“I could do detention. Sitting there in the dark, trembling as the minutes slip by. It didn’t make any difference how slow it went. I was locked in and the rest of the world was locked out. I couldn’t touch them, but they couldn’t touch me, either.

"I was all right.”

Lockdown explores an unlikely friendship between fourteen-year-old Progress inmate Reese and a man he meets through his work program at a local senior citizens’ home. When Mr. Hooft is finally able to open up about his harrowing past, he gives Reese a way to reenvision his own future. Imbued with the realism and authenticity that have marked Myers’s prolific writing career, this story questions how complicated it can be to separate right from wrong while struggling for survival.

“Students have told me both in words and in writing that if not for Myers’s books, they would not read.” —Jessica Fenster-Sparber, Library Coordinator, Passages Academy

Myers is a frequent visitor to juvenile detention facilities, where he talks to kids about writing and making positive decisions. From one of his visits:
Walter Dean Myers: “If you could tell me to write a book, what would it be about?”
Brittany: “You’re doing it already. About life. Just life.”