Strays by Ron Koertge
I wrote a review for Booklist for Strays, this funny teen drama, several months ago, but we recently got this book in the library so I thought I would post my review here. The book is currently on display on the shelves behind the circulation desk, but when shelved it will be with the fiction, call number F Koertge.
"Sixteen-year-old Ted prefers animals to humans; animals “never lie,” and unlike the kids at school, he understands them. When Ted loses his parents in a car accident, he particularly identifies with strays—after all, as a foster kid, that’s what he is. Ted lands in a new home, where his basic needs are met by fair but semi-dysfunctional foster parents and where he coexists with Astin, his older roommate, and C. W., who has had 19 placements in six years. Ted also starts a new school, and with Astin and C. W. at his back, he learns to express himself and to rely upon people as well as animals. Ted’s two-way conversations with animals may initially surprise readers, but this magic realism effectively emphasizes his emotional withdrawal, and his outsider’s observations of human nature are by turns insightful, devastatingly funny, and suffused with loneliness. Though Koertge never soft pedals the horrors experienced by some foster children, this thoughtful novel about the lost and abandoned is a hopeful one, in which some strays find a place to belong."