AARON LEVY

BLOOD DON'T LIE

Thirteen-year old Larry Ratner wouldn’t mind starting an after-school club; one of those twelve-step programs, only for short people; but he’s worried he’ll be the shortest person in the Short Person’s Club.

Now that he’s celebrated his bar mitzvah, Larry would like to shuck his microscopic status and become the real man his culture now declares him to be, especially in the eyes of his father. But when he falls hard for Sara Rothman, the only human on the planet who really gets him, his daily bus rides become hell on wheels as he’s tormented by a jealous boy three times his size. And when both parents lose their jobs shortly after moving the family to an affluent Jersey suburb, suddenly Larry is too small and too poor to fit in anywhere. Despite everything he is learning about the tragic history of his people, as the tension rises on the bus and at school, and in the Ratner household, Larry may not realize that history is repeating itself in his own life until it’s too late.
 

In the humorous and mysterious spirit of The Watsons Go To Birmingham and When You Reach Me, at 61,963 words, BLOOD DON’T LIE is not a typical bully story. What happens when David slays Goliath, and afterward feels so sick and lousy about it he wants to die? And what happens when the smallest kid in 8th grade discovers the biggest bully in his life is not on the bus but under his own roof… his own blood?