Myers, Walter Dean. The dream bearer.

MYERS, Waiter Dean. The dream bearer. HarperCollins, Trophy. 1800. c2003. 0-06447289-2. $5.99. J

To quote from the review of the hardcover in KLIATT, May 2003: It's summer on 145th Street in Harlem, and 12-year-old David spends his time hanging out with his good friends Loren and Sussi, a girl from Kenya. Life at home is stressful, because David's father, Reuben, is "nervous," as his mother calls it. But Reuben is more than nervous: he is angry and unstable, even violent at times, and David is often afraid of him. Meanwhile, David's 17-year-old brother, Tyrone, is feeling the pull of the streets. He's a WG--wanna-be gangster--and he may be doing drugs and also dealing them. The police come to the door; Tyrone vanishes for a few days, and then admits he owes some people money. David's mother works hard at holding the family together, while David tries to make sense of his life and the people around him: "the need to understand everything was creeping up on me." He meets an old man named Mr. Moses in the park, who calls himself a dream bearer and who gets David thinking. Mr. Moses tells David the dreams he carries around, dreams of slavery, lynching, and death, and David gradually comes to realize that understanding people's dreams helps you to understand them. When Mr. Moses suddenly becomes ill, Reuben helps to rescue him; when Reuben has a crisis of his own, David plays an important role, and he comes to a new understanding and appreciation of his father. This is a haunting, sad, and yet hopeful tale of one boy's struggle to cope with his father's mental illness, and Myers, author of Monster and many other outstanding books for YAs, makes David and his world come alive for the reader in deceptively simple yet poignant prose. Paula Rohrlick, KLIATT