Jess Mowry

Kids run away for many reasons; abusive parents, a bad environment, poverty, lack of love or respect at home. A few run away for adventure. Others hope to find a better life, but most discover that life on the street is cold, hungry and lonely. It's also a jungle of predators. The smarter - or luckier - kids usually find that no matter how bad things were at home, at least they had a bed to sleep in and a chance to really escape by going to school and preparing themselves to win life's battles. Most runaways are heard from again, days, weeks, even months later. But a few kids just disappear, and only their faces on milk cartons, or images on "missing" websites prove they once existed. Collin Thatcher, thirteen-years-old in Oakland, California, has a reason for running away: his self-righteous Aunt Bulah, a part-time social worker and full-time fool, wants to put him in a boot camp for being "lazy and obese," take him away from his "dreamer" father, who was wounded in the Army, given a wheelchair along with a medal, and survives by writing books for kids. With the help of his best friend Ralpa, whose family fled political oppression in Tibet, Collin hopes to defeat his aunt's schemes. He and Ralpa are unexpectedly aided by a homeless boy named Tyger who survives by fishing in a battered old boat. Tyger introduces Collin to the Asian inner-city, a vastly different 'hood from Collin's, yet also plagued by gangs and violence. Collin's plan seems to be working. But then, he and his friends are captured by men who use kids for actors in "films about kids, but not for kids." The boys are also forced to model for comic book covers and VR games. Physically helpless against the men, Collin, Ralpa and Tyger must use their minds and computer skills to escape this dirty cartoon prison and also free the other kids.

Some might say that 14-year-old Brandon Williams is an over-privileged white kid. He lives in a million-dollar house overlooking the ocean in Santa Cruz, California, gets a weekly allowance equal to the take-home pay of many service industry workers, and has gone to a private, all-white school from Kindergarten through eighth grade. While health-nazis would call him “overweight," Brandon is only slightly chubby, and handsome by American Caucasian standards, though his looks are nothing special in a sunny, seaside environment of blond and blue-eyed surfer dudes. Brandon should be happy -- or at least think he is -- but he’s not. Like many young teens he’s sure there must be a better world somewhere, and he's tried to escape to it in cyberspace and fantasy games, and has even created a website world with his best friend, 12-year-old Tommy Turner, a cheerful fat boy who lives next door. He's also tried to dull his angst in various chemical ways, and has wasted a year of his youth staying high. But, Brandon hopes to be a writer and use pen and PC to right some of the wrongs of this world. Being who he is and living where he does, he’s never experienced discrimination or hate based on appearance or race. Despite the protests of his liberal-minded and loving, but career-oriented and somewhat distant parents, Brandon decides to attend public high school. He isn’t completely naive, thanks to his older brother, Chad, who also attends public high school and is now a senior; but Brandon’s first day is a reality-check as he discovers what public education in the U.S. is all about... pounding just enough knowledge and mainstream values into kids’ empty skulls so they can get their McFreakin’ diplomas and become productive Proles. Since no one knows Brandon, he naturally falls in with the outcasts, which include Travis White, one of the school's few black students and also the fattest at five-hundred pounds. Other new friends include Danny Little-Wing, a Native-American boy from an almost forgotten forgotten local tribe and the second-fattest dude at school; Carlos, a pudgy gang member; Zach, a pot-bellied gainer; Rex Watson, a smaller-than-average boy who was kicked into high school a year early; and dismal Jason Gray who is really not “obese” but who has been taught that he is and therefore to hate himself. There is also chubby Bosco Donatello, a world-class surfer though indifferent to his fame and seemingly oblivious to the present as if he’s been transported through time from 1963. Brandon has never been hated before, and there is a question of whether a person can empathize with the suffering of others unless he or she has suffered. Along these lines Brandon discovers that most of what he “knows” about black people (and fat people) is only what he’s been told. Brandon also delves into the mostly cyber universe of teen and pre-teen gainers, a rapidly growing (no pun intended) counter-culture that few young-adult authors, educators, and "experts" on youth seem aware of... or perhaps don't want to admit exists. Phat Acceptance is a mix of issues, including consumerism, advertising, propaganda, xenophobia, and how kids are brainwashed from the time they first turn on a TV into buying what they’re told to buy, wearing what they’re told to wear, eating what they’re told to eat, looking how they’re told to look -- which now includes weighing what they’re told to weigh -- and hating who they’re told to hate. It also illustrates how the “war on childhood obesity” gives haters a group of people whom it’s socially acceptable to hate, as well as how sheep-like people are in accepting how “unhealthy” they are because they're being told they are by a health and fitness industry with multi-billion dollar profits. The result is a new religion of "health" and a new holy war against those who won't worship.

