South of Heaven

Honestly, I just wanted to say this book is just awesome, hands down. YOu can read it anytime without getting bored..

This book was about high school at the end of the twentieth century. A Largo High there's a program called GOALS, where teachers reach out to the students that try to escape school. It describes several students that attend Largo High and what they do outside of school. This book is great when it came to details. My favorite character in this book was Christine Younskevicius, everybody calls her YY. She had three close friends that she was always hanging out with. YY was very involved in school, and everybody knew her at Largo High. I enjoyed reading this book. It was long but worth it. When I was reading it, it felt like I was there watching or listening to what was happening. Those are the kind of books that I personally enjoy reading. This book caught my attention from the very beginning.

I am a 1993 graduate of Lakewood High School in Pinellas County, Florida -- same county as Largo, with which I was fairly familiar during my three years at Lakewood. South of Heaven was initially appealing simply because I knew (sometimes tangentially, sometimes directly) a few of the people in the book, and because Tom French was a minor celebrity in our high school journalism class. It was therefore many years before I could read it with some equanimity and objectivity.Ten years down the road, I have no idea if French's picture of high school is still accurate. What I do know is that it was accurate in 1992. French manages to convey well the social balkanization and creeping despair that infected Pinellas County schools in those days. He also seizes quite well upon the social archetypes of those schools, and does an admirable job of portraying them with sympathy despite their many fault. One certainly feels that French is an astute observer of social interactions: he zeros in on the crucial doings of Largo's social interplay, without losing the forest for the trees.The book gets four stars for two reasons: first, the writing is journalistic rather than novelistic. French doesn't quite lose the "newspaper tone" in South of Heaven; it does not translate so easily from serial to book as did, say, Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down. It's hardly a fatal flaw, just a nagging one. The second shortcoming is French's analysis of what he sees: there is little, and what little there is is simplistic and unconvincing (anyone familiar with the dreary and pointless GOALS program for failing students in Pinellas could hardly advocate throwing more money into that sinkhole). He is much more of a reporter than an editorializer. To his credit, he seems to understand this, and mostly sticks to reporting.It's a good book, a good read, and a story that approaches in poignance the heights of another classic piece of high school reportage, Friday Night Lights. Tom French is to be congratulated.

I had the opportunity to hear Thomas French speak at a scholastic journalism convention in October, 1998 where he held the audience of teachers and teenagers spellbound as he recounted the year he spent documenting the lives of several students in a Florida high school. The book was every bit as powerful as the talk he gave. For every high school teacher who has ever felt the frustration with dealing with students whose first priority is not school, this book offers a special insight into why some students are the way they are, and why special programs for these students sometimes work and sometimes do not. Thomas French is a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter from the St. Petersburg (FL) Times. I highly recommend this book.

This is a true story about a journalist's year in an American high school. It reads, however, like a novel. I became so attached to these characters that I could not put the book down! Many thanks to the author for providing an epilogue describing what these students are doing now. Despite its easy-to-read style, this book is inherently depressing. While the students are extremely likable and the teachers well-meaning and capable, the problems facing these students seem to be overwhelming the system. The programs proposed by this school (e.g., GOALS) may seem like short-term solutions, but in reality will only perpetuate the problems facing the system (such as the lowering of educational standards). The author, too, offered solutions to these problems--however, they amount to little more than the typical liberal solution (more $$). In my view, the author's obvious left-wing leanings were the only negative to this book.In short, I highly recommend this book. But, be prepared--it is a very expensive book. You won't send your children to public schools after reading this book!