I wish I lived closer to Angela. We share common interests in our study of Young Adult Literature and how the concept of the adolescent is played out in this literature and in popular culture. At the same time, we just don't end up in the same conferences very often. I am always grateful that she attended a conference at LSU and we become friends and colleagues from a distance.

She has written several times in the past for Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday.  Her posts are always interesting and you can find one on Art and YA literature here and another one YA literature and Critical Collaboration here. As always, I hope you browse the contributor page, there are many great post on that page. This week, Angela discusses YA Film.

​Thanks Angela.

​My YA Film students watched Barry Jenkins’s award-winning Bildungsroman film Moonlight (2016) last week. Before we discussed the contextual presentations of Miami, Florida and the narrative proper, we began by closely reading the most famous image from the text:  the trifurcated portrait of the protagonist Chiron at three stages of life—childhood, adolescence, and new adulthood. Like the film’s dominant color palette, this shot is a study in various shades of blue, each image reflective of the tripartite structure of the film pieced together, shards of a mosaic the movie animates. From observation, students noted that the center shard stands out most, since it is the lightest in color and contains most of the “important” parts of the face, especially the mouth, which is closed, as one pointed out. The center shot also presents barely healed cuts from an apparent beating.  

​Further, the image in the center looks largest, they said, and it, by virtue of color or size, “comes forward at the viewer.” Consequently, they hypothesized that the teen years would be most important and formative for the young male character. Their ten-minute discussion of a single image proved to me, again, that teaching students to interrogate motion pictures is always time well-spent. Of course, I’m by far not the first to teach film. I am one of the professors in my chosen field to ask students to move beyond assumptions related to what YA and YA film encompass and, crucially, how and to what end adolescence and adolescents are depicted.

​When students ask me what I mean by “YA Film,” I inevitably have “The Harry Potter talk” with them. Yes, those films—all eight of them--“count,” since they are filmic adaptations of texts written for adolescents and (re)present youth. Yes, Katniss Everdeen resides in this pantheon, as do Bella, Edward, and Jacob.  Percy is there, too. Old timers like Heidi, Anne of Green Gables, and myriad adaptations of little women hold great sway. And there is a plethora of John Green’s teens, given new life onscreen.  

But, I then explain, we will not watch any of these in my course, where our investigation of YA Film centers on abstract films that adults make about teenagers, and on how these art objects are (re)produced, consumed, and replicated by artists and viewers, spreading banal images of kids throughout our social, legal, and educational institutions. Instead of observing differences and similarities between, say, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, chafing about what was left out or added, we begin with the task of understanding adolescence as a social construct that has seldom empowered them.  It doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as The Hunger Games, does it?  Except it is--especially when we consider how film, the genre many teachers naively label the “ice cream” that should follow the “broccoli” of books (Foertsch, 2006), when left unexamined, has enormous power over the 12-18 and 18-34 demographic, “not simply reflect[ing] culture but produc[ing] it” (Giroux, 2001).

As early as 1996, Henry Giroux, critical pedagogue, writes, “representations of youth in popular culture have . . . habitually [served] as signposts through which American society registers its own crisis of meaning, vision, and community” and contends that “Youth as a complex, shifting, and contradictory category is rarely narrated in the dominant public sphere through the diverse voices of the young.” Because the anxieties of a culture are displaced onto (re)presentations of young people, images of adolescents can lack authenticity, rendering youth characterizations as but “empty [categories].” Giroux’s critical canon points to methods we instructors can use to empower students, to strategies that explode the dominant binaries in art that can govern their lives, making study of popular culture a political act wherein we can guide learners towards recognition of the wills to power that seek to control and form them. 

Likewise, recent scholarship on teacher training by Sophia Sarigianides, Mark Lewis, and Robert Petrone (2015) challenges us to question longstanding assumptions about youth that could prohibit critical connections and trust in classroom spaces where English is taught. My YA Film class plan weds what Giroux calls “film pedagogy” to Lewis et. al’s “Youth Lens,” which proposes critical rereadings of students’ lives to effect better instruction. Giroux, in his seminal “Breaking into Movies: Pedagogy and the Politics of Film” (2001) and in most of his ensuing work, seeks to empower adolescent viewers to revise themselves by (re)reading, resisting, and redefining as they view. Lewis et. al. also encourage reconsideration of what student teachers recognize as typical “adolescent behavior.” In the circle of Inquiry of my classroom, student-viewers are asked to move beyond solely academic parsing to become arbiters of the multifaceted ways that film entertains and enculturates. In sum, I invite my students into dialog with the culture that defines and often confines their experiences. I ask them, also, to locate their experiences in what they see, to interrogate erroneous, unsophisticated images of teenagers, or, conversely, to locate the resounding silences where the totality of their lives is put under erasure (John Hughes, prolific and beloved as he may be, never once represents people of color as anything other than caricatured, comic relief).

This semester’s YA Film class began with John Singleton’s third film Higher Learning (1995). While gripping in sections and often well-acted, was judged an ultimately uneven cinematic experience. However, it replicates all the requisite groups of college kids, each striated by class, race, and gender differences that the film glosses in favor of two-dimensional characterizations. The movie culminates in a shocking yet still timely act that left my students unsatisfied, as each juggled their belief that “some stereotypes are true” with others that point to their understanding of the need to sanction intersectional existence, even when they considered that Singleton’s movie was released a mere 3 years after the Rodney King verdict and L.A. Riots.  

Higher Learning is no parallel to its predecessor, Boyz in the Hood (1991), but I chose it precisely because of its weaknesses, especially since, as Singleton told Charlie Rose in 1997, while Boyz represents Black experience, he sought to represent America in Higher Learning. Via our discussion of Singleton’s vision, their own viewing, analysis, and reading of reviews composed at the time of the film’s release, students recurrently found slivers of themselves in the text across the isolate peer groups but also surmised that they had been “spoofed” in sections of the film, caricatured and put into boxes with labels that could hardly capture the complexities of their lives.  This film primed them for the investigation to come.

​The next two films—Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me (1986) and Tim Hunter’s River’s Edge (1986)—center on a dead body, the former a nostalgic, archetypal journey set in 1959 and the latter what I called an “unquest,” its context a 1980’s America rife with teens so indifferent that they feel and do nothing when a friend of theirs kills his girlfriend for “talking shit” and leaves her body on the bank of the town’s river. The film is “based on a true story,” (a weighty phrase we had to unpack), and its impact led Robert Ebert to call it an “exercise in despair” and “an emblem of breakdown” (Rogerebert.com, 1987).  Scriptwriter Neal Jimenez, further, indicates that his story “spoke to a mood that young people were feeling at the time—feeling detached from things and wanting to zone out” (Gilligan, 2017).  In Reiner’s classic, the tweens set out to find a body, hoping to become famous.  ​By end of their journey, which takes place on and alongside the town’s train tracks, solemnity takes the place of fame seeking, and the boys return home the day before they are to start junior high, sobered by what they have seen. The boy’s body, unmarred by the train, nonetheless marks the boys. ​

 This is seemingly not the case in River’s Edge, where the camera seductively pans along the full length of Jamie’s nude, strangled body in the first four minutes and then is viewed passively by teen “friends” who visit Jamie several times, one even calling her an “it.”  I paired these films with hopes that the stark contrast would lead to more robust analysis of the representation of tweens and teens in their respective historical contexts. In our class, the placement of the pale body against the brown ugliness of the bank, and no one’s move to cover their friend’s nudity, quite unlike the tweens who cover the clad male body of the peer they find in Reiner’s film, was the subject of much conversation, especially since Jamie’s body is a rendered a thing in a series of lifeless female bodies Hunter’s mis en scene deploys:  a naked doll thrown into the river and a sex doll used as a companion. Most of all, virtually all of my largely Millennial students reacted with open disdain to the apathy on screen, and in the process of spirited debate set themselves in direct opposition to the teens in Hunter’s film, disproving one of the widely generalized characterizations about their generation.

As we study this curated list of films, I hope to increase my pupils’ ability to read texts critically, to be sure, helping them to build film criticism “toolboxes.” But more than these required learning outcomes, my goals include inviting each into heightened recognition of the designs culture has on them, to explore how teachers, parents, and consumer culture can neatly package identity out of ignorance, greed, or even the best of intentions:  love. Then, even films that gloss complexities like Singleton’s, disgust them like the kids in River’s Edge, deeply move them to pity like the animated characters of Graveyard of the Fireflies may, or even cause them to discover how popular music in Pretty in Pink shapes and reshapes their lives, can matter more. These films, and others, become ones to enjoy through—and despite—deep analysis.  
​
I still teach “conventional” YA (no worries!), but I do so in much the same way as I approach the films, encouraging via Inquiry both active reading and active resistance to adolescent representation as a part of the process.

I still teach “conventional” YA (no worries!), but I do so in much the same way as I approach the films, encouraging via Inquiry both active reading and active resistance to adolescent representation as a part of the process.

​Thanks Angela. Angela can be contacted at [email protected].
​
Until next week.

Sometimes you meet important people in your life quite by accident. Below is a conversation between two English Educators whom I meet without a plan. I met Susan at an editors' meeting at NCTE and Bryan when he attended a conference I held at LSU--referenced below. Both Susan and Bryan and have contributed to Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday (scan for both of their previous post on the contributor's page.) They met at that first conference and discovered that they had several academic interests in common. One, of course, was Young Adult Literature. A second was their work with writing projects.

For this post Bryan and Susan combine to talk about how they have collaborated. Their experience is a prime example of how a few conversations at small conferences can energize and enhance your teaching and academic work. Maybe we can convince them both to come to Las Vegas for the next UNLV Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature. (Stay tuned for details about our keynote speakers and about opportunities to present in the next few weeks.)

The following was recorded between Dr. Susan James, University of Western Florida and Dr. Bryan Ripley Crandall, Fairfield University (Connecticut), as they reflected together on a cross-state National Writing Project collaboration. They met in 2014 during Dr. Stephen Bickmore’s 1st Annual Conference on Young Adult Literature, then hosted in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

This summer, the two NWP site directors thematically infused Rose Brock’s non-fiction collection, Hope Nation, and Matt de la Peña’s Superman: Dawnbreaker in their summer leadership institutes for teaching writing. The Superpower of Hope was a partnership between two locations where K-16 educators had the opportunity to build writing portfolios, to explore best practices for teaching writing and to work with a co-constructed question, “What is the Superpower of Hope?’ 

​Bryan: Susan, it was a pleasure coming to Pensacola, Florida, this summer to talk with your teachers and to finally see your National Writing Project site in person. Seeing the Emerald Coast Writing Project in action and learning how another director carries out the mission was awesome. I was super-impressed not only with your use of young adult literature, but how you paired such work with so many children’s books. It’s definitely something I’m bringing back to Connecticut.
 
So, you and I focused our institutes on The Superpower of Hope this year, a two-state initiative in support of educators attending our summer programs. I was impressed at the energy, enthusiasm and dedication of your teachers and how much they had already bonded by the time I arrived. 
 
You were the first to mention Rose Brock’s Hope Nation to me in a text message and I believe you quickly sent me a copy the very next day. That is always how you roll. Soon after, Rose Brock was invited to be a guest at Saugatuck StoryFest in Westport, Connecticut. She’s a powerhouse of a human being and it was so much fun spending time with the two of you.
 
Do you remember how you pitched the book collaboration with me?

​Susan: Of course, I remember! I spend most of my free time reading and, as you know, books provide me an introduction to various perspectives on life.  In our polarizing climate over the last few years, several teacher consultants involved in the Emerald Coast National Writing Project (NWP) site at the University of West Florida (UWF) wanted to collaborate on a theme for our 85-hour Invitational Summer Institute. This summer, the teachers decided on Hope for answers as to why the world is as it is. I called you and said, “We need to have our teachers read Hope Nation this year. They need to discuss the essays and narratives written by young adult authors.”

​Bryan: Yes, I read the copy of Hope Nation you sent, and instantly knew you were right. I jumped into the writing of Libba Bray, Gayle Forman, and Nic Stone, because two of our CWP-Fairfield teachers, Rebecca Marsick and Kim Herzog, invited them to come to the Saugatuck StoryFest, too. Kim, an English teacher at Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, spent all year creating curriculum in partnership with Hope Nation. I’m super excited that we’ll be able to present this at NCTE later this year.
 
At last year’s NCTE, I also picked up the Hope Nation audiobook, and loved listening to the essays, as well. Sometimes I think listening is even more powerful than reading, and this was especially true for Libba Bray’s chapter, “Before and After.” Her story hooked me and made me think critically about what Hope actually means. I was driving back from my parents and became so engrossed with the story that I had to pull over to listen attentively. It is so beautifully written, and the content is heavy; I realized I needed to think about the story rather than drive distracted. I stopped, listened, absorbed the truth, and soaked in her inspiration. Phew. What a brilliant writer!
 