Not quite in the center of Africa lies a tiny land called Kiwanja, whose people have lived in peace for many thousands of years. Though the British once colonized this land, it was never considered valuable enough to be brought into the 20th century and was granted its independence after World War One. But, times have changed in the outside world; satellites spy on everyone because anything that isn't possessed is a threat to those who don't posses it. Flags are no longer planted on someone's beach to claim new lands for kings and queens, but other methods have been devised to make people slaves and steal their resources. Thirteen-year-old Dakota is the son of Nathi, a Kiwanjian bush pilot who flies an ancient C-47. Dakota is skilled in take-offs and landings from dirt airstrips in the dead of night, skimming hilltops to avoid radar, and dodging high-tech fighters. Dakota has only known war in his life, war in which children kill other children commanded by adult "generals." One side wants to rule the land to "bring it into the future," the other claims to be fighting for freedom and ancient traditional ways of life, but both bring only terror and death to the innocent people caught in the middle. Who started this war? Who profits from it? Dakota doesn't know. He packs an AK-47 and, with his father, smuggles weapons to the freedom fighters. Meanwhile, in Houston, Texas, Nicole Neale, a divorced single-parent with an almost-thirteen-year-old son named Zack, fights a more civilized kind of war to hold her job with a small corporation that manufactures many things from kids' action-figures to military uniforms. Will winning her war in corporate boardrooms save her son Zack from what seems like enslavement to video games, material values, the lure of money, and possibly drugs? 
And, why should an American corporation, subsidized by the U.S. Government, have any interest in a tiny African country? The only thing Nicole knows about Kiwanja is that its people make beautiful boots.

Evil always lingers in a land where men have enslaved other men. Such evil is discovered by Kody Carver, a thirteen-year-old African-American boy who spends his summers in the Old French Quarter of New Orleans. There, with the help of Raney Tanner, his alligator-wrestling, bayou cousin, he assists his magical Aunt Simone with Voodoo ceremonies for tourists in the courtyard of his aunt's haunted house. By day, Kody and Raney roam the steamy streets of the Quarter, where other kids sell Voodoo charms and vampire teeth, or dance and sweat for money. By night, Kody and Raney become Voodoo boys in loincloths and bones. When Kody is almost gunned-down by an eight-year-old wannbe thug named Newton, who was sent out to kill to prove himself worthy of membership in a kid-gang called The Skeleton Crew, Kody discovers the real gang leader has been dead for almost two-hundred years. Kody and Raney set out to save the gang members from death -- or worse -- with help from an undead boy.

Tracy Carter seems to be living the African-American Dream, her forty acres a lavish home in the Oakland, California foothills, her mule a $70k Land Rover. She has an eclectic but practical education, the means to indulge her passion for art; and at age 33 owns a successful boat-building business. So why does her story begin in Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere? Is she on a mission to save children? Is she searching for her ancestral roots? …Or, could she be on an unconscious quest for something much deeper, something long-buried in vine-tangled graveyards and shrouded in moonlit shadows of Voodoo? The meaning of life? Or the secrets buried within her own soul? ...Or does she even have a soul, and if she does could she lose it? Her journey leads her to the isolated children's refuge of Father Amaury, which seems at first a Garden Of Eden. Yet something isn't quite right. The children seem too angelic... except one, a 12-year-old boy who the good Father seems to fear, and who digs at night in the refuge's little graveyard, where, among other small skeletons, lies that of a gifted young wood-carver who died at the age of 13. But, are his bones actually there? Though Tracy finds the answer to that, it only uncovers more unburied bones -- metaphorically speaking -- along with a Voodoo priest's warning that she has embarked on a fateful voyage from which there is no turning back. At first it begins literally aboard an ancient freighter powered by steam and fueled by coal, and crewed mainly by children, but then it becomes a frightening quest over a dark and skeletal sea toward a faint and distant light.

