ST. ANTHONY MIDDLE SCHOOL READS "ALABAMA MOON"

Readers first meet orphaned ten-year-old Moon as he buries his survivalist father in a remote forested tract. He has been raised to be entirely self-sufficient, dependent on no one -- especially "the government" -- for help. His plan to make his way to Alaska to join other survivalists is waylaid when the new owner of the property finds him and turns him over to the state. Moon tells his story in homespun prose, his loneliness bleeding through his determination to make it on his own and his overwhelming love for the outdoors. So thoroughly does first-time author Key inhabit his protagonist that readers will feel Moon's happy amazement at such comforts as the high quality of jail food. When, with two other boys, Moon escapes the orphanage-cum-detention-center he has been placed in and tries to live with them in the wild, he realizes that he needs companionship and that, moreover, his Pap might have been wrong. This weighty moral understanding emerges naturally, sharing space easily with topnotch survival action and exuberantly illicit romps in a beat-up pickup. It's a winningly fresh and sympathetic look at a life and culture almost never seen in children's books.