A review by sherming
Hole in My Life by Jack Gantos

4.0

Gantos is telling us about a difficult but also developmental period in his life, from his last couple years in high school to his early twenties. With an oddly skewed sense of humor and a bit of irony he recalls how his final high school was literally a refurbished prison, how he had few goals or interests other than reading and writing, and how he wound up in prison as a result of trying to make money in smuggling and selling drugs. It's not really the stuff of which humorous memoirs are made, but Gantos manages to find some humor in this bad period of his life.

There's not much arc or inserted plot devices to create suspense, but perhaps that's appropriate for a book about a "hole" in Gantos' life. It's not supposed to be a thriller or suspenseful. There's not a whole lot in the book about the horrors of prison life - his 15 months take up only about 1/3 of the work, and I think I'm glad about that.

Let's call it a short, informative, sometimes humorous cautionary tale and leave it at that.