Clouded Dreams (Fine First Edition)

Just blocks away from the White House, the staff of Ulysses S. Grant Senior High School wages what many fear is a losing battle in the war on poverty, drugs, and despair. The school building itself is a fading monument to an educational system that hasn't kept pace with the needs of the community. Guns and knives are as commonplace as notebooks and pens, security guards roam the halls, and adolescent drug dealers market their merchandise just outside the doors.
A shocking incident in the principal's office sets off a police investigation that reveals more truths than some at Grant High may wish to confront. We follow the tangled lives of these brave and memorable characters: Heck Jasper, the dedicated black principal of twenty-five years who is becoming increasingly discouraged by the hopelessness he sees among his colleagues and neighbors; Cirri James, a bright and eager student who is forced by her mother's drug addiction to take charge of her younger brother and sister; and Danny Mitchell, the white English teacher who commutes from the suburbs and struggles not to lose her sense of mission about teaching.

YA?When the office of high school principal Heck Jasper is trashed, the man sees the violent act as the ultimate betrayal. A black educator who passionately believes that education can bring his students out of the ghetto, he is undone by the drug scene that grips them, the white power structure that prevents his professional rise, and ultimately by his own child who cannot resist the pressure of her peers to defy and defile everything her father believes in. Told in alternate chapters from the point of view of Cirri, a sensitive, promising student trapped into caring for her addict mother and younger siblings; a white English teacher and single mother whose compassion for her students and gifted teaching makes a slight but significant difference in their lives; and Mr. Jasper himself, whose career and legacy is salvaged only by his own death. This naked, penetrating look into an inner-city Washington, D.C. school and its surrounding neighborhood presents the magnitude of the misunderstanding between the races, the generations, and the sexes.?Jackie Gropman, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Life at an inner-city high school in Washington, D.C., is depicted in Insel's well-meaning novel, which succumbs to cliches. Violence at Ulysses S. Grant High is on the rise, absenteeism is rampant and the school's district supervisors are unfeeling. Even so, Heck Jasper, the aging black principal, and Danny Mitchell, a white English teacher, attempt to hold things together and to reach their charges-one kid at a time. The narrative unfolds from the viewpoints of Heck, Danny and erstwhile student Cirri James, 15-going-on-40, madly in love with a small-time drug dealer and saddled with caring for her baby brother and sister, as well as her crack-addicted mother. Insel writes lucidly and with passion, but her characters, other than Cirri, are too familiar, and her plotting is too predictable-up to and including the requisite act of martyrdom that brings the novel to a close.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This tale of troubled youth in Washington, D.C., tells the now familiar story of an inner-city African American family--complete with motherly woman trying to hold things together while she gets the little ones off to school and borrows money for their meager meals--torn apart by drugs, gangs, and hustlers. But the mother figure here is the compelling Cirri, a high-school-age teen desperately trying to maintain a stable household for younger siblings Willie and Pea while Mama shoots the DCFS and food-stamp money into scarred, collapsing veins. In the high school, equally close to collapse, are Danny, the English teacher striving to counteract the menace of the mean streets, and Heck, the battle-scarred administrator burned out from being on the front lines against drugs and crime too long. This grim story of truncated hopes and opportunity has no heroes, only survivors. Whitney Scott