Dead to You

Dead to You's primary educational value lies in its being a good read, even for the reluctant, as well as for making readers consider kids stuck in lifestyles less protected than their own (as in the scene in which Cami tells Ethan how she and her mom make lunches for the homeless shelter and Ethan is overcome, because in his former life he had been so dependent on those lunches). For the detective-minded, those lessons in biology class about heredity and DNA may become suddenly more interesting.

Ethan is no angel and does a number of wrong things; he also knows it, sometimes before he does them, and the situation gets out of his control anyway. But if he has difficulty adjusting to the constraints of suburban Minnesota life after his homeless life, he also loves several people in his new life and is determined to do right by them. Those people, in their different ways -- 6-year-old Gracie, neighbor Cami, and his mother -- all love him, which is something he hasn't felt for as long as he can remember, and their various expressions of this introduce entirely new possibilities.

It's strongly suggested that Ethan has had sex in his previous life and that love wasn't involved; it's clearly understood that, despite extreme attraction, that's not what he wants with Cami, and there's some discussion of how they don't want to mess things up, as well as her parents being upstairs at the time. Intense kissing is about as heavy as it gets between them, though Ethan is pretty frank in hoping on one or two occasions that she's not looking at his crotch. Part of Ethan's dark past is that his "mother," who eventually abandoned him, worked as a prostitute.