Buckhanon, Kalisha. Upstate. NY: St. Martin's Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0-312-33268-8; $19.95 US; Hardcover.
AWARDS/HONORS/REVIEWS
2006 ALA Alex Award
AUDIE Award in Literary Fictin (audiobook)
Nominated for a 2006 Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award in Debut Fiction
ANNOTATION:
Seventeen-year-old Antonio exchanges letters with his girlfriend, Natasha, after going to prison; accused of killing his father.
BOOKTALK:
The written word. A letter from Natasha. There was a time those letters were the only thing keeping Antonio from going insane. Others in prison were fighting, committing suicide, willingly sitting in solitary confinement in order to shut out God and the world that labeled them criminals. Not Antonio. Those letters and that love "made me feel like a human being in my darkest hours."
Yet, why are those letters now ripped into shreds, a million pieces of paper floating down into the river? Why is Antonio cutting the cord that kept him human for five lonely years behind bars? Antonio says he is "finally letting go"; "its all about the present." His life as a teenager on the streets of Harlem is in the past and it's time to grow up. As if going to prison didn't make him grow up enough.
Read the letters exchanged between Antonio and Natasha that over ten years harbored a deep secret under the surface; a secret that if told would have written a different ending for two families.
Yet, readers you already know the ending; for nothing can be same after Antonio is shipped Upstate.
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