Good Idea Gone Bad

by Lesley Choyce

Mick and his high school friends call it street cleaning -- four of them beating up on one guy they don't like the looks of. Mick likes the action, but he'd rather be playing drums.
Mick and his friends hang out in front of the downtown library--hassling passerby, making noise, spitting on anything in sight. If the night's slow they might even do a little "street cleaning," bashing some geek who has the bad luck to come anywhere near them.
Unlike his friends, though, Mick would rather be playing drums in his metal band, but they broke up in a vicious scrap that left everyone in stitches. So when he meets Dariana, a keyboard player, he's psyched to get together. But for Dariana, Mick's bashing is not at all cool. When Mick and Dariana's band starts taking off, he knows he's got to change. But his old friends have other ideas, and they decide to "persuade" Mick to see things their way.
Set against the tough background of inner-city Halifax and its music scene, Good Idea Gone Bad is the story of one young man growing up in dangerous circumstances.

About the Author

Lesley Choyce

Lesley Choyce
LESLEY CHOYCE is a novelist and poet living at Lawrencetown Beach in Nova Scotia. A former grand champion of the Men's Open Canadian National Surfing Championships, he surfs on the Atlantic coast year-round, along with running a literary publishing house and teaching English at Dalhousie University. He also has a regular nationally-broadcast program on Vision TV called Off the Page with Lesley Choyce. He is the author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction for adults and children, including Carrie's Crowd and Go For It Carrie. His writing has earned him several awards, including two Dartmouth Book Awards and the Ann Connor Brimer Award for the Young Adult novel Good Idea Gone Bad. Five of his previous Formac novels have received the Canadian Children's Book Centre's "Our Choice" Award. The Ottawa Citizen calls him "a national treasure."

Reviews

"With his ear tuned into the rhythm of youth, Choyce does not settle for merely good-bad solutions."
Atlantic Books Today

Awards

Canadian Children's Book Centre Our Choice Selection
1993
Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children's Literature
1994

Subjects (BISAC)

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