A very well-written if occasionally over-written account of a year spent teaching English literature to jailed Vermonters. It's not your typical prison story, mainly because this is not prison, it's jail: Theo's students (to whom he is always just "Theo") are often only with him for a matter of weeks before either moving on to somewhere more permanent or being released. This only makes a tough situation tougher, of course, and Theo does not always deal with it well. This is probably the strength of the book: Theo might be considered a very poor jail teacher, over-ambitious, starry-eyed, and too lenient with his charges, but he admits this. Although when I say that he "admits" it, I don't mean to say that he comes out and tells the reader, "I was a bad teacher." He simply tells the reader about his thoughts and dreams (sometimes literally -- there are at least two, maybe three or four, dream sequences in the book) and lets said reader make up their own mind. Most importantly, Theo does not undercut his faults with irony or self-deprecation, methods by which he might attempt to soften the impact of his failings and thus make himself appear to come off better.

All of this is not to say that Theo fails all the time. The students (whom he refers to as his "kids", which is fair given the number of teenagers in the jail, a fact Theo dwells on at some length late in the book) have some excellent insights, and there are moments of success with the class, if not out-and-out breakthroughs. It isn't a heart-warming tale by any means, but not is it a pure polemic against our criminal justice system. Instead, it is a very effective mix of memoir and social criticism, definitely recommended for people interested in criminal justice, the plight of the teenager, the decay of the industrial northeast, and/or education.
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