Doug Power: 2 books

When Dougs father refuses to return to suburban New York from one of his lengthy business trips, his mother swallows a bottle of sleeping pills and Doug and sister Constance move in with their mothers mother in Rochester, who takes them in temporarily. At the end of the school year, Constance goes...

Heres how it starts: Vardaman is chased by two older boys and he jumps into the elevator shaft and reaches for the steel cable and catches it, seven stories high, but his hands are slipping. He can barely hang on. The elevator is broken because the building is in Chicago, the Cabrini-Green projects,...