Todd Strasser - No Place

I’ve heard that some other houses were donated as well.

So I guess some good came out of Mayor George’s “worthy experiment” after all.

It’s too bad that the baseball tournament had to be on the same weekend as the march, but I still think I made the right choice. For me.

There are people like Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, and maybe even Aubrey Fine, who somehow know they’re meant to change things in a big way. I don’t know how they know it, but they do.

On the bus coming back from the tournament, I found another quote in The Grapes of Wrath:

Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there…. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad—an’ I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.

Some things have changed since the Great Depression—the police are here to protect the homeless and the people who strike for better pay, not to beat them up.

But it’s weird how a lot of things haven’t changed. Nearly a third of our country is living at or near the poverty level, and on the news we keep hearing that homelessness and unemployment are close to the highest they’ve been since the Depression. Some people still go hungry, and many can’t afford medical care.

I just can’t help thinking about how The Grapes of Wrath is based on events that happened nearly a hundred years ago.

How is it possible that so many of the problems people faced back then are still the problems we face today?

TODD STRASSERhas written many critically acclaimed novels, including Famous, If I Grow Up, Boot Camp, Can’t Get There from Here, Give a Boy a Gun , and Girl Gives Birth to Own Prom Date , which was adapted for the Fox feature film Drive Me Crazy . He lives in a suburb of New York City. Visit him at toddstrasser.com.

Famous

If I Grow Up

Boot Camp

Can’t Get There from Here

Give a Boy a Gun

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Todd Strasser

Jacket photography copyright © 2014 by Clayton Cole/Getty Images

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is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Book design by Tom Daly

Jacket design by Laurent Linn

Jacket photograph by Clayton Cole/Getty Images

The text for this book is set in Berling LT Std.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Strasser, Todd.

No place / Todd Strasser.—First edition.

pages cm

Summary: When Dan and his parents can no longer pay their mortgage, they end up homeless and living in a local tent city. It’s a bad situation, and it only gets worse when the leader of the tent city is brutally beaten. Who is trying to shut down the tent city, and why?

ISBN 978-1-4424-5721-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4424-5723-2 (eBook)

[1. Homeless persons—Fiction. 2. Poverty—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.S899No 2014

[Fic]—dc23

2012043701