“We didn’t so much arrive at our destinations as aim and crash into them like kamikaze yachtsmen.” So Gantos describes himself as a 20-year-old about to be arrested and imprisoned for smuggling two thousand pounds of hashish from St. Croix to New York City. Young Jack seems to share with his fictional characters—Joey Pigza and Jack Henry—a blithe disregard for the consequences of wild behavior. Readers follow him from a seedy motel run by the great-great-granddaughter of Davy Crockett to a Keystone Kops adventure on the sea, from a madcap escape from FBI and Treasury agents to his arrest and trial, represented by his lawyer, Al E. Newman. This true tale of the worst year in the author’s life will be a big surprise for his many fans. Gantos has the storyteller’s gift of a spare prose style and a flair for the vivid simile: Davy has “brown wrinkled skin like a well-used pirate map”; a prisoner he met was “nervous as a dragonfly”; another strutted “like a bowlegged bulldog.” This is a story of mistakes, dues, redemption, and finally success at what he always wanted to do: write books. The explicit descriptions of drug use and prison violence make this a work for older readers. Not the usual “How I Became A Writer” treatise, it is an honest, utterly compelling, and life-affirming chronicle of a personal journey for older teens and adults. (Nonfiction. YA)
