REVIEW of SEEING RED by Kathryn Erskine

SEEING RED
Kathryn Erskine
Scholastic
2013

SUMMARY
Life will never be the same for Red Porter. He's a kid growing up around black car grease, white fence paint, and the backward attitudes of the folks who live in his hometown, Stony Gap, Virginia.

Red's daddy, his idol, has just died, leaving Red and Mama with some hard decisions and a whole lot of doubt. Should they sell the Porter family business, a gas station, repair shop, and convenience store rolled into one, where the slogan -- "Porter's: We Fix it Right!" -- has been shouting the family's pride for as long as anyone can remember?

With Daddy gone, everything's different. Through his friendship with Thomas, Beau, and Miss Georgia, Red starts to see there's a lot more than car motors and rusty fenders that need fixing in his world.

When Red discovers the injustices that have been happening in Stony Gap since before he was born, he's faced with unsettling questions about his family's legacy.

REVIEW by Eva Terry
 I think that if I were to rate Seeing Red on a scale of 1 to 5 I would probably give it a three and a half. What I really liked about Seeing Red it is set in a kids point of view. The boy in this book is my age and I felt like he thought like a 12-year-old kid should. His thoughts sound so much like a kid of that ages thoughts should. In a lot of books the first person point of view from a kid sounds like an adult but not in this book.

I also really liked how I got attached to the characters even though some of them were already gone and you never really met them.This book was a page turner for me, because once I got going I couldn't stop. Unfortunately, what downgraded my rating was violence. The story line was about how Red's great great grandfather, Old Man Porter, made their legacy off of hatred. If you get uncomfortable reading a book with violence in it you might want to consider this one as not your best option.