Having punched out one too many classmates, 16-year-old Diego Rivera finds himself on probation for fighting and faces doing prison time if it happens again. At the beginning, albeit for a brief time, Diego is an enigma to readers. On the outside, he’s a lovable, intelligent young man who helps his mom take care of his little brother; on the inside, he’s a tortured teenage boy with an anger-control problem and whose arms bear the scars of years of self-inflicted cutting from a shark’s tooth he wears around his neck. Obviously Diego has issues, and it’s up to his supportive probation officer, Mr. Vidas, to help get him back on track. Even out of his element, Sanchez draws his characters lovingly, making it very apparent that he knows teens like Diego and genuinely understands their peril. Although the pieces of the plot fit together, Diego’s recovery is rendered in such a bombastic, groan-inducing, problem-novel style—complete with dream interpretation and an especially cringeworthy guided visualization/remembering exercise—that even the author’s biggest fans may be flipping pages to get to the end. (Fiction. YA)
