Breakout, mixed results from a middle school book with good intentions

From the cover, Breakout by Kate Messner feels like an epic novel. It’s thick, clocks in at 433 pages and has notations at the end of the book for those that want to read more about the content in Breakout. Breakout takes place in a sleepy mountain town in New York as two inmates have just escaped from a prison. The story is told through the eyes of two seventh-graders in a variety of ways including text messages, cartoons, poems, and letters to the paper, their friends and more. Breakout is loosely based on the real 2015 prison escape from Clinton Correctional Facility. It sees a fictionalized account of how those youth might have imagined the situation as they saw it.

Nora and Lizzie are friends. Elidee is black and has just moved to the area where her brother is an inmate in the prison. Nora has lived in the area all of her life and her dad is the superintendent of the prison. It’s two weeks before the end of school and the city is upended by the escape of two inmates. The national media descends on the town, there are road blocks at every intersection and the town is not feeling like itself. These two are legitimate bad guys who have escaped from a prison that’s made up on mainly black and Latino inmates.

The entire town gets behind the search for the convicts. However, Elidee isn’t sharing her friends’ enthusiasm as she’s been the victim of some overt, subtle racism from the town’s people. Lizzie tries to show her that the entire town isn’t racist and Elidee starts to write more poetry. Eventually the two inmates are discovered, one of them is shot dead by the police and the other is taken into custody.

Breakout didn’t work for me, but not because of the way that I’ve described it. It’s due to the format of the book being too manic and not holding the narrative. There was a short text, followed by a letter, then a comic and then a longer text-all of which that might or might not have been written by different people. The pacing for that format was too fast and didn’t give me a chance to identify with any of the characters.

The book also hammers the race element. Racism exists, kids need to read about it and middle school students will be attracted to the format of Breakout. However, older readers will get the point quickly and then tire of the message. A lighter tone would’ve suited the desired readers and its format more effectively. Conversely, a more traditional presentation and the same story might have resulted in an overall better book. Some middle school kids will also find the book a little preachy and slightly predicable. Audiences older than 12  might like the format for a moment, but it’s too much and combined with the heavy handed nature of the way the topic is handled they’ll be turned off.