Dark Triumph was never actually written or published When Lila first found out she was a werewolf, she was devastated. Then she found Rider, a werewolf like herself. Their love gave each a new freedom--and anchor in a storm. Now they've joined with two others as they flee northward, chased by agents of unimaginable evil.

For thirteen-year-old Dante and his friends, life in Babylon isn't about having choices but only trying to stay alive. Dante, born to a crack-addicted mother, needs a heart operation if he hopes to live to reach thirty; Pook seemingly has no hope of going to medical school and becoming a doctor; Wyatt's biggest handicap is being smart in an ignorant place - a disadvantage shared by his little brother, Cheo - Jinx is trying to get off crack, and Radgi is homeless out on the streets. But when the boys find a package of pure coke dumped by a drug-dealer running from cops, it suddenly seems that they do have choices... if they can somehow sell it. But that's a very dangerous choice... and will it be the right one?

Rats In The Trees was Jess Mowry's first book, written in 1989 and published by John Daniel & Co. of Santa Barbara, California in 1990. It's a collection of interrelated stories of many street kids, though mostly about Robby, a 13-year-old African-American boy from Fresno, California who runs away from a foster home. Robby arrives in Oakland on a Greyhound bus, then, lost and alone in the city, he's befriended by a "gang" of 12 and 13-year-olds who call themselves The Animals. The stories were originally "told stories" in what some might call an oral tradition, to entertain and offer positive messages to kids at a West Oakland youth center where Mowry worked at the time; and when he began to write them down he tried keep that flavor. Although never intended as a documentary, Rats portrays the conditions for inner city kids during the late 1980's -- around the end of Ronald Regan's "trickle-down theory" and the beginning of George Bush's "kinder, gentler America" -- which was when crack-cocaine was starting to flood into mostly poor black neighborhoods, as if designed for that, and especially to destroy kids. The times of happy black music of the late 1970s were ending. So was the social-awareness and the kinship of Brotherhood which had bonded, strengthened and sustained black people during the '60s and early 70s. The break-dance era was over, and the brutal and desperate years of gangstuh rap, of self-hatred fostering black-on-black crime, and "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" were beginning as if in retaliation for that brief interlude of relative peace. Robby and The Animals were old enough to remember the happier days when black people seemed united in a common cause of freedom and justice; and like most black kids at the time they knew they were losing something even if they might not have been able to give it a name. Sadly, all the predictions made in Rats have come true, the ever-increasing and senseless black-on-black crime, the "guns, gangs, drugs and violence" in U.S. innercities, kids killing kids, and the shameful decline in the quality of public education. It was also predicted in Rats that guns, gangs, drugs and violence would move into white suburbia -- as Chuck (an older white teenager in Rats) said: "Coming soon to a neighborhood near YOU!" Of course, much of the language and many of the expressions, as well as some attitudes toward certain types of people, have changed since 1989 -- or are at least masked by political-correctness these days -- but the reader must judge for him- or herself if the U.S. has gotten kinder, gentler or any more enlightened since then despite all the political-correctness and Pollyanna lip-service given to equality. Rats In The Trees received a PEN Josephine Miles Award for excellence in literature in 1990, and was published in the U.K., Germany and Japan. It was also reprinted by Viking in the U.S.

Sequel to the novel, Double Acting.