Hope is a word I’ve thought of often, ever since the tragedy in Sandy Hook, an elementary school that is close to Fairfield University and where I live. At the time, I looked to National Writing Project sites to find inspiration for how to help communities heal. In partnership with author Trina Praulus, CWP-Fairfield and I did a butterfly release of Hope For the Flowers. We dropped the books off in schools, churches, doctors’ offices, masques, synagogues and libraries. Our campus knew there was a tremendous need for community conversations, and we delivered 600 or more copies of the book to the region. For me, books have always been Hope.

​​I also teach an undergraduate philosophy of education course where my students read Dewey, Freire, Noddings, Greene and more. In a text I love, Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in Schools, Lone and Burroughs (2016) emphasize the importance of exploring essential questions about life with school-aged children, because philosophy is question-  rather than answered-centered. It is interesting to think about how scholars name storytelling, literacy and education synonymously with Hope….sort of like Alan Luke’s idea of “pedagogy as gift” (2010). Reading, writing and discussing ideas with students is Hope, a gift to our students that more is possible when one lives a literate life.
 
Like you, I’ve been thinking about Hope and its relationship to our current world, especially in relation to the myth of Pandora’s Box. It’s funny, I like to show a quick cartoon (8 minutes) about Pandora’s Box to undergraduates to bring them up to speed on the Pandora story of her box (which some say is actually a vase or cup). It’s a fast rendition of the story and, although not the quality of today’s animations, I like to challenge them by asking, “Is hope an evil, too?”

​Susan: On the surface, this question seems easy to answer, Bryan, but in reality, it takes quite a bit of reflection and, unfortunately, experience with crippling loss that occurs in our lives. Every blog I have ever written for Bickmore has been written while in the hospital awaiting news about a parent who is in the ICU, so this question is both timely and important to me as I grasp for hope during a dark time. My definition of Hope (with a capital H, as it deserves) is when, despite a soul-shattering loss, we combat any fear that steals today’s joys and robs us of any optimism for the future. 

​Bryan: It’s interesting that you say, “combat any fear,” because fear is the exact word students and teachers often mention in relationship to Hope. Pandora realizes that Hope is the only thing left in the chest to counter illness, death, turmoil, strife, jealousy, and hatred, the evils unleashed into the world. Hope, then, is left in the box to counter fear. Hope is what we grab onto when faced with the ugly side of having life, which has shown itself over and over again throughout history. I found a poem, once, written by Brendan Kennelly, an Irish writer, that he called “The World’s Oldest Trilogy” (1995).  The poem was  short, “I love / to believe / in hope.” The oldest trilogy is that love, beliefs and Hope are intertwined. I like to remind myself that Hope, however, was boxed-in with all the darkness, too.
 
Perhaps this is why middle and high school teachers need to explore Hope within their profession and as a theme with students and teachers. Why did you and your teacher leaders turn to Hope as a theme?

Susan: Because Hope is a great theme, especially for teachers of literacy. Absolutely.  In fact, each year at the National Writing Project Invitational Summer Institute (ISI), I have planned for use of a theme, which ties every activity and reading we do to essential questions about a particular concept.  This is the method I used when teaching both middle and high schoolers, and it really allowed for students to make deeper connections to literature, as they were exposed to diverse stories, characters, and people who struggled through an event or events in life but, in different ways, continued to sustain hope.  The writing from these themed units was the most poignant of all my years as a teacher, and the students I taught during those times still communicate with me about how this style of teaching changed their lives.
 
As for Hope and teachers, the first year of my NWP site’s existence, I continued the idea of using themes during the summer institute. The first year, I selected “courage” because building a National Writing Project site by myself required a lot of work and hours, and a whole lot of “courage”.  I feared I would not successfully provide what the teachers needed. 
 
The next year, however, I worked with a group of teachers who were participants during the first year, and they selected the theme of “Hope.”  I spent hours organizing resources to use in a massive text set, and one of the books I fell in love with was Rose Brock’s Hope Nation, which was published a year before Emerald Coast Writing Project debuted.  As you know, I have never known a stranger, so I reached out to Rose Brock and asked her and Jeff Zentner, author of The Serpent King, Goodbye Days, and his latest Rayne and Delilah, to help me kick off our institute with Skype visits. The rest is history, as I have become good friends with Rose, and Jeff still Skypes each year with the teachers. 

​Bryan: CWP-Fairfield also themes its summer programs each year, and use shared texts between our teacher institute and young adult literacy labs, especially Project Citizen - a two week writing camp for high school kids. In collaboration with you, however, we framed this summer’s work with Hope Nation and Matt de la Peña’s Superman: Dawnbreaker. Throughout the programs we asked the question, “Is Hope a superpower?” 

Wes Daunis, an incredible elementary teacher and comic book fanatic from Bridgeport, Connecticut, taught us during the summer institute that the S on Superman’s uniform is actually not for the  name, but the Kryptonian symbol that means Hope. He assured us it was trivia for only the geekiest of comic book nerds. Sure enough, I did some reading around the symbol and, well, I welcomed the coincidence and shouted out to the Great Whatever, “Look Suzie Q, it’s serendipity!” The coincidence brought the pairing of de la Peña’s YA novel with the essays in Rose Brock’s collection to a much higher level.
 
We also used Kelly Chandler’s Olcott’s A Good Fit For All Kids:Collaborating to Teach Writing in Diverse, Inclusive Settings, and Ronnie Sidney’s Nelson Beats the Odds. We wanted to do a better job addressing the writing needs of all kids, including those with learning disabilities. We often discussed, “Is the real superpower having the ability to reach all kids?” Lucky for us, too, we picked up Jerry Craft’s New Kid at the last minute, which added another amazing layer to the conversation. It was a great summer of using YA texts within the National Writing Project tradition, and all of us are better educators because of it.

​Susan: That’s just it. Teachers are readers and need to be given opportunities to see how books can be paired to explore new ideas with students. Rose Brock’s reason for writing the book, in fact, echoed what I kept hearing from teachers as to why they wanted “Hope” as our theme.  The teachers, who were now Teacher Consultants for our NWP site, agreed that a feeling of anger has been ruling supreme with citizens in our country.  The divisions created by politics has caused friction most have not known before.  Add current issues in education to this anger, and teachers are just plain tired. 
 
In Florida, we started the year with nearly 3,500 positions that needed to be filled. As the Orlando Sentinel noted, “If you teach in Florida, pay is low, bureaucratic baloney is high, and the politicians are more likely to demonize you than support you” (Maxwell, Orlando Sentinel, August 13, 2009). Our teachers were just getting a handle on the Florida Standards, and now they are being rewritten. With this comes new textbooks, more high-stakes testing, and the need for additional planning and professional development, but with limited funding and support.  Add with this loss there’s also the unregulated charter schools, and it is a hotbed of stress. Teachers feel our children are not at the forefront of thought, and that needs to change.
 
I knew the magnitude of this theme, of Hope, when teachers asked to continue it during the NWP Invitational Summer Institute for a 2nd year.  It all came together this summer, when you arrived in Pensacola right after Rose Brock, and the three of us became instant friends due to our shared passion for books and working with teachers. Your idea of adding Matt de la Peña’s text and a theme of The Superpower of Hope made this summer extra special. Why Superman? Why now? Do we all have superpowers as classroom teachers?

Bryan: I will go to my grave advocating for teachers and kids, and it will always interest me that at the core of America’s education system is a battle between administrative progressivism and teacher progressivism. The National Writing Project model has always worked for me because it celebrates the knowledge, expertise and dedication provided by classroom educators. Teachers teaching teachers. We need more opportunities for educators to come together to discuss what works with kids, what can be possible, and where one might find additional resources. Too often, we get top-down, detached and agenda-oriented professional development that comes and goes in fad-like fashion that leads to nowhere. The National Writing Project mission and framework is sustainable.I often joke that teaching is  emptying the ocean with a fork.  I think any teacher who is able to resist the forces hindering excellence in the classroom is a superhero. Any educator who puts their kids first, who takes responsibility for their instruction and its results, and who endures what they do on a daily basis with all the pressures of teaching, is definitely a being with incredible powers. Perhaps that is why Matt de la Peña’s Superman: Dawnbreaker resonated so much with me. It’s the same for any Marvel or DC Comic hero. I want to believe in extraordinary powers because that’s what one needs to be successful in today’s schools. We need metaphors to keep us fighting the good fight, sort of like The All-American Diner for Clark Kent in de la Peña’s story. It works as a reminder that the United States is a result of the hard work of individuals from many cultures.
 
The All-American Diner was famous for two things: cheap, massive portions of french fries and a generous owner who never seemed to stop smiling. The owner, however, was not as all-American as the name of his restaurant might suggest. Davie Baez was one of Smallville’s first-ever Mexican immigrants. He’d move to town in the 1960s, from Oaxaca, and never left. He eventually married a local woman and had a large family and became a citizen. (51)
​

My research on the teaching of writing, and my special interest in working with refugee- and immigrant-background youth, made the Superman: Dawnbreaker book more intriguing. Matt de la Peña explores the American icon in his YA novel, as Clark Kent comes to terms with the fact that brown people are disappearing in Smallville. There’s a rise of hatred for anyone who is other - an adolescent Superman must come to terms with the bigotry, cruelty, and privilege existing in the place he knows as home. He must decide if he is on the side of White nationalism or with democracy and diversity. Interestingly, this is not new. The icon has stood for equity and pluralism as early as 1949 (see Superman: A Classic Message Restored, Nat’l Comics Pub, Inc, Distributed by the Institute for American Democracy, Inc)..
 
A few summers ago, when Matt de la Peña spoke to our students and teachers, a boy asked him what he was working on next. This is when I first heard him talk about Superman: Dawnbreaker and I remember him responding that Superman is, in some ways, the epitome of an immigrant. He’s the ultimate illegal alien. He comes from Krypton, yet serves the nation with strength, pride and integrity. He isn’t of this place, but arrives to this place with Hope that it can be better than it already is. That is a message I learn again and again with the young people I work with.
 
CWP-Fairfield provides opportunities each summer for young people and teachers to explore writing together. This year, I was lucky to have a history teacher, and YA Author, Michael Belanger, in my summer institute. He wrote The History of Jane Doe (Penguin Random House, 2019) and came to the institute not so much to tune his own craft, but to find ways to be a better writing teacher. This is what he had to say about The Superpower Hope,

I’ve never been the biggest comic book fan. Sure, I’ve seen the movies, carried the lunch boxes, played with the action figures. But to this day, I don’t know why I never embraced Superman and Batman the same way some of my friends did.
           
As a teacher and writer, I’ve had a lot of time to think about hope—and hopelessness—in my career. It takes hope to start a new draft. To teach a class. To fail and try again. As a participant in the Connecticut Writing Project this summer, we talked a lot about Hope, in particular how it can be an antidote to fear. That really clicked for me. Because Superman and Batman were all about action, but teachers and writers have to live in their heads a lot of the time, and sometimes the best thing—the only thing—we can do is Hope.
 
Sometimes Hope takes time; it’s not only storming the bad guys’ headquarters or saving someone from a burning building. Really, for me, I’ve learned that teaching and writing are Hope. Because they speak of always striving for better. To be better. And I’m not just talking about being better than the person you were yesterday. Teaching and writing are about more than yourself, they’re about passing on hope to others. When you turn on the news, check Twitter, walk down the street, it’s easy to see a lot of fear. But if I can keep writing, keep teaching, then suddenly I have this superpower, the ability to see the world one way and imagine it another. It might not be as stylish as a cape—or it might be more stylish, depending on your view of capes—but it’s the best we’ve got. And it’s what gave us Superman and Batman in the first place. ​

Susan: Wow. That’s what many of the teachers in my institute were thinking, too. I asked myself the same question about Superman. Although our society has endured vast changes of late, one aspect of our culture is that we all love a good story, and Newbery-Winning Author Matt de le Pena spins a good one! 
 
I met Matt back in 2012 at NCTE, and I have enjoyed reading his stories and following his career.  When he told me he was writing a version of Superman, I immediately bought it, as did you.  Although there are variations on the Superman story, the plot is consistent with a character who looks, on the surface, to be an ordinary citizen.  Whether it is the power of adaptation that The Hulk demonstrates, the memory-wiping kiss that Superman displays, or the x-ray vision or enhanced senses of Wonder Woman, these superheroes use their abilities for the benefit of humanity.  No career is even close to comparable as teaching.  Under the most extreme circumstances, teachers have continued to be the one factor in education that makes the difference in the lives of students. They know what each student needs, and they pull out all the stops (superpowers) to make kids a priority, despite the odds. 

​Bryan: That’s exactly it. It is one of the reasons why we also explored writing instruction as a ‘good fit’ for ‘all students’ this summer. Not all kids love to write, but all kids can write and will write when they are motivated to communicate something important and relevant to them. Pairing Rose Brock’s Hope Nation with Superman: Dawnbreaker initiated a lot of thinking for all of us this summer. Young adult literature goes hand in hand with what middle or high school teachers can do as writing teachers. The reading is high-interest for kids and the craft is excellent for modeling the choices writers make. Having a good question like, “What is the superpower of Hope,” leads to a variety of responses and thoughts. There’s never a homogeneous one; rather, the thinking is heterogeneous and rich. 

