Blood Don’t Lie

Thirteen-year-old Larry Ratner wouldn’t mind starting an after-school club - only this one wouldn’t be for science or Frisbee golf or speaking Mandarin. It would be a club solely for short people. The only problem is that Larry is afraid of being the shortest person in the Short Persons’ Club. Now that he’s celebrated his bar mitzvah, Larry would like to shuck his microscopic status and become the real man his culture now declares him to be, especially in the eyes of his father. But when he falls hard for Sara Rothman, the only human on the planet who really gets him, his daily bus rides become hell on wheels as he’s tormented by a jealous boy three times his size. Larry’s too humiliated to tell anyone, especially his parents, that he doesn’t want to fight back. With his parents losing their jobs shortly after moving the family to this affluent Jersey suburb for a better life, suddenly Larry is too small and too poor to fit in anywhere. Despite everything he is learning about the tragic history of his people, as the tension rises on the bus and at school, and in the Ratner household, Larry may not realize history is repeating itself until it’s too late to save his own life. Wonderfully witty and hauntingly compelling, Blood Don’t Lie is not a typical bully story. What happens if David stops himself right before he slays Goliath? And what happens when the smallest kid in 8th grade discovers the biggest bully in his life is not on the bus, but under his own roof…his own blood? A former member of the Short Person’s Club, Aaron Levy offers an unforgettable anti-hero in this powerful debut.