Cart, Michael, ed. Rush hour: a journal of contemporary voices.

CART, Michael, ed. Rush hour: a journal of contemporary voices. Sin: Vol. One. 230p. 0-385-73031-4. Bad boys, Vol. Two. 209p. 0-385-73033-0. Random House, Delacorte. c2004. $9.95 each. S *

Busy high school students who do not have time to read an entire novel may find an alternative in this journal. Especially designed to attract youth, Rush Hour will be published twice a year, each volume focusing on a different theme. Billing itself as "neither a magazine nor a book," the journal intends to be "cutting-edge," its contributors' contemporary voices to be "at once artful and risk-taking, innovative and--always--eclectic." This inaugural volume explores sin in all its contemporary and past definitions. Stories by well-known young adult authors Brock Cole and Joan Bauer depict a young newlywed running away from a hasty marriage and turning to kleptomania, and an advertising agency intern needing a job for college finding herself selling cigarettes in spite of her uncle's horrible death from smoking-related emphysema. An essay by Marc Aronson discusses the Salem Witch Trials, and a short story by Gary Miller explores the feelings of a young boy in a fundamental Christian sect who found his mother's body hanging from the toolshed rafters. Art and poetry are interspersed among the prose pieces. At times lighthearted, at other times, painfully gritty, the journal should appeal to thoughtful, mature YA readers.

In Volume Two, some boys are bad to the bone from birth, and some boys are good boys in disguise to protect themselves from pain. Some boys turn cynical from family violence. Other boys become ruthless in the worship of competitive sports. Some boys worry that they've gotten their girlfriends pregnant and might be forced to do "the right thing." All of them are found in the second volume of Michael Cart's new journal. Jack Gantos, a popular writer of YA fiction, writes an essay on bad boys reading. Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan write about '70s bad boy, Andy Warhol. Robert Lipsyte writes a penetrating essay on the adverse effects of "jock culture." Michael Simmons writes a story about an older brother who is a psychopath from birth. Julia Jarcho has a one-act play that tries to find the common human thread that links school shootings. Another boy plots his abusive father's murder. Cart also includes a comic story by Chris Gall, and whimsical artwork and poetry that portray the bad boy as mask. This second volume of Rush Hour, like the first, does not back away from hard subjects but combines a variety of voices to explicate the bad boy phenomenon in American society. Myrna Marled, Assoc. Prof. of English, BYU, Provo, UT