BABYLON BOYZ

Mowry allows young readers to hang with the Babylon Boyz, an inner-city posse: Dante, a 14-year-old ``crack baby'' with a heart condition; Pook, a fearless, gay street fighter; and Wyatt, witty and able to slip a gun past the school's metal detectors by packing ``heat'' in his rolls of fat. The world these teens inhabit is portrayed in gritty, vivid, and cruelly realistic terms, right down to the drugs, homelessness, and casual gun play. Babylon, situated on San Francisco Bay, has a textbook case of urban rot, and while the novel follows the boys' lives after they chance upon a block of cocaine, it is the milieu and people that take center stage; Mowry's depiction of the boys at home and at school is unerring as they struggle in the predacious environment. He doesn't sugar-coat reality; there is graphic sex (both Pook and Dante are ``deflowered'') and violence (a local drug dealer's brains are blown out as Dante watches). While the decision about whether or not to sell the drug is removed from the boys' hands—the white criminals get it back—they do argue among themselves about the money it could provide. The lack of sympathetic white characters—Mowry depicts them as timid, unfeeling, or in the case of the police, sadistic and prejudiced- -reduces the impact of the novel's climax, where the boys deliver a homeless teenager's baby, and makes questionable the overall theme of mutual acceptance, understanding, and love. (Fiction. 13+)