Susan: Agreed. Having 30 years of experience in education, I, like all teachers, have had a front row seat with adolescents and young adults and have seen an increasing amount of grief, anxiety, and suffering.  The past two summers, I have looked into the eyes of nearly 90 teachers who fear the obstacles they are seeing in their classrooms. Kids mimic what they see adults do, and the anger and pain we are seeing in the world are more prevalent with our students than even 5 years ago.  And yet, teachers continue to do what they do using their superpowers.  What has become readily apparent is this: we cannot forget about the power of stories. We cannot forget about the power in sheer numbers. The National Writing Project has given us that community of like-minded individuals who will always make kids a priority.  Within this community, we all have our own strengths, or superpowers. Through reading amazing pieces of text, respectful discussion about our views, and the sharing of our stories, we have become a strong force. Our stories are those of Hope: they show how love, forgiveness, perseverance, faith, and action allow us to survive trying times. Reading, sharing, and listening to each other’s stories of Hope provides us the tools we need to bring equilibrium back to our world.

​Referenced Work:
 
Belanger, M. (2018). The History of Jane Doe. New York: Dial Books, Penguin House
Brock, R. (Ed.) (2018). Hope Nation: YA Authors Share Personal Moments of Inspiration. New
York: Penguin Books
Chandler-Olcott, K. (2019). A Good Fit For All Kids: Collaborating to Teach Writing in
Diverse, Inclusive Settings. Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press.
Craft, J. (2019). New Kid. New York: Harper Press
De la Peña, Matt (2019). Superman: Dawnbreaker. DC Comics. New York: Random House
Lone, J.M., & Burroughs, M.D. (2016). Philosophy in Education: Questioning and Dialogue in
Schools. New York: Rowman & Littlfeld.
Luke, A. (2010). Pedagogy as gift. In A. L. J. Albright (Ed.), Pierre Bourdieu and Literacy Education. New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group.
Kennelly, B. (1996). Poetry My Arse. Ireland: Bloodaxe Books, Ltd.
Maxwell, S. (2019). “3,500 teacher vacancies in Florida. This is what happens when you abuse
public education.” Commentary in Orlando Sentinel. August 13. Retrieved from:
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/scott-maxwell-commentary/os-op-florida-teach
er-vacacnies-scott-maxwell-20190813-ujqpsem3rzc4rheb3f5aqmybiq-story.html
Paulus, T. (1973). Hope for the Flowers. Paulist Press.
Sidney, R. (2015). Nelson Beats the Odds. Virginia: Creative Medicine: Healing Through
Words.
Zentner, J. (2017). Goodbye Days. New York: Crown Books for Young Readers
Zentner, J. (2017). The Serpent King. New York: Penguin House Emblem
Zentner, J. (2019). Rayne and Delila’s Midnite Matinee. New York: Crown Books for Young
Readers

Until next time.

As Lesley outlines below, I also believe there are moments that seem to permanently impact individuals and a national community. I have been an educator for over 40 years. I believe I now divide my career between pre and post 9/11. The event was startling. I had been teaching high school for over 20 years and had causally considered graduate school and a move to higher education. Within a few weeks, I began the serious investigation of graduate school. I had conversations with Anna Soter, Peter Smagorinsky, Anne Ruggles Gere, and few others; my life began to change forever. For me the event was a catalyst for doing more. I am committed to preparing new teachers and helping the new ones navigate those early years. I quite sure, however, the education environment during my last 20 years does not carry the same joy and enthusiasm that enveloped my first 20 years.

In many ways, I believe our national response to No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top where shaped in unhealthy ways by our response to 9/11 and the resulting conflicts that ensued. Now, eighteen years later we are still involved in armed conflict that may or may not be related to those events. Arguably, we are more nationalistic and our lack of trust of the "other" (whatever that really means) both within and without our borders has increased. 

Twenty years ago we would not have blinked and eye about educating immigrants or refugees--in my first year I taught a mixed group of immigrants from Mexico, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand mingled in with students who needed to make up an English credit. I was completely unprepared for what I didn't know and forever grateful for how much they taught me. 

There are many moments in history that will exist forever in our hearts and minds. For my dad it was the day WWI broke out as he was a 6-year-old standing in a candy store on his first foray to buy a piece of penny candy. The announcement came; the store closed; and a little boy walked back home, candy-less, to share the story, still vivid in his mind, with his daughter 65 years later. He went on to experience other wars from other perspectives. For me, these historic events were the November 22, 1963 announcement over our classroom speaker that “The President has been shot”; watching the January 28, 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster which directly affected friends of family and friends; and the events of September 11, 2001, events that shaped the world in which we and our children and students now live. How do we share the impact of those events with our MG/YA readers?

Novelist Richard Price once said, “The bigger the issue, the smaller you write.” In the books recommended and reviewed below, authors do not write about 9/11, they write about the effects of that day on Lucas, Deja, Claire, Wendy, Alex, Sergio, Naheed, Aimee, Will, Sameed, Ema, Dawn and Johar, Kyle, Hope, Tom, Kai, and their families and friends—in 2001 and, in some cases, years later. These novels portray challenges, difficult decisions, loss, uncertainty, tragedy, PTSD, discovery, resilience, heroism, and, now, 9/11 syndrome.

​As I wrote in my 9/7/2018 guest blog, Eleven Novels for Nine/Eleven: Studying & Discussing 9/11 through Diverse Perspectives, “Every historical event is distinct and affects people and places uniquely—and each is surrounded by misconceptions, misunderstandings, miscommunications, and differing and shifting perspectives. But none may be as unique and complicated as the study of the events of September 11, 2001. First of all, none of our K-12 students were born at the time of this event—which is true for most historic events--BUT, in this case, their parents, teachers, and even older siblings bore witness to this day and the days that followed. In that way, 9/11 is exceptional to teach and talk about. And with the devastation and impact of these events on past, present, and future relations and as ingrained a part of history these events are, they need to be discussed and understood, as much as possible.”
 
Below, I present four novels about 9/11 that  I recently read in addition to links to the eleven novels I wrote about in 2018, giving educators and parents fifteen MG/YA novels to generate important conversations about the events and effects of Nine/Eleven with children from grades 4-12. Because of the differing perspectives presented by these novels and the nature of the topic and conversations that each will initiate, I recommend choosing four or five to read and discuss in book clubs although they also lend themselves to whole-class and independent reading.

Noah was a baby in the hospital, fighting for his life, on 9/11 when his father went back to his office in the World Trade Center for his lucky hat, never to return home. He and his mother now live with her new husband and Noah is obsessed with comedy.

At age 15, Abbi is experiencing a suspicious cough, keeping it a secret from her parents and grandmother. Connie, the daycare worker, has recently died from cancer, most likely 9/11 syndrome, and Abbi takes a job as a camp counselor in a nearby town, looking for some anonymity and a chance at a “happily ever after” to the story that began with “Once upon a time” (9/11). Unfortunately, Noah, a fellow counselor, recognizes her and blackmails her into helping him interview the four other people in the iconic Baby Hope picture, convinced that the man in background wearing a Michigan cap is his father and also convinced, since his mother won’t talk about him, that his father chose not to come home after escaping from the Tower.

This is a novel about 9/11, one that presents yet more facets than many other 9/11 novels, such as 9/11 syndrome which is affecting many of those who were at Ground Zero, heroism and sacrifice, survivor guilt, and “[What] happens when the story you tell yourself turns out not to be your story at all.” (280)
​
This is primarily a novel about relationships—shifting relationships with family, friends, ex-friends, strangers, and romantic partners. I absolutely adored these characters—Noah and Abbi especially (and their evolving relationship) and Noah’s BFF Jack, Abbi’s divorced-but-best-friends-and-maybe-more parents, her grandmother who is experiencing the onset of dementia, and even Noah’s stepfather who learns to make jokes. I was sorry when the novel ended, not that the story was unfinished but my relationship with the characters was.

None of the three are directly affected—none of their parents worked in the World Trade Center, none of their friends or relatives were killed; they were not physically hurt—but the events of this day color the year following. “I want to know why this is so much a part of me.  I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me.” (104)

​​Readers view the day through their alternating perspectives. We view the constructive acts of strangers as Claire observes,  “There are skyscrapers collapsing behind us, and nobody is pushing, nobody is yelling. When people see we’re a school group, they’re careful not to separate us. Stores are not only giving away sneakers, but some are handing out water to people who need it. You’d think they’d take advantage and raise the prices. But no. That’s not what happens.” (14) and Peter reflects,  “And the people I care about, suddenly I care about them a little more, in this existential way.” (82)
 
Even though Peter and Jason’s date does not go well, another ramification of the day, the three become friends, especially Claire and Peter who attend high school together, Jason returning to college. And the year continues, each is a little changed. As Peter observes, “ If you start the day reading the obituaries, you live your day a little differently.” (123)
 
By December Jasper observes that he has finally gone an entire day without thinking of 9/11 but then wonders what that means. Claire feels the weight of the day lighten a little, but “It is still strange to see the skyline. I have never seen an absence that it so physical.” (126)
 
On the anniversary of 9/11 Claire retraces the steps she took on that day, and Peter and Jason finally have a second date. On March 19, 2003, the day of the United States invasion of Iraq, the three reunite, and Claire observes, “And we are so different from who we were on September 10th.  And also different from who we were on the 11th. And the 12th. And yesterday.” (163) Together they have found the “antidote” to the fear and uncertainty; they have each other as they individually navigate the world and remember what matters.

​Lucas had sneaked into NYC that September 11 morning to ask his uncle to intercede on his behalf. After three concussions in two years of football, his parents and doctor were taking him off the team, and Lucas loved being on a team, a team of two with his father, his dad and uncle’s Ladder 177 firehouse, and especially his football team. Lucas was near Ground Zero when the planes hit the Towers, and when his father went looking for him, they were able to make it safely back to the fire station, helping others along the way.
 
Readers view the attacks of 9/11 up close and personal through Lucas’ eyes; they experience his loss, the heroism of the firefighters, and the resilience of his father. We feel the dust of the falling Towers, see the sky fogged with dust and ashes. “It wasn’t like regular dust. Some of the grains were jagged—bits of ground glass.… The dust, Lucas realized. That was the tower. It was practically all that was left.”
 
The story ends on a realistic but positive note with Lucas, not a player, but still a valued member of the football team.  “Nothing would ever be the same again.” But his father told him, as time passed, it would get, not easy, but easier.
 
This was the first book in Tarshis’ I Survived series that I have read, and I was impressed with the writing, development of the main character, and the complexity of ideas presented in such a short text. This novel could be employed for MG or YA readers who are less proficient or more reluctant readers; English Language Learners who may not be ready for a longer or more complicated text; students who are short on time through absences, trips, or other obligations or who joined the class during the unit; or as a quick whole-class read for background before students break into book clubs to read one of the other 9/11 novels.

​The students interviewed members of the Stuyvesant High study body, faculty, administration, and staff and turned their stories of the historic day and the days that followed into poem-monologues. They transcribed and edited these interviews, keeping close to the interviewees’ words and speech patterns because “each individual has a particular story to tell and the story is more than words: the story is its rhythms and its breaths.” (xiv) They next rehearsed the monologues, each actor playing a variety of roles. Although cast members were chosen from all four grades and to represent the school’s diversity, actors did not necessarily match the culture of their interviewees.
 
They next planned the order of the stories to speak to each other, “paint a picture of anger and panic, of hope and strength, of humor and resilience” (7), rehearsed, and presented two performances in February 2002.
 
With Their Eyes presents the stories of those affected by the events of 9/11 in diverse ways. It shares the stories of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, special education students, an English teacher, a Social Studies teacher, the School Safety Agent, the Building Coordinator, a dining hall worker, a custodian, an assistant principal, and more, some male, some female, some named, others remain anonymous. Written as a play, readers are given a description of each character. Read and performed as a play, readers will experience the effect of Nine Eleven on others, actual people who lived that day and persisted in those days that followed, sharing their big moments and little thoughts.

“the air felt on the outside like something that you might smell at a,
or feel at a barbecue,
but it didn’t, it…it hurt you.
It hurt your windpipe.
I could feel like, things collecting on my esophagus or on my lungs,
and I don’t think that is something that I will ever forget.” (44)
--------
“and you know
what an odd thing this is
a peculiar little odd thing
just a little quirk, just
an odd thing, but, ah, the day before
on Monday evening I had taken the time to shine my shoes.
‘cause it’s kind of weird I took the time to shine my shoes
and I did a good job, right,
and then Tuesday morning
it was a beautiful sunny day
you know
and as I was dusting myself off
from the debris of the north tower
I—I shook my clothes off and then I looked down
at my shoes and my shoes were a whole ‘nother color
they were completely covered
and I thought to myself
‘I just shined them yesterday’…” (102)
--------
And the pregnant English teacher who said,
 
“…during that time of feeling afraid I felt like I was
crazy to be in New York…
and I had lots of conversations with my friends about
whether or not we would…
we would consider, you know, just completely changing our
lives and leaving New York
So far I don’t know anyone who has done that.
But do I plan to raise my child in New York? Yes.” (90)
 
You know, I really believe in healing
And I believe that, the city will
um… be
healed.
I think you have to believe that.” (93)
 
With Their Eyes was written with the thoughts and pens of a school community.

