Dark Dude (by Oscar Hijuelos)

Rico looks white, but he's a Cuban living in Harlem in the '60s. A bright kid who loves to read, he is often picked on, sometimes beaten, doesn't feel he belongs anywhere, has a drunken father and an angry mother, and his only friend is turning into a junkie. There's little that's good in his life. So he decides to run away, dragging the junkie friend with him, and hitchhikes to Wisconsin, where an older friend from his neighborhood is living in a ramshackle farmhouse without running water. There he finds some peace and a gas-station job, but he can't go to school, and still doesn't know where he belongs.

Pulitzer-winning author Oscar Hijuelos's first young adult book is really for older teens and adults. Its subject matter is unusual: a white Cuban boy from Harlem washing up on a run-down farm in Wisconsin. Though it runs more than 400 pages of not a lot happening in between small incidents of nasty violence, and has more coolness and emotional distance than most YA books, the pages fly by, and it's engrossing from beginning to end. It's easy to see why Hijuelo's won that Pulitzer (for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love) -- the man can write.

Rico may steal comic books from the store, but he is mostly a nice kid who just wants to get along, get an education, and get out. Hijuelos adeptly sets Rico up in a no-win situation, then allows him a sort of winning, but at a cost that may be more than Rico is willing to go on paying. While few readers will relate directly to the particulars of his situation, most will relate to Rico himself, and his outsider status is universal.