All of his childhood friends had to leave the state and scatter across the country just to escape the stigma that attached to them all … Del has few university prospects, because who’d accept a student with a criminal record? And he has regular sessions with a psychiatrist who is constantly asking Del to explain his anger.īut Del isn’t going to tell his secret, not just yet.

He owes his parents a debt of gratitude for the way they stuck by him during the worst of a terrible time. He’s a seventeen-year-old gravedigger with a secret. But what has Del done? In flashbacks to Del's fourteenth year, we slowly learn the truth: his girlfriend texted him a revealing photo of herself, a teacher confiscated his phone, and soon the police were involved.īasing her story on real-life cases of teens in trouble with the law for texting explicit photos, Susan Vaught has created a moving portrait of an immensely likable character caught in a highly controversial legal scenario.

As a result, he can't get into college the only job he can find is digging graves and when he finally meets a girl he might fall in love with, there's a sea of complications that threatens to bring the world crashing down around him again.

At seventeen, he's trying to put his life together after an incident in his past that made him a social outcast-and a felon. Del is a good kid who's been caught in horrible circumstances.

Going Underground by Susan Vaught