Beneath by Roland Smith

This is a story that mixes fantasy and realistic fiction, as most of it feels realistic fiction until the end where it is a bit too much to be real. Anyway, the protagonist Pat lives in a life where his parents are useless and his brother has disappeared. Eventually his brother reaches out and they communicate for a while until all of a sudden, he disappears again. Pat decides to go find his brother. He runs away to New York and retraces his brother's steps. His brother was living in underground New York and slowly Pat befriends the right people and his adventure really begins. It's an interesting tale, but one that makes it look all to easy to run away to NY and not have awful things happen to you...not very realistic there either. Grades 5-8