Start your story with a fourteen-year-old boy. He’s African-American. His father is not always around, and is abusive when he is. His mother is an addict. Most of the kids he knows are thugs.

He’s doing time for stealing a doctor’s prescription pad. Locked up in a dirty, tough New York juvenile facility, ironically named the Progress Center, he’s trying to walk a thin line between maintaining some dignity and staying meek enough to earn his release.

The story has to be in first person. It has to be straightforward and plainspoken. No riots or gangbanging. The only death caused by old age, and perhaps heartbreak. The voice has to be true, but also accessible, without relying on hip-hop slang or any other form of time-dated urban cultural baggage.

The boy has to be a good kid.

Those are not the broadest of parameters. Walter Dean Myers, author of the simple, gripping ‘Lockdown,’ makes it look like he’s got all the room in the world, and gets his reader rooting for Maurice ‘Reese’ Anderson, who desperately wants to be a good person leading a rewarding life.

Reese immediately shows his character when a twelve-year-old Progress inmate, the vulnerable Toon, is jumped. Trying to ignore Toon’s cuts and bruises—‘I couldn’t stand up for him and risk getting disciplined’—doesn’t work, and soon Reese is involved. Getting noticed by guards and administrators could mean the end of his work program, helping out at an old people’s home.

At Evergreen, Reese’s compassion is again demonstrated as he puts up with the bigoted remarks of the lonely Mr. Hooft, and eventually forms a friendship with him.

Reese’s humanity is especially evident in his relationship with his little sister, Icy, the protective way he treats her, his desire to preserve her sense of hope, wonder and naiveté.

His connections to others, Reese realizes, are what give him identity and strength, and enable him to negotiate the mean hallways of Progress with a chance to get out and not come back, or worse, move upstate to a real jail.

‘Being alive wasn’t just about breathing and whatnot,’ Reese says. ‘It was like you could look around and somebody else would notice that you were alive.’

Readers of ‘Lockdown’ will notice that Reese is vibrantly and emphatically alive, and will be captivated by his struggle to have that mean something in a society that doesn’t give him much help.

Short and easy to read. Highly recommended for sixth graders on up.