Little Chicago
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Little Chicago is a 2002 novel by Adam Rapp
Little Chicago is a story told by eleven-year-old Gerald 'Blacky' Brown, a victim of sexual abuse and neglect. The opening pages describe the little boy running naked in the middle of the night through the undergrowth from the home of his single mother's boyfriend, Al Johnson. He woke up to discover that Al was abusing him.
Blacky then does what every abused child should do, he tells: he asks his older sister Shay for help (his mother is at work), and when she and a friend take him to the hospital to be examined, he tells the social worker about the molestation, and at school he tells his best (and only) friend, Eric Duggan.
But he’s let down by everyone he should expect to help him. Blacky's mother wants to keep seeing her boyfriend; his sister has a serious drug problem; Wendy Wolf, the woman from the Children's Service, doesn't follow up on the allegations; his school friend tells all the kids at school that Al stuck his thumb up Blacky's butt, and Blacky then gets bullied with all the kids giving him 'thumb's up' signs.
Blacky befriends Mary Jane Paddington, a lonely and very unpopular girl at school, and she encourages Blacky to resist the bullying, but she becomes the victim of a brutal prank. The girl’s friendship helped him, but he still suffers the cruelty at school and neglect at home. Eventually Blacky acquires a gun and two bullets and confronts two of the bullies.
Rapp, through the immature, though touching, observations of the young boy, shows the terror, bewilderment, and behaviour changes that can result from child molestation if adults ignore it.
