TIME TO TAKE SIDES

This is all about a teachers' strike and eighth-grader Jeff's divided loyalties, and the fact that Gold puts goodies and baddies on both sides doesn't make it any less contrived an issue book. Jeff wants to be ""in"" with a gang of boys who are working for the teachers, but his widowed mother, a school cafeteria worker and newly appointed teacher's aide, crosses the picket line and orders him to do the same. For a while Jeff goes along with the boys who call his mother a scab, but he reports their plan to wreck the subs' cars; his consequent fink image is turned around when, the strike over, he gives an emotional speech about scabs helping to heal. But all the characters are pawns to Gold and even Jeff's repeated ""damodam"" comes across not as a kid's spontaneous speech but as an author's calculated ""realism.