The Plot and My Thoughts
Maniac Magee is a child who was orphaned at a very young age and sent to live with his aunt and uncle. The aunt and uncle do not seem to have been cruel or otherwise horrid to him, but their marriage was unstable, and this apparently caused him to go off the deep end and run away from home. He ran back to the city of his birth and, somehow having grown up color blind (a la Stephen Colbert), he ends up in the black side of town and makes friends with one of the families there.

This causes some consternation amongst the folks in town, and he soon leaves that family, feeling that he’s causing them too much trouble. He moves in with an old man and lives in a shed for a while, in a weird little interlude that concludes (you will be surprised) with the old man’s sudden death. On Christmas!

Though tempted to fling the book away at that point, I perservered to the pointless conclusion. Through the power of free pizza and his amazing inability to have been influenced by any sort of cultural or peer pressure in his life until his current age, Our Hero manages to strip away prejudice and cause the white people and black people in town to start interacting and get along.

In Short
The entire story was implausible in the extreme, there was a sudden random death, and basically, the story was too preachy for words. 2/10 — if you’ve got to write a book report on some kind of racial issue or social problem, this one would be an easy target, but otherwise, stay away.