The Bully or the Victim: Leech Mob Novel Questions School Profiling

More than 4,000 teens commit suicide each year because of bullying. Sure, it’s great advice for youths to talk to their parents, teachers, and even the police if they are victims of bullying and school violence. But most kids don't want to admit they’ve been bullied because they feel embarrassed, so they keep quiet. Leech Mob: A Novel about a Connecticut Gang by John Harwood shows how the main character Kelly Hayes chooses to fight back against the bullies, who, in his case, are star students, teachers, administration, and cops.

The novel is set in the early 1990s, before the long term effects of bullying on the victim were acknowledged. Kelly's teachers look the other way, the school administrators do not investigate complaints, and even the city cops “profile” youths before the term was ever used.  Kelly keeps the bullying a secret from his mother, a common response in teens, so she is unaware of the actual problems he faces. He believes that fighting is his only option, and he becomes a problem that the system wants to eliminate. 

Order a copy of Leech Mob through our website: www.leechmobnovel.com. I was having problems with Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble so please order the Leech Mob Novel through the products page at www.leechmobnovel.com so I can continue to support myself and you will definitely get a copy of the book without problems or delay. 

Hear the first two chapters on audio book - with artwork and video interviews with author John Harwood:

 https://www.youtube.com/user/LeechMobNovel

Or check out our website: www.leechmobnovel.com 

Leech Mob Novel Appeals to Teens and to Reluctant Readers

Even though the school system tried to kill me, I survived because our gang was a cool bunch of friends who always had each other’s back in an otherwise unfriendly world. Leech Mob: A Novel about a Connecticut Gang is the wisdom about growing up that I was able to get across enemy lines.  I leave it in the hands of you kids now, so start reading!

         What? You don’t like reading books?  Well, neither do I if you’re talking about most of the boring novels we were assigned to read in high school. But Leech Mob is altogether different.  It’s about high school kids who are experimenting with being adults.  We make lots of mistakes, but our lives go on.  Yep, there is some violence in the book, but the fights are real rather than glorified.  No one walks away a hero, and not everyone walks away. 

I was having problems with Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble so please order the Leech Mob Novel through the products page at www.leechmobnovel.com so I can continue to support myself and you will definitely get a copy of the book without problems or delay. Order a copy of Leech Mob through our website: www.leechmobnovel.com 

Being the new kid in high school, Kelly Hayes fights the bullies in Leech Mob Novel

It’s not easy being the new kid – especially when you’re new to high school and everyone has known each other - like - since the first grade. I know - cause I was in that predicament myself.   I had barely stepped off the school bus when I was in a fight on the first day of school. But the teachers didn’t want to spend any time investigating the incident.  They just assumed that I caused it rather than the school’s elite - a bunch of preps, jocks, and honor roll kids.  It’s weird how a thing like that can seem to go on for rest of your life! So read the book and decide if you agree or not. 

Order a copy of Leech Mob through our website: www.leechmobnovel.com. I was having problems with Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble so please order the Leech Mob Novel through the products page at www.leechmobnovel.com so I can continue to support myself and you will definitely get a copy of the book without problems or delay www.leechmobnovel.com 

Or listen to the Leech Mob audio book and interviews with

the author here: www.youtube.com/user/leechmobnovel 

Leech Mob Novel Website Launch!

Leech Mob: A Novel About A Connecticut Gang

Here is Leech Mob's official website! Check out the synopsis, excerpts and all that good stuff.  And also check out the artwork and interviews with the author - John Harwood at YouTube: 

https://www.youtube.com/user/LeechMobNovel 

There you can find the first two chapters of Leech Mob, available on audio book, artwork, music and interviews with the author. 

Please order a copy of Leech Mob through our website: www.leechmobnovel.com. I was having problems with Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble so please order the Leech Mob Novel through the products page at www.leechmobnovel.com so I can continue to support myself and you will definitely get a copy of the book without problems or delay: www.leechmobnovel.com 

                              

Leech Mob Novel Synopsis

Leech Mob: A Novel About A Connecticut Gang

In the early 1990s, Kelly Hayes, a friendly fifteen-year-old, moves from New York City to Connecticut with his recently divorced mother in search of a finding a simpler and safer life in the lovely town of Riverview. But when the school year begins, students, teachers, and even the principal consider him an outsider and a troublemaker. Bullied and beaten by the Jocks and the Preps, Kelly finds friendship with the other outcasts in the school but gets caught up in a world far more complex and dangerous than his urban upbringing had prepared him for. 

From the dilapidated confines of State Hospital, Kelly relates to his psychiatrist the raucous and riotous events of the last year that changed him from a typical high school kid to a rebellious youth, a problem who the school and the community helped to create.

Leech Mob: A Novel about a Connecticut Gang is much more than an updated Catcher in the Rye or The Outsiders. With brilliant characterization and dialogue, Harwood introduces a cast of rebel teens who will inevitably become icons for our modern dysfunctional age.

Please order a copy of Leech Mob through our website: www.leechmobnovel.com. I was having problems with Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble so please order the Leech Mob Novel through the products page at www.leechmobnovel.com so I can continue to support myself and you will definitely get a copy of the book without problems or delay www.leechmobnovel.com 

Hear the first two chapters on audio book - with artwork and video interviews with author John Harwood

 https://www.youtube.com/user/LeechMobNovel

Leech Mob: A Novel About A Connecticut Gang Book Release

Leech Mob, A Novel About A connecticut Gang

Leech Mob: A Novel about a Connecticut Gang

Announcing the release of a Young Adult Fiction novel for Mature Teens 

Linda Thiel: Press Agent

 

John Harwood, former resident of Brookfield, CT and graduate of Brookfield High School, has published a novel about a teenage boy’s first year of high school in a Connecticut town. Readers are taken for a wild ride from school to sleazy night clubs to mob brawls in a true to life teen drama with candid vignettes into the real world of adolescence that most adults have not been privy to until now. 

Set in 1990, behind the facade of New England propriety, Harwood’s main character Kelly, a newcomer to the area, becomes a victim of bullying and assault on his first day at school. Each of the novel’s chapters deals with a social issue as pertinent today as it was twenty years ago. Kelly is seamlessly drawn into a world of absent fathers, drugs, vandalism, promiscuity, police profiling, date rape, stealing, and ultimately mental illness that lands him behind locked doors at State Hospital. 

Though some of the Leech Mob characters are likable while some are not, each one is uniquely developed with depth and clarity. Once idealizing the secret and concealed world of unacceptable behaviors that rebellious teens embrace, the Leech Mob finally discovers that their gang is not worth the tragedy that it has perpetuated.

Hard-hitting yet humorous and insightful, this book is a must-read for teens as well as for parents and teachers, who want answers to the questions spawned by recent tragedies of violence in our schools. Eight years in the writing, Leech Mob is a work from the heart and the soul. 

Leech Mob: A Novel about a Connecticut Gang by John Harwood

is now available. Visit our website, read excerpts and order the Leech Mob Novel here: www.leechmobnovel.com   

   

Or hear the first two chapters read as an audio book here: 
www.youtube.com/user/leechmobnovel 

John Harwood can be contacted by writing to him at:

leechmobnovel@gmail.com