Story Rating 7.0 out of a possible 10.0

Book review by: Essence age: 12 Review submitted on 10/31/2008 at 07:58:40 list all 58 reviews for this book

Illustrations Rating 0.0 out of a possible 10.0

Essence writes the following about That Was Then, This is Now :

The book That Was Then This, This Is Now took place during the 1960’s, in Oklahoma, and this story is mainly about two boys by the name of Mark and Bryon. Mark and Byron have been best friends for a very long time I would have said they were like brothers. Mark and Byron do a lot of stupid things during this book like hustling pool illegally at their friend Charlie’s bar. They do drugs, steal, beat up strangers, and skip school. Mark also hot-wires cars, and he’s on probation. Once he hot-wired his own principal’s car to meet with his probation officer for hot-wiring cars! I thought that was hilarious. That’s some of the things Mark and Bryon do through out this book but they end up getting their friend Charlie shot and killed over something they did , which was hustle some guys in pool. Byron and Mark also have another friend who everyone calls M&M, He‘s a hippie. They call him M&M because he’s always eating M&M candy. M&M has long hair and his father is constantly messing with him about it so later on in the book M&M gets tired of it and runs away to a hippie-commune house. And to find out M&M was doing LSD(Lysergic acid diethylamide), which is typically delivered orally, usually on a substrate such as absorbent. When Mark and Bryon found him he was all torn up and complaining about spiders crawling in his stomach. LSD really messed up M&M’s life he was a very smart kid, but he will never be the same. A long time before this happened Bryon had been in a serious relationship with M&M’s sister, Cathy. They had been going out for a pretty long time but Byron broke up when he found out that M&M was on LSD. I bet that had to be hard to do. Bryon found out a very shocking thing was that Mark was selling drugs to earn money to support Byron, Byron’s mother and himself. Byron and Mark always had thought of themselves as extremely close brothers, but come to find out that they really didn’t know each other like they thought they had. Mark and Bryon ended up hating each other. Byron actually called the police on Mark for selling drugs and ends up in the State Prison. While Bryon on the other hand gets good grades and has a good job, trying to stay out of trouble and have a good future. I thought the ending could have been a lot better or more dramatic but over all It was still an awesome book and I will be looking forward to reading the next book in the series.

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