Books/Dirt Road Home
Novel · Young readers
Dirt Road Home
Hal Mitchell can be released in a few months if he stays out of trouble. Hellenweiler is not a place where staying out of trouble is one of the options.
The story
After his recapture at the end of Alabama Moon, gutsy fourteen-year-old Hal Mitchell is sentenced to live at Hellenweiler, an institution that is more like a jail than the boys’ home it is supposed to be.
Hal has a release date and a simple plan for reaching it: keep his head down, take nothing, owe nobody. But Hellenweiler is run from the inside as much as the outside, and the boys who run it do not allow anyone to stand apart for long. Refusing to pick a side turns out to be a side.
It is a hard book, and deliberately so. The reform-school world in it was checked against the real thing.
Details
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus and Giroux
- Audience
- Ages 12 and up
- Connected to
- Alabama Moon — Hal is a character from the first novel
Behind the scenes
How the prison in it got right.
Readers ask how a novelist from Point Clear knows what a locked institution sounds like from the inside. The answer is a man named Chip, serving a life sentence, whom Watt first met at a county landfill.
They began writing to each other. Chip answered long, detailed questions about how the days actually run — the hierarchy, the currency, the vocabulary. Watt read Chip’s manuscript in return. Alabama Moon went around the prison with a waiting list on it, and letters came back from other men inside.
Chip is acknowledged in the opening pages of Dirt Road Home.
The language and the situations are taken from the way it really is in prison.
Watt KeyA note for parents
This one is rougher than Alabama Moon — institutional violence, gang pressure, and the language that goes with both. It is written for older middle-grade and young adult readers.
Start here instead
Younger readers usually come to Watt through Alabama Moon or Terror at Bottle Creek.
Browse the books →For schools & teachers
Classroom resources.
Two guides, both free. The second was written and contributed by a teacher, Tiffani Flora of Indiana, and the Word versions are there so you can cut them to fit your own unit.
- Discussion guide (PDF) Guide #1
- Study guide (PDF) Guide #2 — contributed by Tiffani Flora
- Study guide, editable Word files (ZIP) Adapt as you like
Read next
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Novels for young readers, Southern fiction for grown ones, and nonfiction from the delta.
