SYNOPSIS

In the early 1990s, Kelly Hayes, a friendly fifteen-year-old, moves from New York City to Connecticut with his recently divorced mother in search of a finding a simpler and safer life in the lovely town of Riverview. But behind the façade of a quaint and welcoming New England town lies an arsenal of provincial prejudice against newcomers. When the school year begins, students, teachers, and even the principal consider him an outsider and a troublemaker. Bullied and beaten by the Jocks and the Preps, Kelly finds friendship with the other outsiders in the school but gets caught up in a world far more complex and dangerous than his urban upbringing had prepared him for.

From the dilapidated confines of State Hospital, Kelly relates to his psychiatrist the raucous and riotous events of the last year that changed him from a typical high school kid to a rebellious youth, a problem who the school and the community helped to create. Leech Mob is an edgy, young adult novel that stuns the reader with the dangerous, provocative, and destructive world that many teens secretly embrace. With violence erupting on school campuses across our nation, most Americans are asking, “Why?” Leech Mob does not attempt an answer, but instead shows “How.” It shows how what we see of the adolescent’s world is often a fabricated stage play, with the real drama going on behind the curtain.  Harwood supplies the script; we must make sense of the tragedy.

We invite you to take the ride here.