​These fifteen books, written at differing reading levels and complexities, present diverse characters from grade 5 through college, for readers from grades 4 to 12, vastly distinctive plots and conflicts, in a variety of settings—New York City; Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Shanksville, Florida, Japan, Pakistan, and Maine—and timelines. They are also written in different formats. These novels offer different issues resulting from, and perspectives on, the events of Nine Eleven and the repercussions of that day. As such, they particularly lend themselves to reading in book clubs. When classes read novels about 9/11, especially in book clubs where small groups of students are reading different novels, they can access differing perspectives to a story and generate important conversations within each book club and between book clubs. When reading on the same topic, book club members can also compare and share stories with other book clubs.

The eleven books from last year (see the slide show below) are fantastic selections. You you haven't read them all there is no time like the present. With all of these wonderful books under your belt, it would be an easy process to run a unit on this topic after the model that Lesley explains in chapter 10 of her wonderful book--Talking Texts. 

In this chapter, Lesley outlines in significant detail how to run a book unit. This chapter is the culmination of the whole book. Throughout the text she walks teachers through how to engage students. In this chapter she carefully explains some novels that might be used and provides a day by day guide. If you have never tried book clubs or literature circles, Lesley has provided a road map. It you have, then Lesley's work is a great refresher course. 

Below are the covers of many of the novels discussed in chapter 10 of Talking Texts and each image is linked back to Lesley's blog from last year. There is no excuse for not finding and reading what Lesley had to say then and what continues to be important today.

​A middle school and high school teacher for twenty years, Lesley Roessing  is the former Founding Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project at Georgia Southern University (formerly Armstrong State University) where she was also a Senior Lecturer, College of Education. In 2018-19 she served as a Literacy Consultant with a K-8 school and now works independently.
 
Lesley is the author of Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically & Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core; Comma Quest: The Rules They Followed. The Sentences They Saved; No More “Us” & “Them: Classroom Lessons and Activities to Promote Peer Respect; The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension; the just-published Talking Texts: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum and has contributed chapters to Young Adult Literature in a Digital World: Textual Engagement though Visual Literacy and Queer Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the English Language Arts Curriculum. She writes the “Writing to Learn” column, sharing reader response strategies across the curriculum, for AMLE  Magazine and served as past editor of Connections, the award-winning journal of the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. ​

Until next time.

One of the orginal purposes of this blog was to provide an arena for scholars to talk about their ideas, to explore research projects, and to talk about their teaching.  I have been friends with Sophia for quite a few years now. I am never surprized by her creativity and her intelligence. I love when she contributes to the blog. You can find her previous post here, here and here. 

A while ago Sophia started talking with Carlin ( another scholar I love to hear from at conferences) and then they were presenting together. I have not surprized that their friendship developed into an important academic partnership. In this post they talk about one of the ideas from their new book--Letting Go of Literary Whiteness. The book was published last Friday. I ordered my copy several weeks ago. I can't wait for it to arrive.

Enough from me, let's hear from Sophia and Carlin.

On the day when students discussed The Crossover, students initiated discussion around Alexander’s creative story structure and playful use of language--but they made no mention of the racial dynamics of the story or features of African American literature. In fact, when Carlin brought it up, one student observed that it didn’t “seem like a Black book.” Several other students agreed that they weren’t sure whether they were supposed to assume that the main characters were black or not. Working through her surprise during class, Carlin reminded students of the many signals in the book about the characters’ racial identity: Josh had “locks” that he’d grown to imitate his dad’s when he was a professional basketball player; his mom had had to have a talk with her sons about how to respond if they ever interacted with a police officer; every mention of a musical artist or public figure was Black. Yes, Alexander did not explicitly name his characters as Black; but White writers never do. 

​On top of that, when Carlin’s student said that it did not “seem like a Black book,” he followed up to say that it doesn’t focus so much on racism. He seemed to be saying that he expected books about Black characters to be books about racism. This may not be surprising, given that students encounter so few texts featuring characters of color, especially in school, and when students do encounter texts that “address race” in school, they are, more often than not, books that focus on racism. So understanding this novel as a book about a loving, thoughtful, successful Black family focused on first love, on worrying about parental health, and on sibling jealousy challenged many of the racial assumptions Carlin’s students brought to the text. 
 
So what to do as a teacher who already knows about the importance of diversifying our text selections and ensuring that we invite students--all students—to read positive, heroic, everyday stories featuring people of color, across the year’s curriculum? The big epiphany for Carlin here—as difficult it is to admit—is that although she and her students ended up talking about Blackness in the novel at length, what they had not talked about was Whiteness. They failed to talk about the ways Whiteness and racial assumptions color White readers’ responses to literature. 

Therefore, one strategy that we promote, especially for White readers unaccustomed to having to consider the role of our Whiteness in affecting how we respond to texts is to teach students how to racialize their responses as readers. 

Setting up for a racialized reader response 
We adapt questions shaped by Deborah Appleman in her (2015) Critical Encounters ETC where she helps teachers introduce a reader response lens to high school students by asking students to consider the context for reading a text, the details in the text itself, and also what the reader brings to the transaction. In efforts to racialize a reader response lens, we modify the kinds of questions she asks to ensure that readers consider racial factors more explicitly. For each set of racialized reader response questions below, we use italics to signal some possible responses in relation to The Crossover that might have helped Carlin’s students address the challenges they faced in reading Blackness. 

CONTEXT
What is the racial context in which you are reading this text? Any recent local, regional or national events that might be pertinent to consider? How did the fact that students read this novel after first reading a set of texts that focused on racism affect their expectations of this text? How might the fact that students read this novel in a course on cultural pluralism in children’s literature affect how they read the novel?
 
TEXT
What are the major plot points? How do they reinforce or interrupt dominant ways of thinking about race/ism? How do themes reflect or interrupt dominant ways of thinking about race/ism? How are characters of color represented in the text, especially in relation to white characters? To what extent does the form or style of the book reflect the racial perspective of the text? What is the racial identity of the author, and how is that reflected in the text? What is the racial identity of the intended reader, and how do you know?  Alexander made a deliberate decision not to name the race of his characters as Black, something that is far more characteristic of texts by and about Whites. Why might he have made this decision? What are its effects? How does this decision contribute to the themes of the text?
 
READER
How does your racial identity shape your reading of the text? Does the text position you as a racial insider and how do you know? Which details of the text do you relate to? How might not relating to some aspects of the text, especially in relation to race, be significant? Are there facets of the text that are unfamiliar to you or challenging? What might that reveal about your racial assumptions? Given White students’ misreading of the characters in The Crossover as White, what does that reveal about their racial assumptions about characters like those in the novel? What are the consequences of such a misreading?

We begin our example of a racialized reader response above with The Crossover to share one way we are responding to the problem of White readers learning to expect Whiteness when they encounter characters, especially characters not dominantly dealing only with racism in literary plots. This suggested strategy of a racialized reader response need not only be one that could work with this novel, however, nor only after this problem of not “seeing” Blackness transpires. How might students respond to similar questions about other YA novels like, Rita Williams-Garcia’s (2010) One Crazy Summer, Dashka Slater’s The 57 Bus, or Angie Thomas’s On the Come Up?

Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides is Professor of English Education at Westfield State University, and Carlin Borsheim-Black is Associate Professor of English Education at Central Michigan University. Their book, Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist Literature Instruction for White Students (2019), offers more strategies for addressing race and racism through literature, especially with White students.

References of Quotes
​Collins, S. (2008). The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic Press.
 
Garcia, A., & Haddix, M. (2014). The revolution starts with Rue. In S. P. Connors (Ed.), The politics of panem: Challenging genres (pp. 203–217). Rotterdam: Netherlands, Sense Publishers.

Until next week.

Lesley Roessing needs no introduction if you follow this blog. If don't follow yet (I hope you will) drop down to the bottom and read about her achievements. She is a prolific reader and a strong advocate for students and teachers. She has contributed many times on a variety of subjects. Please browse through the contributors page you will find several links to Lesley's posts. These week she builds on her August posts on strong girls (find them here and here) by discussing YA literature featuring strong boys. I love her selections. She focuses on fairly recent texts. Certainly there are plenty more to consider. What is your favorite YA text with a strong male protagonist? Is it one by Gary Paulsen, Jerry Spinelli, Chris Crutcher, Robert Cormier, Will Hobbs, or someone else?

Life has always presented challenges to children and young adults. My father lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. I don’t know if the types of challenges have changed, if more children are affected by challenges, or if we are more aware of the challenges our young people are facing, such as bullying, poverty, homelessness, immigration, mental illness, neurodiversity, physical differences, gender identification, loss, abuse, prejudice and discrimination, parent incarceration, parenthood. Sometimes strength is having the confidence to be ourselves, and sometimes strength is having the courage to transform ourselves into the persons we know we could be.
 
Everyone needs to recognize themselves and see their lives reflected in books to realize that they are not alone and their problems are not unique. Readers also see story and characters’ decisions as maps to help them navigate life. Just as important are books that cause readers to experience the lives of those they may see as ”others” in order to develop empathy and respect for their peers and to catch glimpses into the lives of children they may not personally encounter. The value of books, such as those listed and reviewed, is to generate important conversations; adolescents will more willingly discuss characters and how characters handle, or mishandle, conflicts and personal issues than discuss themselves, their difficulties and concerns, and their actions and decisions. In this way books can also serve as bibliotherapy.

I have written three YA Wednesday guest blogs on the topic of “Strong Girls in MG/YA Literature,” but I realize that boys are going through many of the same challenges and boys are no less strong when summoning the fortitude and resilience necessary to face these trials. In fact, many times boys are expected to be even stronger by virtue of the prescriptive components of gender stereotyping. Traditionally, males are presumed or “supposed” to be independent and avoid weakness. In “Comparing Prescriptive and Descriptive Gender Stereotypes about Children, Adults, and the Elderly,” Anne M. Koenig cites a study that showed that boys tend to be bounded by stricter rules of gender conformity and are subject to stronger “gender policing” than girls. “In fact, some researchers argue that gender role pressures intensify at this age [adolescence] mostly for boys.” (2018). 

​Some of the characters in the following novels will help readers negotiate difficulties in their own lives and empathize with those of their peers. As whole-class, book club, or independent reading, these stories will generate important classroom or small group conversations, or private reflections, about how characters experienced and met challenges encountered, providing maps for those readers.
 
In alphabetical order by the title of their stories are 25 strong boys from MG/YA literature, written in prose, graphics, and verse at a variety of reading and interest levels, featuring diverse characters and authors and an array of challenges. These are not all newly-published novels, but they are ones that I have read and reviewed in the last two years.
 
Following these, I have also included 5 novels which feature strong boys and girls who face challenges together.

Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram
​
​“I had never been surrounded by my family before. Not really.
“I loved them.
“I loved how their eyelashes were long and dark and distinct, just like mine. And how their noses curved around a little bump in the middle, just like mine. And how their hair cow-licked in three separate places, just like mine.”(174)
Darius Kellner just didn’t fit in.
He was a Fractional Persian who was a little overweight from his medicines for clinical depression. He didn’t fit in in school where he was one of two Persian students, Javaneh being a True Persian. He didn’t fit in at school where he was bullied by Trent and his Soulless Minions of Orthodoxy. He didn't fit in at work at Tea Haven where they steeped every tea to a full boil, despite the advice of Darius who knew teas. And he didn’t fit in his family: with his mother, a True Persian; and his father, the Ubermensch, a handsome blonde American with Aryan looks; and his little sister, Laleh, who was also a Fractional Persian but was popular at school and spoke fluent Farsi with her Persian relatives and friends.
But when Darius and his family go to Iran to visit his grandmother and dying grandfather, Darius becomes Darioush and is enveloped by his extended family and the Persian culture. There he makes a new best friend, plays “soccer/non-American football,” finding that he is actually good at the sport, and he learns more about his father. “I finally managed to open up the well inside me.”(299) But the most important lesson he learns is that Darius the Great is not okay, and that is okay.
Through Darius’ story, YA readers will learn quite a lot about the Persian culture and how it feels to stand with one foot in two worlds.

Dear Martin by Nic Stone

​Justyce always thought that if he studied hard and stayed out of trouble, he, a black teen from a marginal neighborhood, would do fine and be treated equally. Justyce is a full-scholarship senior at a college preparatory boarding school, captain of the debate team, and has received his acceptance to Yale. Then, helping a drunk ex-girlfriend, who is bi-racial with very light skin, into the back of a car, a white cop slams him around, cuffs him, and takes him to jail. This experience completely challenges his concept of racial equality in America, and Justyce begins writing letters to Martin Luther King, trying to figure out what Martin would do.

When students debate equality in class, Justyce learns that his cousin Manny’s rich white school friends insist that there is equality even as they disrespect him and challenge his college acceptance as affirmative action. Taking his side is his Jewish debate partner, Sara Jane; Justyce realizes that they have some things in common and falls for her even though he knows his mother will never accept an interracial relationship.

