The Season of Styx Malone by Kekla Magoon (review)

Caleb Franklin lives just outside Indianapolis, but he might as well live on the moon for all the access he has to the big city. Dad boasts of being an ordinary guy with an ordinary family, and their small Indiana town should be all they ever need; besides, they are all safer there than in big bad Indy. Ten-year-old Caleb's amorphous dreams of excitement and a more expansive life take shape when sixteen-year-old Styx Malone arrives in town. It's nice to have another Black kid to hang with besides his over-cautious brother, and Caleb is promptly intoxicated with Styx's road-to-riches Great Escalator Trade scheme, in which they swap items up until they reach whatever goal they set. Caleb identifies a secondhand, like-new moped as his ticket to clandestine joyrides to the city, and Styx has the driver's license and worldly wisdom to make it happen. Styx has his own Escalator Trade goals, however, and betrayal looks like the inevitable outcome. Magoon walks the line between predictable lessons learned and sharp character study, with Caleb's real bitterness toward parental constraints lending weight to the story and patiently spun hints of Styx's background keeping the plot points in tension. The happy endings all around seem a bit contrived, but they are exactly what middle-graders, right along with Caleb, will clamor for. EB