THE YOUNG LANDLORDS

"How come you ain't nothing but some children? I ain't never heard of no children landlords before." The tenant's skepticism is understandable—the whole thing is a little hard to credit, but here are Myers' good-doing Harlem teens (early teens), trying to run a building they have inadvertently bought from a slum-lord. (He has responded to their good-neighbor complaints by dumping an unprofitable property.) The kids' dreams of profits fade with a little arithmetic and some straight talk from their charitable volunteer accountant; and their dreams of helping the tenants—an amusingly colorful lot—are considerably dampened by experiences that range from fixing a plugged-up toilet (and getting locked in the bathroom) to comforting a senile old lady. Between subplot sleuthing on a hot hi-fi equipment case and holding rent and block parties to finance repairs, first-person narrator Paul learns in the course of the summer that it's easier to protest from across the street than to live with the day-to-day responsibility. If it's all a little goody-goody, Myers as usual cloaks his straight-and-narrow messages in easy colloquial dialogue and street-corner savvy.