Things escalate, and Justyce loses his sense of where he stands in the world. “Every time I turn on the news and see another black person gunned down, I’m reminded that people look at me and see a threat instead of a human being” (p.95). Manny and Justyce are gunned down by a white, off-duty police officer, and after the trial, Justyce is left even more hopeless “Martin…it never ends, does it?” (p.201), but he does admit, “And maybe that’s my problem. I haven’t really figured out who I am or what I believe yet…, but knowing you [Martin] were my age [when he wrote to the editor of the Atlanta Constitution] gives me hope that maybe I’ve got some time to figure things out”” (p.202).

This is certainly another novel that will generate important conversations among readers, and would work well in books clubs centered around social justice issues, combined with All American Boys, The Hate U Give, Long Way Down, Yummy, and How It Went Down. 

Denis Ever After by Tony Abbott

“So. I made a difference.” (132)

Denis died when he was 7 years old. It is now five years later, and he is with his great-grandmother GeeGee in Port Haven where the dead go to forget their lives—backwards, helped by those on Earth who begin forgetting them, until they “fade peacefully.” Usually the dead remain the age they were when they died, but Denis was a twin and since Matt, his brother, imagines them still doing things together, he has aged along with Matt.

Denis died under mysterious circumstances. He was kidnapped and found three days later, halfway across the state from his home, placed on the Georgia memorial on the Gettysburg battlefield. Was he murdered?  By whom? How? And where? As twelve-year-old Matt and his friend Trey begin to investigate, Denis feels he must come back as a ghost and help them. What follows is a story of loss, broken families (both that of Denis and Matt, their father and two brothers, and the family who becomes involved in the kidnapping), the effects of war, redemption, and bonds. Russell, the scribe of Port Haven, says that “there are bonds between all of us, the living and the not.” (7) Denis risked a lot to create those bonds and make a difference.
​
“A thousand thousand threads! Patterns woven and repeated, subtly or accidentally, over the years. One thing I’ve figured out, though. Those threads aren’t just lines connecting and reconnecting. They’re more like arteries, pumping life from one thing to another, creating not simply patterns in a fabric, but a living connection from person to person to thing.” (303) Matt’s reflection describes Tony Abbott’s well-crafted complex tale. At first, I thought the author would never be able to pull all the events together; however, like arteries in a body, they each served to nourish each other. Teachers and parents have expressed concern about finding books for our more advanced young adolescent readers; in many YA novels, the themes, events, and language are not appropriate for 9 to 13-year-olds. Denis Ever After is a complex book appropriate for young readers and, given that the vocabulary is not particularly advanced, it will also appeal to readers who are interested in an intricate mystery.

Falling into the Dragon’s Mouth by Holly Thompson

Over seventy percent of young people say they have encountered bullying in their schools—as victim, offender or bystander. The Centers for Disease Control and Department of Education defined bullying as “unwanted, aggressive behavior that involves a real or perceived power imbalance and is repeated or has a high likelihood of repetition.” But bullying is not a problem only in the United States.

As Holly Thompson so powerfully and effectively portrayed female bullying—bullying by exclusion, spreading rumors, and meanness ("mean girls")—in her verse novel Orchards, she portrays the more physical and verbal abusive bullying of males in Falling into the Dragon’s Mouth.

Jason Parker is a fifth-grade American boy living and attending school in Japan where he is different—and bullied for being different. He has redefined “friend” as anyone who doesn’t punch or kick him or refer to him as a “stinking foreigner.” Near the end of the school year, Jason is placed in a group, or han, with five of the meanest kids in the class. What follows is relentless bullying, and the reader sees the importance of telling an adult, but not just any adult. The teacher has to be aware of what is going on, and Jason is afraid that his parents will make it worse. He is hoping to last until his parents can afford to send him to the international school.

With the support of his little sister, two new friends outside school—an older man with Parkinson’s disease and a teen who quit school because of the bullying, his English group, and aikido, Jason perseveres until the bullies “play” the choking game and Jason’s parents and the school finally become involved. Jason’s aikido instructor explains “…we need to train so that we sense danger in order to avoid it” but also warns him “the world is full of all kinds of people and some of them are a bit lost” (308-309).
 
In short lyrical free-verse lines, readers learn about Japanese culture but also the trials of being perceived as different in any culture. Readers will experience the effects of bullying on children and the importance of effectively stopping and preventing bullying, but they will also become aware of the dilemmas involved with trying to end bullying. I found myself frustrated that Jason did not tell his parents, but then I am an adult. I also was disturbed that his teacher ignored all the signs, but I have learned that this is too often true. In fact, Jason wants to change the rule in his school that allows teachers to hit students.

An effective study of bullying would be for a class to either read both Orchards and Falling into the Dragon’s Mouth to gain different perspectives and begin conversations about different types of bullying, or for half the class to read one of the novels, or to combine these novels with other books on bullying that I reviewed in “Books to Begin Conversations about Bullying. Part 1 (http://www.yawednesday.com/blog/books-to-begin-conversations-about-bullying-by-lesley-roessing) and Part 2 (http://www.yawednesday.com/blog/books-to-begin-conversations-about-bullying-part-2-by-lesley-roessing).

Firegirl by Tony Abbott

​When I taught middle school, I told my students that this was these were years (7th-8th grade) that they would decide who they would become, not what they would become (that would happen in high school), the type of person they would become. Many adults don’t remember just how confusing and challenging adolescence can be—adolescents have friends who are BFFs one day and frenemies another; some hang out with “friends” they don’t even like, just to have a friend or to seem popular; and even through most know right from wrong, sometimes “right” is just so hard to do. Hormones are “raging” and take over brains. And there is always the worry of judgment and censure from others. Author Tony Abbott remembers and designs Tom, the protagonist of Firegirl, with all these challenges and insecurities.
 
Seventh grader Tom, who, as his mother says needs to “get out there,” has a fairly predictable life. He goes to a Catholic school where he is quiet and most kids ignore him; he has fantasies about saving the life of a grateful Courtney, the prettiest girl in the class; and he hangs out daily with Jeff, a friend who is a little strange, has an unhappy home life, and may not be very truthful or nice but just might help Tom impress Courtney.
 
Then Tom’s world and values change when Jessica Feeney, a girl who has been badly burned in an accident, joins their class. While many of their classmates ignore Jessica or spread rumors about her, Tom begins seeing her as the person she is even though he is “afraid” of her “The way you look…it scares me.” (134) They strike up a friendship—to a degree—although, as Tom admits, “I never talk to you where anybody can see me…” (135), but hard is it is for him, he wants to do what is right, although it is realistically a slow transition. “It suddenly seemed like the hardest thing in the world to go over there.” (129)
 
The story shows the how one seventh grader decides the person he will become. As Tom says, “On the outside it doesn’t look like very much happened” (144), and he is not sure that this experience has made him a better person, but he is a changed person and “I’d want to tell her thank you.” (145).
 
Firegirl is a novel I missed reading when published in 2006, but when I saw that Tony Abbott has written a new novel, The Great Jeff [see below], which focuses on the character Jeff from Firegirl, I decided to read the earlier novel and am so glad I did. Tom’s voice took me in from the first page and led me through a pivotal three weeks in his adolescent life.

In Sight of Stars by Gae Polisner

Researchers at Johns Hopkins Children’s Center found that “children who lost a parent due to suicide when they were teenagers or young adults had the highest chance of being hospitalized for a suicide attempt in the first 2 years after the parental suicide.” This highlights the vital importance of providing support to children who are grieving.

Klee’s father committed suicide, and Klee was the one who found him. If that weren’t traumatic enough, his mother moves Klee away from his friends and Manhattan for a senior year in a new high school in the suburbs, away from the museums, art, and parks he loves—the museums, art, and parks where he spent time listening to his father’s stories about Van Gogh and life—and from his friends.

Klee looks for support in Sarah, his one new friend, but he may be demanding more than she can give. When she disappoints him, he cuts himself with a knife and ends up in a psychiatric hospital.

The reader lives through Klee’s hospitalization with him; as does he, we wonder what is real, what is imagined. Who can he trust? He already found that he cannot trust his perfect mother, or can he? Who is real, and whom does he fabricate. How much like his favorite artist, Van Gogh, is he?

Gae Polisner creates a perfect puzzle. I was reminded of the sliding puzzles I played with in childhood. In sliding puzzles, there always is a piece missing. And Klee finds he does have a piece of the puzzle that is missing and, when he finds it, he may be able to build the picture and trust again.

Once started, I literally could not put this novel down. (Picture me frowning at the doctor for taking me on time for my appointment.) The story is skillfully crafted, as each piece slides into the opening left by the movement of another piece. The characters—Klee, Dr. Alvarez, Sister Agnes Teresa, Martin, Sarah, and even Klee’s mother—are well-developed and are integral parts of the puzzle. There is a transcendental or ethereal quality that reminds me of A.S King’s Still Life with Tornado. There are so many pathways and levels offered by this novel that I know I will read it many more times.

“…the sight of stars is always right there. Right in your line of vision. Even on the cloudiest day.”

New Kid by Jerry Craft

Jordan leaves his neighborhood each day to attend seventh grade at Riverdale Academy Day School (although he would rather go to an art school), a school that is not as diverse as he would like and he is not sure he will fit in. On the otherhand, he is beginning to not fit in with his neighborhood friends, who start calling him “Private School.”
 
As one of the new kids at school, he has a guide, Liam, who is white, lives in a mansion, wears salmon shirts, is a third-generation RAD student—the auditorium is named after his family.Liam constantly says, “Just don’t judge me” which is confusing to Jordan.
 
As Jordan becomes friends with Liam and some of the other kids, he realizes that everyone—teachers and students alike—judges each other, expecting them to fit stereotypes—Alexandra, the Weird Girl; Ashley, the Gossip Girl; Drew, the Troublemaker; Andy, the Bully; Ramon, the Mexican (who is actually Nicaraguan). Even Jordan feels his art teacher is not a real artist because she paints abstract art until she explains “I choose to do it to free up my creativity…to break boundaries.” (222)
 
Jordan is shocked when Liam admits, “I just don’t feel like there’s anyone who’s like me at this school. I always feel so different.” And then continues, “Well, it’s better now. You and Drew are regular people.” (151) As the school year ends, Jordan admits to his parents, “You know, I feel kinda like a new kid.” (245)
 
A graphic novel that will appeal to readers grades 5-9, the drawings add nuance to the story. And the reader gains another entry into Jordan’s life and thoughts through his black/white sketch book. 

No Fixed Address by Susan Nielsen

Felix Fredrik Knutsson is 12-3/4 years old and has to determine ways to navigate life. “Astrid and Daniel were great people…but they were not great parents." (176)

I loved the main character, Felix, and also his two friends Dylan and Winnie. This novel, which takes place in Vancouver, highlights a very important crisis, in both the United States and Canada—homelessness.

What I most appreciated in the novel was the resilience and resourcefulness of Felix and the support of his friends. Also the novel illustrates many of the challenges experienced by homeless families to maintain the veneer of normalcy and to stay together. The novel paints a realistic picture of many of the over 1.3 million homeless students in the United States and in Canada, the novel’s setting, where an estimated 235,000 Canadians experience homelessness each year, one of the fastest growing demographics of the homeless population being children and families.

Therefore, this story, or stories like this [see former guest blog “Hiding in Pain Sight: A Different Diversity http://www.yawednesday.com/blog/hidin...] need to be read by teachers and peers to build empathy and understanding of classmates who may be experiencing these types of difficulties.

However. there were some details that may be considered inappropriate for MG readers which I found unnecessary to the plot, such as suggestions that Felix’s mother had relations with men to cover rent and a man exposing himself to Felix in the library. And while in many books we see that homelessness may be the result of an illness or condition (such as a parent’s alcoholism) or bad luck (i.e., Preacher Jack in this novel), Felix’s mother appeared to not even attempt to be a good employee. She was rude to customers and, although in some cases she hinted that the customer’s actions were inappropriate, in the one interaction the reader actually observes, she is just rude, unprofessional, and not doing the job she was hired to do when all the customer asks is to be waited on. She does suffer from some type of depression but that appears to keep her from searching for jobs, not keeping them. These actions could lead to profound discussions about responsibility and fault.

This novel covers an important topic with a resourceful main character whom readers will like and learn from, but may serve classes better with teacher-led discussions.

Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt

"You know how teachers are. If they get you to take out a book they love too, they're yours for life" (p.168). Every teacher will want to get this in every middle grade/high school student’s hands. I read this novel straight through, stopping only to drive to a school and guest-teach a 6th grade class (where I talked about the book and ran home to finish).

I loved every single character (except the bullies—child and adult) from Joseph who has been repeatedly hurt by others; to Jack who "has Joseph's back" almost from the beginning and counts how many times Joseph smiles while not giving up on trying to get Joseph to call him Jack, not Jackie; to Jack's parents, who are Joseph's foster parents who help Joseph to heal and become whole again; to the teachers and coach who see the positive in Joseph.

