Leech Mob — John Harwood

In the early 1990s, Kelly Hayes, a friendly fifteen-year-old, moves from New York City to Connecticut with his recently divorced mother in search of a finding a simpler and safer life in the lovely town of Riverview. But when the school year begins, students, teachers, and even the principal consider him an outsider and a troublemaker. Bullied and beaten by the Jocks and the Preps, Kelly finds friendship with the other outcasts in the school but gets caught up in a world far more complex and dangerous than his urban upbringing had prepared him for.

From the dilapidated confines of State Hospital, Kelly relates to his psychiatrist the raucous and riotous events of the last year that changed him from a typical high school kid to a rebellious youth, a problem who the school and the community helped to create.

Leech Mob is much more than an updated Catcher in the Rye or The Outsiders. With brilliant characterization and dialogue, Harwood introduces a cast of rebel teens who will inevitably become icons for our modern dysfunctional age.