![]() First-novelist Roybal's smooth narrative and captivating characters will keep readers turning the pages. Like Caroline Cooney's Whatever Happened to Janie?, this eye-opening and atmospheric story shows the vacillating loyalties and deep-rooted anger of a child caught between families. His muddled emotions are convincingly conveyed, as is his gradual acceptance of the jarring changes in his life. ![]() Cow-punchers and urbanites alike will sympathize with Billy's struggle to adjust, his loneliness and his frustration at being misunderstood. Meanwhile, his cowboy garb is ridiculed at school and his new-found Hispanic friends don't meet the Campbells' approval. ![]() He is anguished when, his true identity discovered, he is sent back to the family who ``didn't care enough to come find him.'' Relearning the rules of his inflexible legal father, Dave Campbell, causes more than a few problems for the self-sufficient teen. ![]() But five rugged years with ``Dad,'' Guillermo Santiago Melendez, in rural New Mexico have given the boy a solid sense of himself as Billy Melendez. When Will Campbell is kidnapped by his natural father, a rodeo rider, all the 10-year-old can think about is returning to his adoptive home in Iowa. Sixteen-year-old Billy is arrested for a brawling in a small New Mexico town and, when the police computer reveals that Billy was kidnapped by his father. ![]()
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