I laughed and I cried through the novel, but I keep re-writing the ending, not because it wasn't well-written, not because it wasn't realistic, but because it's not the ending I wanted. 

Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian

“Things get a little more complicated when you know somebody’s story.…It’s hard to fear someone, or be cruel to them, when you know their story.”

The majority of the 21.3 million refugees worldwide in 2016 were from Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. The United States resettled 84,994 refugees. Together with immigrants, refugee children make up one in five children in the U.S. More than half the Syrian refugees who were resettled in the U.S. between October 2010 and November 2015 are under the age of 20.
​
Narrator Tom Bouchard is a high school senior. He is a soccer player, top of his class academically, and well-liked. He lives in Maine in a town that has become a secondary migration location for Somali refugees. These Somali students are trying to navigate high school without many benefits, including the English language. They face hostility from many of their fellow classmates and the townspeople, including the mayor; one high school teacher, at the request of students, permits only English to be spoken in her classroom.
 
When four Somali boys join the soccer team, turning it into a winning team, and when he is forced to complete volunteer hours at the K Street Center where he tutors a young Somali boy and works with a female Somali classmate, Tom learns at least a part of their stories. Tom fights bigotry, especially that of his girlfriend—now ex-girlfriend, but he still doesn’t comprehend the complexity of the beliefs, customs, and traditions of his new friends, and his actions have negative consequences for all involved. While trying to defend the truth, Tom learns a valuable lesson, “Truth is a difficult word. One person’s truth is another person’s falsehood. People believe what appears to be true and what they feel is true.”

Lesson Learned: Tolerance and acceptance is not enough; we all need to reach respect (for others and their cultures, beliefs, and traditions). 

Rebound by Kwame Alexander

“I want to be the hero in my story.” (339) The year Charlie Bell turned twelve many good things were supposed to happen, but his father died suddenly, and Charlie began to lose his way. His dad was “a star in our neighborhood,” but on March 9, 1988, Charlie’s “star exploded.” A good kid, he starts making bad decisions—skipping school, taking part in stealing an elderly neighbor’s deposit bottles. Even his smart friend CJ, a girl who might become more than a friend, can’t keep him on track. And his life began to revolve around his comics.

Then his mother sends Charlie to spend the summer with his grandparents on their “farm.” Through his grandmother’s love and his grandfather’s work ethic, and most of all, through his cousin Roxie’s obsession with basketball, the re-named Chuck discovers a love for basketball, and he learns to “rebound on the court. And off.” (2)

I became immediately caught up in the rhythm and rhyme of the free verse, and font size, style, and spacing were effectively employed throughout the narrative. Many readers will be engaged by the graphics, comic book style, that are scattered throughout.

This was definitely a character-driven novel. I fell in love with Charlie/Chuck and all the other characters, especially granddaddy Percival Bell and cousin Roxie Bell. In fact, I would love to see a novel featuring the young Miss Bell herself.

A prequel to The Crossover—Charlie is the Crossover twins’ father—this book would serve as a companion reading, but it can stand on its own, although I am not sure that the last section, set in 2018, would make sense to those who had not read The Crossover (but, by now, I think most students have read the earlier novel, and if reading these novels in different book clubs, The Crossover club members could update the Rebound readers).

Restart by Gordon Korman

In this novel I met a new favorite character—Chase Ambrose. The eighth grade, MVP football player fell off his roof and suffered from a concussion—and amnesia. The “new” Chase is a nice guy who plays Barbies with his 4-year-old half-sister and volunteers at the senior citizens’ home.
​
When he returns to school, becomes a valuable member of the video club, and begins making new friends, new, improved Chase finds, to his horror, that the old Chase was not just a bully, he was the Head Bully; one boy even had to change schools to avoid him. His new video-nerd friends are some of the kids he bullied the most. After a particularly vicious prank, pulled with his best friends and fellow football team members Aaron and Bear, he was given community service as a punishment. Surprisingly his father approves of Bully Chase and is disappointed that his concussion prevents him from playing football.

As Chase navigates his “new” world, he is worried that he might slip back into old habits and that he won’t be able to convince his new friends that he really has changed. He finds that he might still have to pay for who he was and figure out who he will be able to become. I read this well-written novel straight through, worrying that it might be too late for Chase to be accepted for who he now is.
 
Restart is a perfect novel to begin important conversations about bullying and whether bullies can change because bullying affects all youth, not only those who are bullied, but those who bully others and those who see bullying going on. Approximately 30% of young people admit to bullying others in surveys (Bradshaw, C.P., Sawyer, A.L., & O’Brennan, L.M. (2007). Bullying and peer victimization at school: Perceptual differences between students and school staff. School Psychology Review, 36(3), 361-382,).

Seeing Red by Kathy Erskine

"The truth will set you free." Or so writes Miss Miller on her board.

When I studied history in school, I learned dates, events, and names. I didn’t learn the motivations, the stories, the different perspectives on the truth, and most important, I didn’t learn what changed and what still needs to change. And I didn’t learn to reflect on where I stand and how I can become an agent of change. Teachers told me what to think; in Seeing Red the main character observes, Miss Miller “tell[s] us to think!” In his first classroom encounter with this new, hippie teacher, Red says, “I mean, it’s all happened already and there’s nothing you can do about it, so it’s kind of a waste of time.” Seeing Red takes the reader back to the 1970’s where Red learns that in his town discrimination and racism is still alive and his family was more involved than he knew. Learning his history will be crucial in making things “right.”

Frederick Stewart Porter (Red), the 12-year-old main character of Kathy Erskine's novel begins with the narrator’s observation, “Folks don't understand this unless it happens to them: When your daddy dies, everything changes." and he spends the novel navigating those changes. Red knows in many instances what his father would want him to do, but he now experiences the complexities of what is right to do and how to make that happen.
 
Where do his rights/wants end and others’ begin. His mother needs to sell their house, shop, and store; Red wants to stay, to preserve his father’s family legacy. He has to decide how far he will go to do so. To enlist the help of the town gang, he first goes along with their initiation. If you burn a cross but don’t mean it to make a statement, does it still make a statement? What if you were just doing what you were told to do? What if your friend who is black happens to be there? What if he is tied up? And beaten?

As Red learns more about the town and his family’s history in forming that town, he thinks back to his father’s words, “Next time, you think for yourself and decide what makes you a man, a good man.” Red does. “It felt like there was nothing but change happening.”

Why do we study history? It’s all happened already and there’s nothing you can do about it, right? This novel reminds me of the Edmund Burke quote, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing.” And that's one reason for our adolescents to read Seeing Red. We can encourage our adolescents to "Discover the past, understand the present, change the future."-Kathy Erskine. 

Small as an Elephant by Jennifer Richard Jacobson

According to the National Institute for Mental Health, 9.8 million Americans aged 18 or older, or 4.2% of the adult population, are living with a serious mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depressive disorder. Other mental illnesses that may affect parenting and child welfare include obsessive-compulsive, paranoid, psychotic, panic, and posttraumatic stress disorders. Because two-thirds of females and one-half of men afflicted with serious mental illnesses are likely to be parents, "There's a significant number of individuals with some level of emotional distress who are raising children," says Joanne Nicholson, PhD, a professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center in The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth University.

Jack’s mother frequently spins out of control. Sometimes she is sad, sometimes she is normal and sorry about her behaviors, but more often she is “spinning”—loud and excited and full of fun, usually inappropriate. She takes Jack out of school to go to amusement parks and makes up games, but she also fights with her mother and takes away Jack’s trust of his grandmother, and Jack wishes his mother would take her medication more regularly. On a camping trip in Maine, she leaves Jack and disappears. It is up to this 11-year-old boy to find his way back to Massachusetts and, hopefully, his mother. Obsessed with elephants, Jack steals a toy elephant which becomes his good luck charm as he battles weather, a broken finger, hunger, fatigue, and evading the police, before he learns to trust a new friend who takes him to Lydia, the elephant, and to his grandmother who will help make his life safe and filled with love.
 
Part adventure, part confronting challenges and accepting help, this novel and its resilient character will appeal to many and raise empathy for what too many children face.

Squint by Chad Morris & Shelly Brown 

“So hit me with your best challenge for spreading kindness…. A challenge that helps people relate to people…. Share a little piece of yourself, like I did, and let us get to know and love you.” (238) These final words from Danny, a boy who suffered and died from progeria, guide Flint and McKell in their search for acceptance and belief in themselves.
 
Flint, nicknamed Squint because he has an eye disease that compromises his eyesight, has two goals: to win a comic book contest and make friends in middle school. McKell is a new student from a school where she had few friends. In Flint’s school she hangs out with the popular kids who bully Squint. But McKell befriends Squint, and they encourage each other, following her brother’s Danny’s video challenges, to attempt something new and follow their passions. When Squint adds a female superhero hero, Diamond, to aid his comic hero also named Squint, he supports McKell in overcoming her fear of sharing her talent. As they step out of their comfort zones, Squint confronts his bullies and finds that relationships are not always what you think they are.
 
This is a powerful novel about trust in others and trust in oneself and about adolescents learning to be themselves as they navigate middle school with all its rules. Comics (graphics) to go along with the story are not included, but Squint does share the text of his comic book as he creates it.

The Dollar Kids by Jennifer Richard Jacobson

I cried because there were sad events and frustrating events, and I cried because there were happy and poignant occasions. But I also cried because the book came to an end, and, even though the author gave us a hint into the future, I didn’t want to leave Millville and its inhabitants, both old and new, especially the Dollar Kids.

I don’t know if today’s children of all ages face more challenges than those who came before them or whether, through reading, my eyes have been open to challenges that children face and have always faced. As Jacobson opened our eyes to the plight of homeless children through her memorable character Ari in Paper Things, in her new novel Dollar Kids she shows readers the effect of loss and guilt on a young adolescent.

Eleven-year-old Lowen is one of the Dollar Kids whose families move to Millville to take advantage of the dollar houses offered to deserving applicants to restore. Lowen’s family is looking for a new beginning away from the city where his young friend was a victim of a fatal shooting in a grocery store. Lowen feels loss, but he also feels guilt because didn’t he send Abe to the store to get rid of his constant questions and suggestions? This is his secret, and when Lowen, his older brother Clem, his sister Anneth, and his British mum move (father to follow) into the Albatross, their dilapidated dollar house, he struggles with this snake inside him as he also contends with making friends, competing in sports, resuming his drawing, and helping his mother make a success of her new business. As he connects with the Millville inhabitants and reconnects with his family, he learns to find peace in the unseen force.

What I appreciated is the diversity of characters, especially in age. Many authors offer us books that have characters of a particular age, and it has been said that most readers like to read about characters who are at least their age or older. While the main character Lowen is eleven, there are plenty of characters who are younger and older, and an array of both male and female characters. Even the adult characters are diverse and interesting. There are also sports, art, and music, as these characters have divergent talents as well as a range of family situations. But what they all have in common is the hope that Millville will survive, and they find it “takes a village,” working together to make that happen.

Lowen is a cartoonist who finds a place in the town as a caricaturist, and an engaging and effective feature of the novel is the graphics by Ryan Andrews. Lowen uses these comics to manage, and explore, his grief and guilt.

Growing up in a small town myself, I can appreciate the Millvillians who know everything about everyone—or so they think, bicker and compete, but can be counted on in a crisis. 

The Exact Location of Home by Kate Messner

A few years ago I read an article “Give the Kid a Pencil” (Teaching Tolerance, April 4, 2016). The article focused on creating “a psychologically safe, mistake-friendly environment” for the student who always forgets a pencil. While I agree with all the author wrote, I started thinking about the student who doesn’t forget a pencil, but doesn’t have a pencil. What does one need to have a pencil? Some money—not much, but it needs to be extra money and rarely can one purchase a single pencil; transportation to get to the store; a place to safely keep the pencil; and a sharpener to be able to use the pencil for homework. Education Department statistics show 1.3 million homeless children were enrolled in U.S. schools in the 2012-2013 school year. I assume that number has risen and that many of them don’t have a pencil.

Kevin Richards and Kirby Zigonski, characters in Kate Messner’s The Exact Location of Home do not have pencils—as their teacher points out in front of their eighth grade class. Kevin and Zig are homeless. Homeless children also have less than ideal conditions to complete homework and Zig experiences his stellar grades falling.

It is crucial that teachers and their students read novels such as The Exact Location of Home to become aware of who may be sitting in front of them and who may be keeping secrets from their own friends. When the teacher berates Zig for lack of homework and pencil, he writes, “I don’t say anything.” It is also important for children experiencing poverty, homelessness, fathers who leave, or the other circumstances outlined in this novel to see themselves reflected in a book.

Besides falling grades and one pair of jeans and 4 shirts as his only available clothing, Zig has another problem—he wants to find the father who abandoned them, not only for child support to help them rent an apartment but just to talk. In his free time, he follows geocaching clues, clues he thinks his father has left for him. He finds not his father, but as Scoop says, that “Friends help” and, like electrons, he travels a path “and things work out.” 