Tumbleweed Terrace Desert View Homes, somewhere south of Tucson, Arizona - “A nice place to raise your kids,” as promised by a faded billboard usually used as a vulture perch - is broiling under a blazing sun. The land all around is empty except for cactus and sagebrush, mostly shades of rust and gray, and the only green for many miles are the squares of lawns in Tumbleweed Terrace, which, from a vulture's point of view, probably looks as alien as a place to raise your kids on Mars. Tumbleweed Terrace had burst upon the defenseless desert with snarling trucks and roaring bulldozers, screaming saws and thudding air hammers, during America’s last housing boom, but then a bust had broken its back and the project has languished for over a decade with most of its houses unoccupied - those that have actually been built - while others are still only skeletons of slowly shriveling two-by-four bones. The huge shopping mall has never opened, its doorways boarded with sheets of plywood, its signs of Sears, Footlocker, Best Buy, The Gap, Ross, and Starbucks, fading and never lighted at night. The wide but mostly empty streets, laid out in aesthetic meandering patterns and lined with sun-bleached sidewalks that have never known the rattle of skateboards, wander though acres of blank-windowed empty or only partly completed homes; and there are many dusty lots with only barren concrete foundations and raw earth holes for swimming pools. Dustin Rhodes and his mom and dad are not only one of the very few families who live in this nice suburban ghost town - the only dwellers on Trader Rat Lane - but also the only black people. Dustin home-schools online, while his father, a Fed-Ex pilot, and his mother, a train dispatcher, are usually away; and Dustin has known mostly solitude for all his thirteen years, though he has a TV and computer, a love of reading books, a "not-dog" named Spot, and most of the coolest video games, including one called Magic Rats, which he frequently plays with a cyber-friend. Perhaps he thinks he's not really lonely, but after he shows kindness to an elderly Apache shaman, someone moves into the house next door. At first they appear to be only a middle-aged man-and-wife, friendly and seemingly nice, but Dustin soon discovers they seem to be hiding someone in their house. Dustin begins to investigate and comes to the conclusion that it must be a boy of around his own age… but why is he being hidden?

Sixteen-year-old Marshall Seaver is expecting a boring summer when his best friend goes away, but instead he finds himself haunted--and hunted--by ghosts that want something from him which he cannot decipher.

13-year-old Mike Saunders, African-American and raised by his novel-writing dad in the nice suburban environment of Thousand Oaks, California, is dismayed when his father's uncertain income forces a move to a tumbledown shack in the desolate sweltering desert of Coyote Valley, Arizona. The property, such as it is -- electricity unreliable, and only a windmill for water -- was left to Mike's dad by Mike's great-uncle, who died at the age of 107 after spending most of his life searching for a ton of gold bars stolen in a train robbery in 1897 and reputedly still buried somewhere. Except for its rusty narrow-gauge track, the Coyote Valley And Codyville railroad, abandoned since 1917, has almost been forgotten. But Mike, though having an interest in real steam trains, is more concerned upon his arrival to find that the only potential friends within twenty miles are Carson, 12, a smart-ass "gamer," and Little Coyote, 13, an enormously fat Apache boy who lives in a shack no better than Mike's at what had once been a water stop on the abandoned railroad. Mike isn't sure he wants to befriend either one, but as the story unfolds, revealing desert legend and lore, crusty old wild west characters, an adventure in an abandoned mine, a steam locomotive resurrected, and an encounter with gun-toting ghosts, Mike learns that true friends come in all colors and sizes, and souls aren't judged by BMI or how much wealth one accumulates while breathing the air of this earth.

Reaps is a collection of ghost and supernatural tales... though several don’t need ghosts to be scary. Most feature a rarity in the genre of young-adult books... young black male protagonists resourceful, brave and intelligent, and many in settings other than the inner-city. Examples of other settings where young black males encounter ghosts, deal with hauntings -- benign or malignant -- vanquish demons, and Satan Himself, are “Goat Boy” somewhere in America’s heartland, “Children Of Death," which takes place in Haiti, “The Train To Lost Lake,” in a forest in Maine, and “The Picture” set in a “nice little town.” Stories which may or may not feature ghosts but are haunting nevertheless, include “Spontaneous Combustion,” a gothic-themed reminder that hate still haunts this world, as well as the “The Execution” which is hauntingly surreal. Homelessness can also be scary, especially to an 8-year-old-boy who may be dying of pneumonia in an abandoned funeral parlor. Jess Mowry does not take the safe route, whether walking through a graveyard at night or an inner-city alley; and neither are his characters the safe and stereotypical heroes who look the parts and play the roles allowed by the mainstream guardians of what young people “should” read. Most are on the verge of manhood and without guides, either spiritual or real, who find they must become their own heroes, and seek their own light in a dark scary world.

