BLOOD DON'T LIE

 

Thirteen-year-old Larry Ratner wouldn’t mind starting an after-school club; one of those twelve-step programs, only for short people; but he’s worried he’ll be the shortest person in the Short Person’s Club.

 

Now that Larry’s celebrated his Bar Mitzvah, he’d like to shuck his microscopic status and become a real man, especially in the eyes of his father. But when he falls hard for Sara Rothman, the only human on the planet that actually gets him, his daily bus rides become hell-on-wheels as he’s tormented by a Jewish boy three times his size. Larry’s too humiliated to tell anyone, including his parents, that he doesn’t want to fight back. And when both parents lose their jobs shortly after moving the family to an affluent Jersey suburb, suddenly Larry is too small and too poor to fit in anywhere. Despite everything he is learning about the tragic history of his people, as the tension rises on the bus and at school, and in the Ratner household, Larry may not realize that history is repeating itself in his own life until it’s too late.

 

In the humorous and mysterious spirit of The Watsons Go To Birmingham and When You Reach Me, at 61,963 words, BLOOD DON’T LIE is not a typical bully story. What happens when David slays Goliath, and afterward feels so sick and lousy about it, he wants to die? And what happens when the smallest kid in 8th grade discovers the biggest bully in his life is not on the bus but under his own roof… his own blood?

 

For information and ideas on possible lesson plans or curriculum ideas for using this text in the classroom, please click here.