Doing Time: Notes from the Undergrad

by Rob Thomas, Karen Blessen (Illustrator)

Overview

Each student at Robert E. Lee High School is required to perform two hundred hours of community service in order to graduate. Their responses to the assignment are as varied as the organizations for which they volunteer....

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781442468108
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster Books For Young Readers
Publication date:	06/12/2012
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Rob Thomas is the creator and executive producer of the television series Veronica Mars. He is also a cocreator and executive producer of the cable television series Party Down. In addition to his television work, Thomas is the author of several young adult books including Rats Saw God, Slave Day, Satellite Down, and Doing Time: Notes From the Undergrad. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Katie, daughter Greta, and son Hank. Visit him at SlaveRats.com.

Editorial Reviews

Returning to the scene of Slave Day, Robert E. Lee High School, Thomas's collection of thinly connected stories (all of the students are fulfilling their school's community service requirement) barely scrapes the surface of how work affects young people. Thomas relies on hip lingo and details from movies, television and music to carry his narratives forward, which makes his handling of such serious subjects as neglect and abuse within families, racial discrimination, teen pregnancy and poverty seem off-handed. Confronted with people who are economically disadvantaged ("Blue Santa"), bereaved ("Loss of Pet"), badly injured ("Half a Mind") or just rude and obscene ("Cheatin' Heart"), these teenaged volunteers respond, in most cases, as caring individuals who are just discovering the painful areas of life. While the characters and language ring true, descriptions of, for example, the treatment young women receive at pregnancy counseling centers, offer one-sided perspectives that belie the complicated issues involved. In addition, some explicit language (e.g., "one of us'll be holdin' a Shania Twain poster one-handed in the little boys' room," a DJ says in "Cheatin' Heart") may be too strong or incomprehensible for readers in the lower part of the recommended age range. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Gr 8 Up--A collection of 10 loosely knit vignettes that focus on the theme of volunteering. In "Shacks from Mansions," Randall's college social work class has been assigned to report on community service projects completed by local high school students as a requirement for graduation. Randall reminisces about the time he was on the receiving end of one such project and a well-known professional football player befriended him through a Big Brothers program. About the time Randall began to develop a bond, his big brother completed his court-imposed number of hours and disappeared from his life. The remaining stories examine issues regarding community service, including attitudes and motivations. Thomas challenges readers to look beneath the surface of these typical teenagers and realize that they are rarely the people they first seem to be. In "Blue Santa," one high school do-gooder is the president of the Key Club and heads up a Christmas toys project. The student is motivated only by dreams of the recognition the club will receive. On the other hand, Dwight, in "The Laser," rarely lives up to the expectations of his school superintendent father, yet he goes far beyond the service requirements to help a Mexican man pass an employment test. The stories are well-written, interesting, provocative, and humorous, and often have surprise endings. Teachers will find them useful to stimulate classroom discussion. The characters accurately reflect contemporary young adults and the dialogue is both realistic and amusing.--Tim Rausch, Crescent View Middle School, Sandy, UT

School Library Journal

From Thomas (Slave Day, p. 306, etc.), an attempt to draw a cross-section of humanity from a group of high-school students performing community service.

In the first chapter, as part of a college course, Randall is assigned to follow up on nine high-school seniors who had to do community service projects to graduate, by interviewing them and the participants in their projects. He's a skeptic after his own experience on the receiving end of someone else's community-service project a decade earlier. The next nine chapters are more like short stories, each one a self-contained first-person account by one of the nine seniors: Some perform their service with honor, some with cynicism. Thomas covers a lot of territory and demands that readers keep track of several characters and activities; each narrator establishes himself or herself, describes the mission, learns a lesson, or hits a defining moment, then checks out, without a reappearance of Randall for perspective or hindsight—which leaves the book's premise, and readers, dangling. It's a promising work—it just doesn't feel finished.

Kirkus Reviews