Second Quarter Book Review

Eric Pouliot
12/12/08
Mr. B-G
Second Quarter Book Review
The Lost Boy.
The Lost Boy by Dave Pelzer. Harper Collins Publishers, 2007.Genre: Fiction.
The Lost Boy is the sequel to A Child Called It. The protagonist in this excellent story is Dave Pelzer, the author. This book is about Dave growing up and living with his alcoholic and brutal mother. Dave has to put up with harsh and cruel beatings that are delivered from his mom. He experiences a stab in the gut and horrific gas chamber punishments in the first book. In The Lost Boy Dave Pelzer eventually gets sick and tired of his mother and walks out on her and the rest of his family. Throughout the book, Dave experiences foster homes, around thirteen of them. Dave moves from one foster home to the next because he gets in trouble too many times. Dave sometimes will steal food from convenience stores, and occasionally gets into fist fights with kids from school. Since no foster parents will deal with this, they decide to give him away to another home. This book is about the hardships he endures from moving, and mostly about him trying to find a family to love him as he is. The setting is all of the foster homes, and the conflict is him trying to find a foster home that suets him.
"The Lost Boy stands shining as the premier book on the unique love and dedication that social services and foster families provide for our children in peril. Dave Pelzer is certainly a living testament of resilience, personal responsibility and the triumph of the human spirit-" John Bradshaw, the book jacket. I believe that this quote means that this book shows how good social services and foster families can be for kids like Dave. It also talks about how Dave Pelzer is like a hero for surviving and going through these hard obstacles in his life.
The Lost Boy reminds me of the other book from Dave Pelzer, A Child Called It. I think that they are similar because they both talk about Dave's horrible life. I also think that The Lost Boy is similar to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone because in the beginning of the Harry Potter book, the author, J.K. Rowling, talks about how Harry;s life is horrible and he hates his aunt and uncle. This is similar because Dave hates his mom and he talks about how he wishes to have a better life someday. They are also similar because Harry's life gets better because he goes to Hogwarts, a school for wizards and witches. Dave's life gets better because he ends up in a foster home with a family that loves him instead of living with his abusive mother. They are different though because Harry is a wizard and Dave is a normal kid living in a foster home.
"Weekends are worse. No school means no food and more time at "The House". All I can do is try to imagine myself away-somewhere, anywhere-from "The House". For years I have been the outcast of "The Family", pg. 4 I think from this excerpt from the story, you can see that Dave Pelzer likes to emphasize that he is really not part of the family. That is why he uses phrases like "The Family" and ""The House". Dave also writes in a depressing way and a optimistic way too. He says that his weekends are bad and he gets no food, but he also says that he dreams of going somewhere nice and relaxing.
I really liked this book because it shows how Dave was able to overcome horrible things in his life and live to tell his story. I also like how Dave wrote the book. I liked how he wrote it because he tells everything as real as he possibly can. He talks about how his life sucked, but also how he never gave up and thought of one day that he would be loved. He allowed me to live his life for a little and really put me in his shoes. Even though I will never experience how bad it must have been for Dave I can say that I was able to catch a glimpse of his life. This book affected my life because now I know a little bit about how horrible it is to be a child that is not loved by his parents and how hard and difficult it is to be a foster child. I would recommend this book to people that like to read about heart-warming stories and things that happened to people in real life.