Revenge Fires Back!
by JR Thompson
Copyright © 2009
215 pages
$11.99 Paperback
$4.00 E-Book
ISBN: 9780557160488
Lulu.com
I have to admit I was immediately and personally drawn to JR Thompson’s book because it is about children in the foster care system. I’m actually starting classes in January to become a licensed adoptive parent. The first nine weeks of classes are devoted to fostering. There are passages from JR’s book that read like they were straight from the number of forms and documents I’ve already had to read over and sign, from rules against “corporal punishment” to helping the children with their “Life Books.”
Revenge Fires Back! begins with a camping trip with the Clark family, parents Roxanne and Trevor, and their two sons Brady and Derrick. Brady’s friend Dalton is also camping with the family. There’s a terrible storm brewing outside and the tent is leaking. In the morning, the boys tease one another about their sleeping bags being wet and also tease Mom about drooling in her sleep. A large tree branch has also fallen on their van. The teasing and crankiness from a lack of sleep lead to Roxanne disappearing into the woods to take a walk and the boys getting extremely dirty from a bit of rough housing.
At first, I was a bit disturbed by the numerous unfortunate mishaps that begin to take place. Brady ends up in just his boxers after his pajama bottoms get stolen; the rest of his clothes are in the van and he can’t get to them. Mom screams in the woods but instead of immediately going to help her, the boys sit down and eat cookies and brownies for breakfast. Dalton ends up with a bloody lip after Derrick takes revenge on the two older boys for throwing him in the lake.
Tempers run high as the boys refuse to be disciplined by their father and have to go into the woods to look for Mom. A search party is soon summoned to look for Mom which discovers Mom’s scream was a joke and she had just laid down for a nap away from everyone else. Unfortunately, the bruised and bloodied appearance of the boys also raises eyebrows. When Mom returns to camp, arguments between the parents and children break out again, which results in everyone taking our their frustrations on the van by beating it up and breaking out the windows despite it being their only way home.
Dalton’s Mom comes to pick him up and is disturbed by what she sees at the campsite. She threatens to call Child Protective Services. A physical altercation ensues between Derrick and his parents and an officer soon shows up at camp after finding the brothers wandering in the woods – dirty, bruised and bloodied, with Brady still in his underwear. So, Brady and Derrick are taken away for questioning and decide to take revenge on their parents by lying about what really happened at camp and about how their parents actually treat them.
By now, you are probably thinking this is all a bit extreme, and perhaps it is. My eyes were definitely growing wide from what I was reading, and I couldn’t believe the direction the story was going, but I think that was Mr. Thompson’s intention. I almost wanted to sympathize with the parents, but had to stop and think about their lack of disciplining the children at camp and overall odd behavior despite the conditions they were faced with thanks to the storm. I also had to think about how I would have handled such a situation, and it definitely would have been much differently.
The lies don’t work in the children’s favor though. They are taken to a foster home to stay with an elderly lady who is already keeping another young teen. A prank war breaks out between the teen and the brothers, and the Clark children soon get a lesson in rebellion. They are removed from the home and placed temporarily in a children’s home where they are given a shot to make them sleep when they don’t follow directions. Then, they end up getting moved to another foster home which immediately seems a bit more understanding. The boys are enrolled in school, given special gifts, and are properly disciplined. But they learned from their first foster home that if they don’t behave, there’s not much the adults can do about it. No spanking. No being shut up in your room. So, the boys continue to act out and the result is that Brady is soon diagnosed with ADHD and put on medication.
The lines between good and bad behavior are thin, and often crossed when the two brothers are given a chance to visit with their parents. The visit doesn’t go well when Trevor, the father, gets mad at the social worker. Weekly phone conversations with their parents also seem to upset both the children and parents causing only more confusion and anger. The book’s ending is a predictable climax to the children finally admitting the truth and that they lied, and then having to face the courts where a judge will determine if they can finally be reunited with their parents.
Despite the beginning and the ending, I didn’t think this book was too bad. Like I said, I think the odd start was intentional in order to build a firm reason why the kids would be taken away from their parents so quickly. The bouncing around from one home to another can be pretty typical for foster kids from what I know, so I think Mr. Thompson presented that part of the story quite fairly. However, the story is biased against the foster system and makes it seem very bad despite the story being told from the point of view of children who would obviously be against foster care to begin with. Mr. Thompson made this very clear in his query for a review of the book:
Our society looks down on children in foster care. Many schools discriminate against those who are in the system. Their discrimination does not go unfounded. It comes from experience. When a child enters foster care, the life he has known ends. He is taken away from not only his biological family, but from his neighbors, friends, toys, pets, from everything. That in itself would be hard on anyone, but it doesn’t stop there. On a weekly basis he is questioned by therapists and case managers about his biological family and about how he’s being treated in his new foster home. Therapists, in an effort to try to get the kids to talk about their feelings, sometimes put ideas into their heads that weren’t even there to begin with. For example, one might say “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it. I can probably imagine how you feel. If it was me, I would probably be pretty angry. I might even hate the whole world. Is that how you feel?” Even though their intentions may be good, it often pulls these children down and lowers their self esteem and the way they see the world around them. As soon as the social workers can get it scheduled, they usually take these children for psychological testing and 95% of the time those tests return results that indicate the child has ADD or ADHD and the child is put on medication for it. In their new foster home, sometimes there are other foster children in the home who may be abusive. Sometimes these other children might steal or destroy the few belongings the new foster child has. A few months pass by and the child has finally gotten attached to his new life and it’s either time to move back with his biological family or something happens and he is placed in a new foster home. And we wonder “what is wrong these kids?” The problem is not with the kids. The problem is with the way the foster care system is being run.
That being said, I also had a problem with Mr. Clark’s religous thoughts spoken to Brady after amends are made on the very last page:
“I’m going to show you what grace is all about. It was God’s grace that allowed him to send Jesus here to take away our sins. It is the same word grace that is going to allow you to escape this punishment. You deserve a very hard butt busting just like we all deserve to go to Hell. You’re not going to be punished though because I am giving you a gift of grace and am not going to make you pay any further for you sin. Understand?”
This comes from the same man who showed anger toward a social worker when given the chance to visit with his children, displayed extreme anger given the situation that happened in the beginning at the campground, busted out a van window to distress, and who was unable to control his two sons despite this passage that comes later in the book when the foster dad is allowing the boys to talk to Mr. Clark on the phone and Derrick does not want to:
Trevor did not like this situation at all. At home, he would have never tolerated such disrespect from a little boy. He found it absurd that any adult would not make a child do something. He had been raised that adults were supposed to tell kids what to do, not just allow children to do as they pleased.
So, the religious agenda we’re left with on the last page just does not work, especially since it comes from such an angry and feeble character who has not shown any “Christian” traits throughout the rest of the book. This adds to the lack of focus for the book: Are we for or against foster care? And whose side are we on? The parents or the kids? Also, the majority of the book is dialogue and reads like a play. The few inner thoughts are not enough to make a connection with any character, and we are never given a view point from the parents while they are separated from their children. The book also suffers from a few too many grammatical and spelling problems and is also not formatted properly.
All of these negative things being said, Mr. Thompson does have a nice foundation for what “could be” a nice play for the stage or a more solid book if the inner emotion of each character is drawn out and given much more depth. For now, in my opinion, the book lacks direction and suffers from too many hidden agendas.
