In the tradition of The Other Wes Moore and Mercy, a searing memoir and clarion call to save lots of our at-risk youth by a black guy who himself was a lost cause-until he landed in a rehabilitation program that saved his life and gave him purpose.

Delivered into abject poverty in Haiti, small Jim St. Germain shifted to Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, into an overcrowded house with his family. He quickly adapted to street existence and started stealing, dealing drugs, and growing increasingly indifferent to about A Stone of Wish: A Memoir despair and violence. By the time he was imprisoned for dealing split cocaine, he had been handcuffed more than a dozen situations. At the age of fifteen the walls of the machine were closing around him.

But rather than prison, St. Germain was placed in ‘Boys Town,’ a non-secure detention facility created for treatment. Encircled by mentors and positive man authority who enforced something based on structure and privileges rather than intimidation and consequence, St. Germain slowly found his way, eventually obtaining his GED and graduating from university. Then he made the bravest decision of his life: to live, as an adult, in the projects where he had lost himself, also to function to reform what sort of criminal justice system treats at-risk youth.

A Stone of Wish is a lot more than an incredible coming-of-age story; told with a degree of candor that will require the deepest courage, it is also a rallying cry. Nobody is normally who they will be-or capable of being-at sixteen. St. Germain is certainly living proof this. He contends that we must function to build a world in which we usually do not give up on a swath of another generation.

Passionate, eloquent, and timely, A Rock of Hope is an motivating challenge for each and every American, and is certain to spark controversy nationwide.