In The Juvie Three, there are three main characters: Terence Florian, Arjay Moran, and Gecko Fosse (his real name is Graham Fosse). I am going to write about all three because they are all equally important in the book. The first main character is Terence Florian. Terence grew up with an abusive father on the streets of Chicago as a teen gang member. He knows how to survive by playing the game of street criminals. Terence is skinny, tall, and not very muscular, but all the things that he lacks physically, he makes up for with brains and by running his mouth. Terence is the kind of person who is always cracking jokes and is barely ever serious. People always yell at him telling him to listen to them or do what he’s told, but he never does. He is always trying to find a way to make a quick buck (like robberies), which often gets him into trouble.
Another main character is Arjay Moran. Arjay is 15 years old and a whopping 260 pounds and 6’5” tall. The football team wanted him to play on the team, but Arjay refused every time. This makes them angry so they constantly taunt him. Finally the football team snapped. Arjay was all alone when they jumped him and he fought back for the first time. He pushed the quarterback, who was also the team captain, sending him flying back causing him to hit his head. He dies. Arjay is found guilty of manslaughter. Even though everybody thinks that he is a horrible and mean person, Arjay is actually one of the nicest people ever. He isn’t vicious and wouldn’t hurt anybody unless he had to. He cares for his family and close friends. Arjay is also an amazing guitar player. Later into the book he joins a band and is the lead guitar player.
The last main character is Gecko Fosse. Gecko grew up in a family where he was ignored most of the time, which is probably the reason he gets into bad habits, including the robbery with his brother that got him sent to juvenile detention (“juvie”). Although he was only 13, Gecko could drive better than anybody he knew. He was the getaway driver for the robbery that his brother led, right before he got sent to juvie. Gecko is a very smart person when he wants to be. For example, when he got out of juvie and was given another chance, he took charge of all three of the boys, becoming the leader of the group and keeping them in line when Healy was in the hospital. (Healy is their mentor who took all three of the boys out of juvie to give them another chance.) He was probably the most responsible person in the group.
This story was told from the point of view of each of the three main characters. I think that the reason the author told the story this way is because it makes the story more interesting. Telling the story from three different points of view made it so he could write about things that happened separately to the characters. If the story had been told by just one person, that person would be able to tell a very detailed account of what happened, but even though it would sound like that was exactly what happened he wouldn’t be able to tell all the little and the most important details. Also, it wouldn’t be as reliable as if it had been told by the person who actually had it happen to them.
For example, when Gecko went to the hospital every week to check on his mentor, Douglas Healy, he met a girl named Roxanne and fell in love with her. There were many reasons he fell in love with her. She was really pretty, nice, funny, smart, and everybody loved her. But, only Gecko knew the little reasons why he loved her. When he is with her he doesn’t feel like anything matters and that she makes everything better. If it had been told from somebody else’s point of view, you wouldn’t have known all the little details.
Another way the different points of view help is when the reader learns about how Arjay got sent to juvie. People thought that Arjay killed the football quarterback on purpose because he was a big, strong, and almost everybody was intimidated by him. Nobody believed Arjay that he was just trying to defend himself from the football team. The reader knows that Arjay was innocent and that it was an accident because we get to hear it from his point of view. Telling it this way gave all the details of what really happened instead of just having somebody else say, “Oh yeah he killed that guy on purpose, he deserves to go to jail.”
One final example is how everybody sees and treats Gecko. People at Gecko’s high school are afraid of him because he had been to juvie. When Gecko was in chemistry class he accidently spilled a chemical on a kid’s shoe. The kid was a lot bigger than him and, at first, was really angry that something got spilled on his shoe. Then when he saw who Gecko was he got really nervous and said, “It’s nothing!…Don’t worry about it!” When Gecko tried to say he would, the guy said he would clean it up. Gecko was surprised by this and didn’t understand. The other guy was afraid of Gecko and thought he was going to hurt him because he went to juvie, even though he wasn’t going to do anything to him. The reader knows, though, because it was told from Gecko’s point of view. I think that the author told the story in the best way possible by telling it from three different people’s views. For each character, the reader learns more about their feelings and motivations by hearing about their stories from them. Seeing things from each point of view lets the reader sympathize with the characters.
