and the brothers can resume their old lives. But they are not the same boys: each has had his character honed by the experience. Bubber has become a quiet realist, accepting loss while retaining hope. Tolley has become angry at the grownup world, and at his father in particular. Although filled with sharply detailed incident, the book is more character and atmosphere than plot, and hence, concentrating as it does on the changes in Tolley and Bubber, seems to stop rather than end. While occasionally relentless in its portrayals of the boys' struggle, this is compelling and well told in Tolley's believably adolescent voice, resulting in a harsh but credible story with some resonances of the plight of today's homeless.

CONDITION- very good with a library type dust cover.