Reviewed by: No Place by Todd Strasser Elizabeth Bush Strasser, Todd. No Place. Simon, 2014. [272p]. Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-5721-8 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4424-5723-2 $10.99 Ad Gr. 7-10. Responding to a sharp spike in homelessness, a community mayor establishes a temporary tent village, Dignityville, with basic sanitation, a heated dining tent, and a few electrical generators. This barely registered as a blip on high school senior Dan Halprin’s local news radar until his parents both lost their jobs and the house, and now the family is moving with their camping gear to Dignityville. Dan tries to keep his school life cranking along normally, and he confides his status only to his closest friends, but word leaks out. Pity and charity, he finds, are not easy to take, and even when friends try to include him in activities, he simply can’t afford to run with the old pack. Socializing, however, becomes the least of his worries when a local businessman afraid of declining real estate values has a Dignityville organizer brutally attacked, and then orchestrates an opportunity to destroy the tent village in one stroke. Dan figures out the players in this drama, but that may not be enough to secure justice for his homeless neighbors. The ham-fisted messaging makes the book read more like a polemic than a novel, with characters weighing in on the homeless question as if reading from scripts. Nonetheless, teen readers who recognize that their own families may be just a paycheck or two away from a similar fate may rightly regard this as a gripping horror story, with fall from social grace as terrifying as cold nights and hungry mornings. [End Page 285] Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois