Rats in the Trees — Jess Mowry

Rats In The Trees is Jess Mowry's first book, written in 1989 and published by John Daniel & Co. of Santa Barbara, California in 1990. It's a collection of interrelated stories about street kids, though most about Robby, a 13-year-old boy from Fresno, California who runs away from a foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone, he's befriended by a "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds who call themselves The Animals. Rats portrays the conditions for many inner city kids during the late 1980's -- around the end of Ronald Regan's "trickle-down theory" and the beginning of George H.W. Bush's "kinder, gentler nation" -- which was when crack-cocaine was starting to flood into mostly poor black neighborhoods as if designed to bring down the people and especially to destroy kids. Sadly, all the predictions made in Rats have come true; the ever-increasing dominance of guns drugs and violence, kids killing kids, and the shameful decline in the quality of public education. Rats In The Trees received a PEN Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature in 1990, and was published in the U.K., Germany and Japan. It was also reprinted by Viking in the U.S. This Anubis Edition includes an extra story and original text not available in previous editions.