Sixteen-year-old Slam Harris is counting on his noteworthy basketball talents to get him out of the inner city and give him a chance to succeed in life, but his coach sees things differently.
After reluctantly taking on the leadership of the Harlem gang, the Scorpions, Jamal finds that his enemies treat him with respect when he acquires a gun--until a tragedy occurs.
The summer after his absentee father is killed in a random shooting, Paul works at a Harlem soup kitchen, where he listens to lessons about "the social contract" from an elderly African American man and mentors a seventeen-year-old unwed mother who wants to make it to college on a basketball scholarship.
Children's author Walter Dean Myers describes his childhood in Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s, discussing his loving stepmother, his problems in school, his reasons for leaving home, and his beginnings as a writer.
Thirteen-year-old Darnell's twin sister and the other members of the Corner Crew have doubts about his work on the school newspaper, but the article he writes about a homeless man gives him a positive attitude toward school.
During a summer in Harlem, David relies on his mother and a close friend and on an old man he meets in the park to help him come to terms with his father's outbursts and unstable behavior.