The Great Jeff by Tony Abbott

The Great Jeff is a sequel or companion book, to Abbott’s 2006 novel Firegirl, and I found it necessary to have read the first book to understand Jeff's feelings about relationships in the new novel. Firegirl left me with questions about Jeff who was not the most sympathetic character and—from his behaviors in that novel—deserved to be ditched by his best friend Tom Bender.

In this well-written, engaging novel, the reader learns more about Jeff and his family and home life, and he becomes a more sympathetic character. Jeff was nine when his father left. Dad is now living with a second girlfriend who is pregnant, and he has stopped paying for Jeff’s education at St. Catherine’s. As a result, Jeff has to change schools for eighth grade. “I still wanted to love my dad. Inside me, I still wanted to.” (65)
His mother, an alcoholic, loses her job with no savings for rent. Jeff becomes the sensible one and gives up buying his beloved comics and skips lunch every other day. They begin selling their clothing, household items, and furniture until they lose their rented house and become homeless, moving from run-down motel to a friend’s home to sleeping in their car to a shelter. “Home. Homeless. Funny how it doesn’t take much to go from one to the other.” (171)
 
Through it all, Jeff stays positive and becomes resilient for his mom who only infrequently behaves like a responsible adult. “She’d taken over sounding grownup now. She had to sometime.” (158) He helps her hide their situation, despite his lack of clothing and the days he smells.
 
In the shelter Jeff can finally open up and share his problems with other children. “[Jano’s] story was different from mine but the same too.” (199) And when his mother ends up in the hospital, Jeff learns to trust those who were always his friends.
 
Homeless children and teens could be hiding in plain sight in our classrooms. The federal definition of homelessness includes those who lack a “fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence,” sleeping on the streets or in cars, in shelters, couch surfing, or children who have run away or were kicked out of their homes. By the time homeless children reach school age, their homelessness affects their social, physical, and academic lives. The number of homeless children in public schools has doubled since before the recession, reaching a record national total of 1.36 million in the 2013-2014 school year, according to new federal data. A 2017 study found the number of students ages 13 to 17 who have experienced homelessness in the past year to be about 700,000 young people nationwide.
 
Novels such as The Great Jeff and those I read and reviewed for “Hiding in Plain Sight: A Different Diversity” [http://www.yawednesday.com/blog/hiding-in-plain-sight-a-different-diversity] are important for children who need to see themselves represented in a book and for those who need to learn about peers they might view as different from themselves to learn understanding and empathy. These novels are also important reads for educators.

 The Last Exit to Normal by Michael Harmon

Rebelling against his father's coming out when he was 13, Ben has had continuous brushes with the law in Spokane, Washington. When Ben's father and his new spouse Edward move 17-year-old Ben from the city to a small town in Montana, Ben experiences a new type of life and new types of relationships.
 
Ben befriends his 11-year-old neighbor who is being abused by his father and tries to help him find the mother who ran away (as did Ben's). He is led gently into small town ways by his new girlfriend and her scary brother, and he stands up to the town bully who just may be psychotic.

The novel is written with witty humor (I found myself laughing out loud), but I found the scenes between Ben and his father nonproductive and repetitive—most likely demonstrating the author's point—until they come to an understanding. Even though Ben is 17, I see this as a coming-of-age novel as Ben lets go of his 14-year-old self and accomplishes multiple acts of heroism. The story is filled with great characters—especially Edward's mother Miss Mae. 

The Season of Styx Malone by Kekla Magoon

“Styx Malone didn’t believe in miracles, but he was one. Until he came along, there was nothing very special about life in Sutton, Indiana.” (1) The first page just keeps getting better until the last line seals the deal: “It all started the moment I broke the cardinal rule of the Franklin household: Leave well enough alone.” (1)
 
Ten-year-old narrator Caleb Franklin and his eleven year old brother Bobby Gene live in a small town, and their father does not allow them to venture out from where everyone knows them and they are “safe.” Caleb’s goal is to get to the museum in Indy. And to be extraordinary, not “extra-ordinary” as he thinks his father is calling him.
 
Then the brothers meet a mysterious sixteen-year-old name Styx Malone, Yes, as in Greek mythology, where the River Styx separated the world of the living from the world of the dead. Malone may not be their transport from the dead to the living, but it surely seems so. Styx is free from parental restraints and always has a plan that becomes bigger and better. “The moment felt like Saturday, like summer heat, like adventure…. It felt like the soft swish of corn tassels and being one step closer to an impossible dream …One step closer to our happy ending.” (116)
 
As the boys become more and more involved with Styx, providing the friendship it appears he is missing in his life, they learn that he is a foster child who has moved from home to home, family to family, and his life may not be as glamorous as it seems. “’Only person you can ever count on is yourself.’…There were lots of people I could count on…. But I got what Styx was saying: Freedom came with a price.” (154)
 
Many things changed the season Styx Malone “shook [their] world.” That summer did make a difference—to Styx himself and to expanding the world of the Franklins.
 
There were many interesting, delightful characters, including Cory Cromier, the eleven-year-old bully who loves babies and becomes a Franklin brothers’ ally, and Pixie, Styx’s magical ten-year-old foster sister. This book, with its short chapters, each ending with seductive lines. and prospective discussions of morality, ethics, responsibility, friendship, and family, would make a good read aloud for grades 5-8.

The Someday Birds by Sally J. Pla

Anne Lamott wrote about writing in her book Bird by Bird—and that is exactly what Sally Pla does in her first novel. This emotional novel is written bird by bird (literally), character by character, event by event, emotion by emotion.
 
Charlie’s father was an English teacher and a journalist. On an assignment in Afghanistan, he sustained a brain injury and now he does not appear to be aware of his family. He has been living in a hospital where a mysterious, bossy young woman visits him daily.
 
Charlie, the narrator of the story, is a neuro-diverse young adolescent; he washes his hands twelve times, is obsessively organized, doesn’t like being touched, tries to distinguish emotions from visual clues, and is fixated with, and passionate about, birds. When his father is transferred from California to a hospital in Virginia for further treatment and his grandmother goes to be with him, Charlie, his younger twin brothers, and his 15-year-old boy-crazy sister, find themselves driving cross country with the stranger from the hospital room, a Bosnian woman named Ludmila.
 
Charlie decides that if he can find all the birds that he and his father had hoped to see— their Someday Birds—even the extinct ones, his father will be healed. Recognizing that this will at least serve to help Charlie feel better, Ludmila supports his endeavor and plans their trip around the needs of Charlie and the family. Meanwhile, along the way they learn her story and her ties to their father.
 
The travelers have adventures, meet people, find birds that were not even on the list, and Charlie acquires the journal of his hero—ornithologist, artist, and philosopher Tiberius Shaw, PhD, whom he hopes to meet when they arrive in Virginia—as well as a dog he names Tiberius. By the end Charlie has redefined the meaning of success and, with the reader, has learned a bit of history and geography, and a lot about birds and human nature. “Bird’s-eye views or close–up human views; the world is confusing and surprising both ways” (323).

The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor

When I received a copy of this book, I wondered if I would be as captivated by Mason as I was with another Leslie Connor character, Perry Cook (All Rise for the Honorable Perry T Cook). Perry and Mason have a lot in common; they are both loyal, resilient, glass-half-full guys who persevere through challenging experiences. Mason has faced a variety of challenges. He is the largest kid in his grade, sweats uncontrollably, has trouble reading and writing; he lives with his grandmother and uncle in a house he refers to as the “crumbledown”—and then Shayleen moves in and takes over his bedroom.

Mason has suffered more than his share of losses—he had a walkaway daddy, his grandfather and mother died, and, along with most of the town, Mason is still mourning his very best friend who fell from the ladder of their tree house and died. And there are two bullies who are always after him. What Mason does have, beside an indomitable spirit, are a compassionate school social worker, a new best friend who is as loyal as Mason, a neighbor’s dog who loves him, and a supportive family.
 
However, what Mason doesn’t realize is that Benny died under mysterious circumstances and some people, including the lieutenant who questions him incessantly and Benny’s two fathers, think Mason may be to blame. As Calvin and Mason create their own hideaway and battle bullies, Mason inadvertently solves the crime, but he still is never one to think badly of anyone, “My heart feels scrambled” (p. 320). The truth as told by Mason Buttle is the truth.

The reader will fall in love with Mason, and even though he may begin the story wearing a T-shirt that proclaims him as “STOOPID,” he ends with the revelation that “Knowing what you love is smart.”

With very short chapters and a wealth of diverse characters, this novel would be another good teacher read-aloud. 

Words on Bathroom Walls by Julia Walton

​He is very tall, somewhat irreverent, and has schizophrenia, but there is something about Adam that captivated me immediately. I had to keep reading his story. I would be washing dishes and think, “What is Adam doing now? I have to get back to him.” I even was fascinated with his hallucinations, or imaginary friends, especially Rebecca who is almost always with him and the Mob boss who can cause chaos but also can just sit quietly with an espresso and cannoli.
 
Adam was diagnosed in his mid-teens with schizophrenia and, at age 16, he is starting a new school and is part of a trial for a new drug. He still sees people and hears voices and thinks of himself as “crazy,” but he is now almost sure of what and who are real—most of the time. He won’t talk at his therapy sessions, and so this novel is a compilation of his weekly journals to his therapist.
 
Adam has a supportive mother and stepfather and during this year he falls in love with Maya, who he is pretty sure is real; makes a best friend, the pale, serious, nerdy Dwight; and gains the wrath of the school bully. He wants to keep his secret from all of them, especially Maya. “I don’t want to lose my secrets, because they keep me safe” (153).
 
His “corporeally-challenged” friends as he begins to think of them become supportive, and one of the funniest scenes is when his new half-sister is born. “My hallucinations…hung out behind my mom’s bed and made faces at the baby. She couldn’t see them, but I didn’t want to spoil their fun” (277).
 
When the drug begins to fail and his condition is revealed, Adam learns just how supportive his family and friends can be.
 
I always feel that the best writing has characters we don’t want to leave.
 
Note: A study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health found about 1 in 5 teens in the United States suffer from a mental disorder severe enough to their impact daily activities. Schizophrenia is one of the most complex of all mental health disorders. It is a severe, chronic, and disabling disturbance of the brain that causes distorted thinking, strange feelings, and unusual behavior and use of language and words. Statistics indicate that schizophrenia affects approximately 2.4 million Americans.

X, a Novel by  Ilyasah Shabazz with Kekla Magoon
 
This fascinating “novel,” or fictionalized biography, of Malcolm X should have been titled “Before X” since it covers the time before Malcolm Little became Malcolm X or, as written in the Author’s Note, “[it] represents the true journey of Malcolm Little, the adolescent, on the road to becoming Malcolm X.” (352)
 
Written by one of his daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz, with one of my favorite writers, Kekla Magoon, author of Camo Girl, How It Went Down, and The Season of Styx Malone, X covers the years from 1931 to 1948, the year Malcolm went to prison, focusing primarily on his teen years in Boston and New York City. 
 
The reader experiences the significant influence of Malcolm’s father, a civil rights activist, and his mother who kept the family together after his father’s death, or murder, despite severe poverty until she was taken away to a mental institution and the children were divided among foster homes. The story also demonstrates the powerful influence of a high school teacher who, despite the fact that he was a top student and president of his class, told Malcolm that he could not aspire to be a lawyer and should aim for a profession as a carpenter. Taking that advice to heart, Malcolm drops out of school and renounces his father’s principles.
 
The timeline fluctuates from past to present which may be a little challenging for some readers; it might help to write in Malcolm’s ages next to the dates for readers. This novel is definitely for mature readers as teen Malcolm becomes involved in drugs and sex although there are no explicit depictions.
 
Through this well-written and an engaging text, the reader observes the changes Malcolm undergoes as he moves from a family life in Lansing, Michigan, to the influences of big-city life in the Roxbury and Harlem jazz neighborhoods of the 1940’s; from being Malcolm Little to the first time he signed his name, on a letter to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Muslim leader, as Malcolm X. The extensive 6-page Author’s Note takes the reader through Malcolm’s transition, or “awakening,” during his prison experience.

You Don’t Even Know Me: Stories and Poems about Boys by Sharon G. Flake

This is a collection of short stories and poetry that belongs in every high school classroom library. It is a book about boys, for boys and for the girls who want to know more about boys and how they think. The stories are very different from each other, and each will appeal to different readers. The topics are diverse: suicide, teen marriage, a grandfather who was shot, pretty mothers, HIV, and are written in a variety of formats, i.e., diary entries, letters, and poems.

Sometimes it is easier to be strong together. These five MG/YA novels feature strong boys and girls, supporting each other.
 
Between the Lines by Nikki Grimes

My first year of teaching, a student’s father called me and accused me of wasting his son’s time with poetry. I listened, aghast, but did not know quite what to say. I wish I had had Nikki Grimes’ novel, Between the Lines, to quote Mr. Winston, the librarian as he explains to Darrian why he should learn about all sorts of writing, even poetry. “Because poetry, more than anything else, will teach you about the power of words.” And Grimes in her newest novel, to be released in February 2018, shows us the power of words—to heal, to strengthen, to discover. Like Bronx Masquerade, this novel takes place in Mr. Ward’s English classroom where he holds Open Mike Fridays and students work towards a Poetry Slam (and where BM character Tyrone makes guest appearances).
 
