CARMINE'S STORY

A sensitive, sorrowful photo-essay; Schulman exhibits no tendency to sugar-coat the troubled life of Carmine, who was born with the HIV virus and had full-blown AIDS since he was two. In an epilogue readers learn that he died in 1996, two months after his tenth birthday. Carmine's mother, a heroin user, died when he was a baby, so he lived with his grandmother. He tried to have an outwardly normal life, playing Monopoly and video games, and taking care of his school work with a tutor. But the black-and-white photographs tell a haunting story—of an exhausted 34-pound child who knew he was dying, and a loving grandmother who knew she would outlive him. While Schulman has difficulty keeping the first-person narration distinctly childlike, especially when she's conveying technical information about HIV and AIDS, the story is a poignant look at one boy's short life, and the disease that was with him since birth. (Nonfiction. 6-10)