The Lure by Lynne Ewing (review)

On the mean streets of Washington D.C., fifteen-year-old Blaise knows that her best chance for staying safe and earning money to help her ailing grandmother with their living expenses is to get ganged up. She and a friend agree to be jumped in to the gang (that is, beaten by the other girls without fighting back for sixty seconds), but another girl, Melissa, is convinced by Trek, the gang’s leader, to be sexed in—she rolls a pair of dice and her number determines how many boys will rape her for her initiation. They all survive their ordeals, physically if not emotionally, but Blaise is chosen for a special task—to lure guys from rival gangs into letting their guards down to make them vulnerable to attack from Trek. When things get out of hand and a young boy gets caught in Trek’s crossfire, Blaise decides that Trek’s reign is over, but she’s not sure who she can trust to side with her instead of Trek. The despair regarding the inevitability of early death is palpable among these teens; they all have individual backstories of shame and parental failure that have broken them to the point where survival is all that matters to them, and yet even within that life there are clear distinctions between the bad guys and the good guys. While Blaise’s story is as gritty as it gets, the extent to which she is willing to sacrifice herself for her friends ennobles even her most questionable decisions and keeps her sympathetic, and readers will be heartened by the fact that things work out sort of okay, as long as they don’t think too hard about what will happen to these characters after the book ends. The emotional tenor therefore resembles Hinton’s The Outsiders, but the circumstances are raw to the power of ten compared to that book; readers will realize that while the mean streets have gotten infinitely meaner in the intervening years, the kids caught in the crossfire, indeed, the kids doing the firing, still rate more compassion than condemnation.