The Boy in the Black Suit

The Boy in the Black Suit by Jason Reynolds 255 pages

Matt has just returned to his Brooklyn high school after some time off following his mother's death.  His classmates don't know what to say to him so they basically avoid him, his father has started drinking, and Matt learns that the job he had lined up with the school work-program has just fallen through.  When his elderly neighbor, Mr. Ray, offers hims a job at the funeral home, Matt cautiously accepts.

Matt begins wearing his black suit to school everyday, risking further alienation from his classmates, since he leaves early for his job at the funeral home.  He finds that attending funerals helps him process his grief.  Matt develops an unexpected friendship with the older Mr. Ray, and realizes that in his rough neighborhood his recent loss means he has more in common with the people around him than he would have thought.

Jason Reynolds has written a great story that reads smoothly, confronts grief, and exposes readers to urban life.  This addition to my middle school collection will be of most interest to my readers 8th Grade and up.

The Removers

The Removers / Andrew Meredith 177 pgs.

A thin memoir of a guy who bonds with his distant father when sharing a job picking up dead bodies.  Said father was fired from his job as a professor for sexual misconduct, an act that plunged the family into an odd dysfunction.  The parents decide to stay together "for the kids" but have almost no contact with each other for years aside from sharing space in the same house.  Andrew and his sister are trying to "launch" but are held back by the odd family dynamic and perhaps their other issues that they don't really want to own.

Some interesting parts, some seems like every body's life.

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The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley / Jeremy Massey 288 pp.

Paddy Buckley (no relation) is a trusted employee of Gallagher's (also no relation) funeral home in Dublin.  One rainy night he's horrified to hit and kill a pedestrian.  He's considerably more horrified once he realizes it's the brother of Dublin's most vicious crime boss.  This is an intensely-paced noir thriller with quite a bit of sweetness mixed in, and it kept me guessing to the end.

P.S.  Massey earns extra points for convincingly portraying a 60-ish woman as the object of a much younger man's lust.  His mother must be proud of him.