[In the following review, Smith assesses Monkey Island as an honest portrayal of homelessness, particularly the rarely dealt with issue of homelessness as it affects members of the middle class.]

One autumn morning 13-year-old Clay Garrity wakes up in a welfare hotel in Manhattan and discovers that his mother has left him. Clay's father, who has also disappeared, is an unemployed magazine art director. His mother, until recently, had a job working with computers. Clay is white, he has been to good schools (he can read Robinson Crusoe)—an atypical homeless child. He is the hero of Monkey Island, Paula Fox's delicate and moving novel, one of the first describing middle-class homelessness for young readers.

The sight of homeless people pushing shopping carts down the street or sleeping on benches in local parks has become a fact of life, and for children they are the ultimate representation of a terrifying fantasy—of parents leaving, of loss and displacement. How does a writer make the unbearable bearable without violating the basic truth of the situation?

Ms Fox, who has won an American Book Award for children's fiction for her novel A Place Apart, the Hans Christian Anderson Medal for her collected children's work and a Newbery Medal for the young adult novel The Slave Dancer, has written a relentless story that succeeds in conveying the bitter facts.

She depicts life in a welfare hotel precisely the way Clay's pregnant mother needs the sound of a portable radio all the time to drawn out her increasing despair, the way the woman next door cares—alone and lovingly—for her retarded son who sits all day watching television, "his feet turned out like a duck's feet." The elevator is a "a poison box," the halls are littered with trails of coffee grounds from leaking garbage bags. A trip to the bathroom can be a dangerous journey.

Eventually, Clay makes his way to a city park—called Monkey Island by thugs who prey on homeless people there. Like most of the newly homeless, Clay has trouble sleeping. The recent arrivals "were in a panic for days," one character observes. "They were also the angriest if someone or something woke them up in the middle of the night." Life is a constant, primal search. A portable toilet at a construction site is a gift, a broken water fountain means no way to wash that day. For an old woman, counting her few possessions over and over again is "a kind of housekeeping."

Although the focus of Ms. Fox's story is a middle-class family, she never lets us forget the way race and class affect destiny. When Clay catches pneumonia, his black friend, Buddy, wants to take him to a hospital but knows a taxi probably will not stop for him "Nigger is the longest word I know," says Buddy.

Eventually, Clay is placed in a foster home where people are kind. But, one wonders, how will Ms. Fox ever resolve Clay's abandonment? Will she stage a scene of false forgiveness? When Clay and his mother are finally reunited, his mother doesn't ask Clay to forgive her. "Sorry can't erase all that," his mother says. She can only hope that one day she and Clay will find a way "to go on caring for each other that's … beyond sorry."