Release
Date: 8/31/15
Summary from Goodreads
John
Shepherd (Shep) is a kid of the streets. An orphan bounced around from one
foster family to another until he winds up in a juvenile detention center in
upstate New York. While incarcerated, Shep and his fellow inmates are subjected
to regular beatings and forced hard labor by the corrupt warden who runs the
facility along with his squadron of armed guards.
But
Shep is no ordinary minor and has no intention of spending the rest of his
youth behind bars. Shep and a handful of other inmates hatch a bold plan which
culminates in a spectacular turn of events changing the lives of the young
prisoners and their captors forever. The Upstate Boys is a tale of adventure,
redemption and the unbreakable will of the human spirit. A must read for young
and old alike, for anyone who ever dreamed of freedom and especially for those
who made it happen.
Quotes from The Upstate Boys
"We
were gettin out or we were gonna die tryin"
"We
dug and clawed for the freedom that awaited us on the other side of that barbed
wire fence"
"Shep
was running for his life, for the life of every one of those boys"
"There
was no turning back now...nowhere to go but forward"
"They
were the poor, the orphaned, the dispossessed. They were the boys that had been
sent upstate and came back as heroes"
Author’s Writing Inspiration
My
inspiration for The Upstate Boys came when I read an Article in the
NY Times about the Arthur G. Dozier school for boys. The stories of the
abuse, neglect and murder struck a cord and I wanted to change the story.
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About the Author
Ofer
Aronskind was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and came to the United States at the age
of six. He grew up in Little Neck, Queens, on the outskirts of New York City.
He attended SUNY Albany then took a year off after college where he spent the
year in Los Angeles writing screenplays. The following year he came back to NY
to attend St. John's University School of Law and graduated in 1989. He went to
work at the law firm of Weil Gotshal & Manges as a real estate attorney and
worked there until 1997. He now lives in Short Hills, New Jersey with his three
sons and is a real estate investor.
Ofer,
father of 3 boys, has had a lifelong passion for reading and writing. He began
writing his first book, Summer Sleep Away the summer he sent his own sons off
to camp for their first time. Ofer spent endless nights sitting at the edge of
their beds telling his children stories from his own years in camp. As the boys
embarked on their journey they encouraged Ofer to turn his stories into a book…
so became Mattie Kleinfeld and the beginning of Ofer’s prolific career.
New
Jersey resident Ofer Aronskind remembers what it was like to be 12 years old:
the challenges of middle school, making new friends, attending summer camp for
the first time, having your first crush. By drawing on events from his life, as
well as those of his three teenage sons, he has been able to vividly recreate
some of life’s most memorable experiences in his young-adult novels.
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