Book Review: A Hope in the Unseen
Have you ever felt like your dreams will never come true? Or have you ever felt like you
know you can be successful as long as you can get away from the bad reputation that’s
surrounding you based off of where you come from? Well this is exactly the way Cedric
Jennings felt in the book: A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind. In the book, Cedric is one of
the smartest honors kids that attends Frank W. Ballou Senior High School in Washington D.C.
The struggle comes in because the school is one of the worst high schools in the city and it is
located in Southeast D.C. which contains some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the
Suskind’s book begins by introducing the setting at Ballou High School…show more content… On this particular day, Cedric decided not to
attend because he knew the pep rally would be a ceremony for the kids who made honor roll.
Even though Cedric was a honor roll student, he didn’t want to be teased like the other honor
kids that would attend and be called names like “Nerd! Geek! Egghead! Whitey!” (3).
Cedric Jennings was just a typical teenage boy who was struggling to care for his mom
and himself. His mom was a single parent so it was up to him to be the man of the house and his
intentions were to do just that. Unlike most of the boys at his school, he had a dream and a plan
to succeed in life. Cedric’s big plans included graduating from his high school at Ballou and
attending college with plans to graduate with a degree. This was rare at his high school because
most boys at Ballou were dropping out of high school, so attending college wasn’t an option.
Cedric was so determined to achieve his goal that many days he would eat lunch in a classroom
while studying and doing extra work because he knew he was in competition with a lot of other
kids from a lot of other schools. Cedric faced many obstacles from not having friends, to