Module 13 * Graphic Novels and Series Books * April 14-20

Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty
by 
G. Neri

Bibliography: Neri, G. (2010). Yummy: The last days of a Southside shorty. New York, NY: Lee & Low Books.

Summary:  Yummy is an eleven-year-old gang member who never had a chance.  From the broken home and parents in jail to his gangster brother, life did not deal him a fair hand. Things go from bad to worse when a gang hit attempted to earn him street cred kills a young girl from his neighborhood.  On the run and hidden from the law by his gang, Yummy's story took hold of the nation.  He was even on the cover of Time magazine!  The gang eventually decides that the heat is not worth it and takes Yummy out themselves.  What a sad and tragic life.  

My Take: Though this story was very depressing, even more so because it is true, it was also very powerful.  To some Yummy's life might seem pointless, but he brought nation-wide attention to a very real and increasingly prevalent problem with gangs in urban environments.  Since the juvenile laws were so much less stringent than adult laws at the time, gangs got young boys to do a lot of their dirty work for them.    

Reviews: 

"So young to kill, so young to die" read the 1994 Time magazine cover with Yummy's photo. Yummy was a real 11-year-old Chicago kid, with father in jail, abused by his mom, and sucked all-too-readily into the Black Disciples gang. "The disciples ain't stupid," comments a character in Neri's account. "They got this endless supply of young ones with no daddy, just looking for attention"--pit bull puppies who could escape felony convictions because of age. Given a gun and sent on small jobs, Yummy was a bundle of thug ego with a kid's immaturity, and he accidentally killed a teen girl bystander while threatening supposed rivals. Now a liability as a magnet for unwanted attention, Yummy was executed by his own gang. While Neri invents a fictional narrator as tour guide for the reader, the story is based on public records, media reports, and personal accounts. VERDICT Neri's re-creation paints a compelling and sympathetic portrait of how a youngster became too eager to please the wrong people, and DuBurke (Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography) provides skilled, semiphoto-quality inks and shadows that do his subject justice. Strongly recommended for tweens and up.

Cornog, M. (2010). Yummy: The last days of a Southside shorty (review).  Library Journal 135(19), 56.
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In 1994, in the Roseland neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, a 14-year-old girl named Shavon Dean was killed by a stray bullet during a gang shooting. Her killer, Robert "Yummy" Sandifer, was 11 years old. Neri recounts Yummy's threedays on the run from police (and, eventually, his own gang) through the eyes of Roger, a fictional classmate of Yummy's. Roger grapples with the unanswerable questions behind Yummy's situation, with the whys and hows of a failed system, a crime-riddled neighborhood, and a neglected community. How could a smiling boy, who carried a teddy bear and got his nickname from his love of sweets, also be an arsonist, an extortionist, a murderer? Yet as Roger mulls reasons, from absentee parenting to the allure of gang membership, our picture of Yummy only becomes more obscure. Neri's straightforward, unadorned prose is the perfect complement to DuBurke's stark black-and-white inks; great slabs of shadow and masterfully rendered faces breathe real, tragic life into the players. Like Roger, in the end readers are left with troubling questions and, perhaps, one powerful answer: that they can choose to do everything in their power to ensure that no one shares Yummy's terrible fate.

Yummy: The last days of a Southside shorty (review). (2010).  Publishers Weekly 257(28), 119.

Use in a School Library: This book would be a great graphic novel to use in a middle school or high school when introducing graphic novels.  Sometimes kids think of graphic novels as comic books, so one that is based on a true story and is about someone who is their age could be powerful.  It shows how to take a personal narrative and use graphic arts to turn it into something very different.  There are many apps and web tools that would allow kids to do this with one of their own, hopefully much less depressing, personal stories.