SuitabookToughness and care
Harry Sue plans to become a juvenile delinquent but struggles to ignore suffering and spends time caring for younger children and supporting a friend.
Loading your next page
Book details
Sue Stauffacher - Author
This offers a lively, unconventional voice alongside serious family circumstances. Its humour, literary references and unusual friendships sit beside imprisonment, neglect and harm, while Harry Sue’s movement towards trust and hope gives the story emotional direction.
Harry Sue Clotkin is tough. Her mom's in the slammer and she wants to get there too, as fast as possible, so they can be together. But it's not so easy to become a juvenile delinquent when you've got a tender heart. Harry Sue's got her hands full caring for the crumb-snatchers who take up her afternoons at the day care center, and spending time with her best friend Homer, a quadriplegic who sees life from a skylight in the roof of his tree house. When Harry Sue finds an unlikely confidante in her new art teacher, her ambitions toward a life of crime are sidelined as she comes to a deeper understanding about her past--and future.Sue Stauffacher has once again crafted a fast-paced middle-grade novel filled with quirky but lovable characters, a narrator impossible to ignore, a completely original plot, and a whole lot of redemption.From the Hardcover edition.
Book Brief
Sign in to see how this book fits your child and family preferences.
Sign in for personalised guidanceThis offers a lively, unconventional voice alongside serious family circumstances. Its humour, literary references and unusual friendships sit beside imprisonment, neglect and harm, while Harry Sue’s movement towards trust and hope gives the story emotional direction.
Harry Sue plans to become a juvenile delinquent but struggles to ignore suffering and spends time caring for younger children and supporting a friend.
Harry Sue wants to join her imprisoned mother, recalls the last story her mother read to her and searches for a sense of home and maternal love.
Content needing thought includes imprisonment, parental separation, drug use, child neglect or abuse, racism, accidents, a death-related reference and mild expletives. The treatment is described as non-graphic, but the accumulation may feel intense.
This is a grounded book brief while Suitabook strengthens the analysis: some draft conclusions still depend on unresolved evidence.
Book information
Limited information
Harry Sue – Author Sue Stauffacher – Random House Children's Books
Limited information
Checked: 19 September 2026.
Anything not established here remains open; it is not being treated as absent or safe.