Way Past Cool was the first -- perhaps the only -- novel of urban American black life in the early 1990's: the era of collapsed structures, lost dreams, dashed hopes, agonizing violence, and a level of rage that for white America is simply unfathomable. Way Past Cool is the story of 13-year-old boys who live alone in abandoned buildings, of 16-year-old single mothers, and of lives that make kids old by the time they graduate from junior high... if live that long. This novel stars Gordon, who at the age of 13, leads his gang through the deadly streets of West Oakland, California. He carries a gun, has seen more people die than a Vietnam platoon leader, and can outswear a dozen sailors. Gordon is backed up by Lyon, a soft-spoken boy whose forays into mysticism have given him a spirituality that belies that fact that he'll blow your head off if he has to. Gordon's gang, known as The Friends, live in a state of tense coexistence with The Crew. The tenuous peace of their neighborhood is broken by Deek, a drug and gun dealer whose bodyguard, Ty, is trying to protect his own little brother from the street life. Deek is trying to sell guns to each gang in the hopes of escalating their turf rivalry into real war... for his benefit. On the sidelines sit the police. The ones who aren't actually on the take are happy to let the kids kill each other off. Throughout this story of despair, violence, and hopelessness, runs a thread of human feeling and power that prevails even over the awful conditions of the characters' lives. The connection between the members of the gang is one of survival, and of real people trying to meet emotional needs. These young boys are violent, vulgar, and perceived by most of society as a lost cause, yet there is something uniquely human about them. In a way that many "kinder and gentler" people will never understand, they love each other, and in each other they find hope.

Meet Jerry Mathers, who, though resembling the middle-aged “Beaver,” bears no other relation, having been born in the 1970s when that illusion of American life was almost a decade dead. His mother, widowed by the Vietnam War, endured many years as a Woolworth’s clerk to bring Jerry up in a “nice neighborhood,” enabling him to go to college and fulfill his dreams of being an artist... at least thus far sufficient enough to still believe in them. However, the present is 2013, and Jerry finds himself 39, still only an underpaid teacher of Art at a private school in Oakland, California, his dreams apparently slipping away... as his mother is also slipping away in a nursing home he can’t afford. And, resolving years before that the road to romance was closed to him -- perhaps by a long-fallen bridge -- he faces a dark and lonely future. His fifteenth year of teaching begins, as have all his others, in a gloomy Victorian mansion bequeathed for the education of youth by Miss Minerva Morrison, who passed away in 1901 at the age of 97, and whose portrait hangs in the shadowy foyer. By film and ghost story stereotypes the huge house looks like it should be haunted, but though there have been “sightings” -- presumably of Miss Morrison’s ghost -- Jerry has never been haunted... at least until this year. But why? Could it be that one of his new students, a remarkable boy named Gabriel Graves, divinely gifted in drawing from life and able to see the souls of his subjects -- but also the first black youth to ever enroll in the school -- has awakened a sleeping racial hatred from over a hundred years in the past? Drawing From Life combines the spirit of classic Victorian ghost tales with hauntings of the Internet age and occasional shades of Steam Punk, as Jerry and Gabriel, in company with Angela -- the new teacher of Graphic Design, and also African-American -- attempt to solve the mystery of “accidents,” some near fatal, seemingly caused by ghostly hate to drive them all from the house.

While visiting his grandmother on Cape Cod, nine-year-old Thomas encounters a ship's cabin boy from centuries past.