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Mellow old Philadelphia, where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have flourished for centuries, now has a new claim to fame. The City of Brotherly Love has been proclaimed number one in the nation...for hostility. English teacher Amanda Pepper, crabbily gearing up for summer school at exclusive Philly Prep, feels she fits right in with the hostility mode.And it's going to get worse. Amanda gets her first prickling of unease in her own classroom, where a reading of Romeo and Juliet show more activates some very strange chemistry. Then the computer science teacher begins receiving anonymous "go-back-to-Africa" phone calls. A young Vietnamese boy dies in a drive-by shooting. And late one night, outside a Chinatown massage parlor, student April Tuong is kidnapped.
Random violence? Perhaps. But Amanda refuses to let gentle April vanish without at least asking a few questions, starting in her own classroom.
Gillian Roberts's Philadelphia is the real thing. So, too, are her wit and humor, and her gripping story of Amanda's tenacious search for the missing girl—along the brick streets of historic Philadelphia, in exotic Chinatown, and through the shady, sinister back alleys of the impoverished. The truth, when she finds it, is appalling, deadly, and much too close to home.
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Member Reviews
This had all the elements that I generally like and yet I just couldn't get into it.
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22+ Works 2,444 Members
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Common Knowledge
- People/Characters
- Amanda Pepper ('Mandy,' an English teacher); Maurice Havermeyer, Ph.D. (Philly Prep principal); Lowell Diggs (math teacher interested in Mandy); Aldis Fellows (history teacher); Bartholomew Dennison the Fifth ('Five,' teacher); April Truong (lovely and motivated student) (show all 14); C. K. Mackenzie (Amanda's homicide cop boyfriend); Thomas Truong (April's brother); Miles Nye (funny student); Woody Marshall (student who glares); Flora Jones (computer science teacher); Officer Deedee Klein (investigating a drive-by shooting); Helga (Havermeyer's secretary); Sasha Berg (Amanda's photographer friend)
- Important places
- Pennsylvania, USA; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA; Philly Prep, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- Dedication
- For Janet Walsh and Howard Pearlstein,
With Sisterly Love - First words
- Greetings from the Big Lemon, formerly known as the City of Brotherly Love.
- Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Fate and surveys work in mysterious ways.
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Statistics
- Members
- 153
- Popularity
- 213,520
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (3.30)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- UPCs
- 1
- ASINs
- 1