Mr Ward’s eleventh grade class is a microcosm of the outside world—Black, Brown, and White and maybe in-between. The reader views the eight students through the lens of Darrian, a Puerto Rican student who lives with his father and has dreams of writing for The New York Times because, “Let’s face it, some of those papers have a bad habit of getting Black and Brown stories wrong.…But I figure the only way to get our stories straight is by writing them ourselves.” So Darrian joins Mr. Ward’s class to learn about words. He does learn the power of words, but he also learns about is his classmates as they learn about each other and about themselves through their narratives, their free writes, and the poetry they share.
 
There is Marcel, whose dad was in jail just long enough to ruin his life; Jenesis, a foster child in her 13th placement; Freddie who takes care of her niece and her own alcoholic mom; Val whose immigrant father was a professor in his native land and now works as a janitor; Li, whose Chinese parents want a strong, smart American girl; Kyle whose defective heart makes him fearless and a mentor to Angela who is afraid she is not enough, and Darrian whose mother died of cancer “half past 36.”
 
But these students, as the students in our classrooms, are more than their labels. As Tyrone explains abut his class the year before, “Before Open Mike, we were in our own separate little groups, thinking we were so different from each other. But when people started sharing who they were through their poetry, turned out we were more alike than we were different.” And Darrian finds out that each word can be unique and special, as Li says about poetry, but also a newspaper story “can be beautiful, especially if it’s true.” Truth is what these characters and novel reveals.
 
A strength of the novel is the unique voice of each character; Nikki Grimes had to write not only their stories but the unique poetry of each of these characters—boys and girls—who need to be strong in different ways. And the reader sees the growth of the characters through their interactions and poems as they discover each other and come together, sharing their strengths through poetry, the boys discovering “Hope,” and the girls telling what “We Are.” 

In Your Shoes by Donna Gephart 

It’s difficult to write about loss—because everyone experiences loss differently, but death has become all too common, and teachers need novels to help their students deal with loss and gain empathy for their peers who are coping with grief. “1.2 million children will lose a parent to death before age 15” (Dr. Elizabeth Weller, Dir. Ohio State University Hospitals, 1991); [last year] 400,000 people under 25 suffered from the death of a loved one (National Mental Health Association). Sometimes, especially in multi-generational households, the death of a grandparent affects a child as much as the loss of a parent.
 
Grieving her mother’s death, Amy is torn from her best friend and her home in Chicago to live in her uncle’s funeral home in Buckington, Pennsylvania. Her father is learning the funeral trade and is away Monday to Friday, and Amy, even with her optimism, is not making new friends. Life hits a low when she sits down with girls in the middle school cafeteria—and they move to another table! But she meets a new best friend, Tate, a weight lifter with interesting fashion sense, in the school library, and they spend their lunch hours talking stories and eating Jelly Krimpets.
 
Meanwhile Miles is still grieving the loss of his grandmother while worrying about his grandfather dying. In fact, Miles worries about everything. His family owns Buckington Bowl, and bowling the perfect game, especially while beating his best friend Randall, is his goal.
 
And a bowling shoe is how Miles and Amy connect—literally, both at the beginning and the end of this delightful middle-grades novel. In addition to Randall and Tate, Amy and Miles become each other’s support system through the special bond of grief and loss.
 
A delightful novel by the author of Lily and Dunkin which  features another strong boy-girl relationship, about the power of family and friendship. In Your Shoes features two sports uncommon for a middle-grades book: female weight-lifting and bowling. The novel also conveys the power of story—those we read and those we write.

Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson is one of the few authors that readers can follow from childhood picture books (The Other Side) through the upper elementary years (Locomotion), middle grades (Hush), high school (If You Come Softly), and to adulthood (Another Brooklyn), for reading fiction and memoir (Brown Girl Dreaming), in prose and in verse. In my classroom, I had Woodson novels for all “level” readers, and in other classrooms, students can grow as readers through Woodson’s novels. These books will each generate important conversations and, unlike novels by many prolific authors, they do not follow a formula. I have taken many of these characters into my heart through the years. And so, I am always excited when a new Woodson read is on the horizon and begged my way to her newest, Harbor Me.
 
In this novel, a group of six fifth/sixth grade special education students not only have classes together but their intuitive, empathetic teacher gives them the gift of an hour every Friday to go to another room on their own as a group, and talk with each other— the ARTT room (A Room To Talk). Over the year the six come to know each others’ stories, fears, and hopes—Esteban whose father was taken by Immigration officers; Ashton who, as the only white student in the school, is bullied; Tiago whose Puerto Rican mother becomes more quiet as she is ridiculed for speaking only Spanish; Amari who can no longer play with the toy guns he loves because, as a Black adolescent, it is not safe; Haley, the narrator whose father is in jail and mother died when she was three; and Holly, her best friend who struggles with ADHD and has to defend being “rich.”
 
Through their conversations and as they share more of themselves and their stories, this group becomes a family, a safe harbor for each other. “’Club Us,’ Amari said. ‘The membership requirements are kinda messed up, but whatever.’” (96) Meanwhile Haley is struggling with her father coming home from jail and her uncle, who has parented her since she was three, leaving. She reflects back on the year and what it meant to her story, “I didn’t know it would be people you barely knew becoming friends that harbored you. And dreams you didn’t even know you had—coming true. I didn’t know it would be superpowers rising up out of tragedies, and perfect moments in a nearly empty classroom.” (175)
 
The shifting timeline might be difficult for some readers, and they may want to keep a timeline of the events in the novel, but they will come to care for the characters and perhaps, in this story, see themselves (a Mirror) or their peers (a Window).

Takedown by Laura Shovan

Mikayla comes from a family of wrestlers. Her two older brothers are wrestlers, and wrestling is one way she can connect with her father who moved out. In sixth grade, under her wrestling name of Mickey, she joins the Gladiators travel team after the coach of the Eagles refuses to include a girl on the team. Her best girlfriend whom she has wrestled with for years decides that wrestling is no longer for her; in fact, it may never have been. And Mickey becomes the only girl on the team where she has to prove she belongs. There she meets Lev and his friends and becomes part of the Fearsome Foursome.

Lev’s best friend Bryan knows they won’t spend much time together during wrestling season and starts pursuing other interests. But Lev comes from a sports family where they spend their weekends and holidays at matches and his sister’s field hockey games. However,he finds he is writing poetry to calm himself down and getting headaches and missing the old family dinners and cultural traditions, and now he is even questioning the sport he used to love.

When Lev and Mickey are paired at practice, he is afraid she might get in the way of his training for States. But as their friendship grows, he finds that as he stands up for her goals, his just might have changed.

As an author on a sports fiction panel once said, sports is the setting, not the story. And even though the reader learns quite a lot about wrestling and the world of adolescent wrestlers through alternating narratives by Mikayla and Lev, Laura Shovan's new novel is a story about family, friendships, resilience, and finding identity. 

The Someday Suitcase by Corey Ann Haydu
Friend. We use this word casually. Almost everyone we meet and like is identified as a “friend.” We have Facebook Friends we have never met. And it seems young teens have a new BFF every week. But in The Someday Suitcase, readers meet true best friends, friends that readers will fall in love with.

When Clover learns the word “symbiosis” in science, her favorite class [“It refers to a relationship where two organisms or creatures are benefitting from each other and surviving together.… They’re dependent on each other” (7)], she has found a word that perfectly described her friendship with Danny. Sometimes they form two halves of a whole; sometimes they are exactly the same. Clover is practical; Danny is fun. Her favorite subjects are science and math; he is better at English and social studies. When they close their eyes and play statute, they make the exact same shape. Every time. The two fifth-graders have “the world’s closest best friendship.” (2)

When Danny gets sick, really sick, Clover decides “I am going to make my science fair project all about Danny.” (54) She will use science to find out what is wrong with him, something the doctors don’t seem able to do. All they know is that when he is with Clover, he feels better. “Maybe this is who I’m meant to be—a person who makes other people feel better.” (150)
​
Living in Florida, the two friends have always wanted to see snow; Clover’s father, a truck driver, brings her snow globes from each trip. When Danny’s mysterious illness worsens, they buy a someday suitcase. “It’s for when we go to the snow.” (114)

With Danny missing so much school, Clover begins to make friends of her own, and the mother of one of her new friends explains that with science, there is also “room for faith and religion.” (174). When Clover and Danny set their sights on a clinic in Vermont where they think Danny can be cured (and where they can finally see snow), they experience the magic of their friendship: “Until it’s proven false, anything is possible. Even magic.” (209)
Clover is strong for Danny, but readers will realize also just how strong Danny is for Clover. This is a sweet, heartbreaking story about friendship, “a magical friendship…. Love with a twist.” (263)

A middle school and high school teacher for twenty years, Lesley Roessing  is the former Founding Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project at Georgia Southern University (formerly Armstrong State University) where she was also a Senior Lecturer, College of Education. In 2018-19 she served as a Literacy Consultant with a K-8 school and now works independently.
 
Lesley is the author of Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically & Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core; Comma Quest: The Rules They Followed. The Sentences They Saved; No More “Us” & “Them: Classroom Lessons and Activities to Promote Peer Respect; The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension; the just-published Talking Texts: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum and has contributed chapters to Young Adult Literature in a Digital World: Textual Engagement though Visual Literacy and Queer Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the English Language Arts Curriculum. She writes the “Writing to Learn” column, sharing reader response strategies across the curriculum, for AMLE  Magazine and served as past editor of Connections, the award-winning journal of the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. ​

Until next week.

I, Steve, loved being a classroom teacher. I learned every day from my students and from my colleagues. A school and a classroom is, in reality, a lab. We take classes, we learn from colleagues, and we learn from our students. I learned almost by accident that more I let them talk the more they became engaged, the more they learned, and I began to learn so much more.

I met Sarah Donovan several years ago at a then CEE conference, now ELATE. We found we had some common interests.  We often found ourselves in the same places at NCTE. She ended up contributing at the 2018 and 2019 UNLV Summits on YA literature. I hope she continues to attend. She now  will begin her career as an assistant professor of English Education at Oklahoma State University.  I wish her well and I know that she will be fantastic.

I love her blog, Ethical ELA, and all the work and insight she has as a classroom teacher. I would have loved working with her as a colleague in a school. As it is, I love the opportunities that I have had and am having working with Sarah. I hope there are more projects in the future. 

How you begin a class about reading literature communicates your philosophy of teaching and what you believe a literature-rich life is, so what happens on the first day of your reading or English class?
 
Perhaps you begin with an ice breaker, maybe a survey of some sort. It is a common practice to fill out reading interest surveys if not on day one, in the first week: What is your favorite book? How many books are in your house? What genres do you prefer? What are your earliest memories of reading?
 
Reading surveys are shared with the best intentions -- to learn about our students -- but each question has implications:

1. Questions about genre assume knowledge about genre and that the student has read a variety of literature.
2. Questions about being a “good” reader may trigger memories of testing and Lexile labels.
3. Questions about how many books a student reads in a year values speed and fluency and may set up a competitive environment.
4. Questions about books at home or reading at home can shame students into hiding the truth as they may not have the means to buy books or even live in a home.

Overall, some questions may reinforce negative stereotypes about reading and readers, create hostility toward you or your class, and/or certainly communicate that you are the one deciding what questions are worth asking

Essentially, surveys, (especially ones with blanks and checkboxes) constrain students’ lives in measurable, narrow spaces. Of course, teachers do need to know information about students’ lives that may need to be shared anonymously or in the privacy of a survey; there will be time for that later. There is no shortcut to understanding the reading lives of your students just as there is no shortcut to building a relationship with your students. But you are not the only one in the classroom; there is a room full of readers who benefit from knowing, deeply the people with whom they will share the 180 days. The key is to get students reading and talking about books, and you will learn a lot about who they are as readers and human beings that will set the tone for a class that values every voice and every reading life. After all, you, the teacher, do not have to do the work. You have a room full of readers, and the books that they will bring into the classroom is like attending a book festival. The authors of the books will start conversations, trouble assumptions, and create laughter and tears. You, the students, the books, the authors are all members of a literature-rich learning space, so on day one, let them all speak to one another.

Last year, I decided not to spend any time setting up ice breakers or forms and instead gathered a dozen books I read that summer. The library was not open to visitors yet, and my classroom library was spread across four classrooms in boxes as I was a traveling teacher. Instead of printing worksheets, I gathered the titles and authors I wanted to share with students. For me, the key was to have a variety of genres, formats (verse, graphic), authors, and identity representations. I wanted the books to be about a range of topics and characters. I wanted to show students that the books that we will be reading are not just old, smelly paperbacks (though some are magnificent). Then, I scattered the books around the room, strategically so that students would open the books as they took their seats. Once the books and readers were gathered (and the bell rang), I began with simple questions (didn’t even say my name):

What does it mean when we say: “I like this book?” or “This is a good book?”

​Teacher: When someone says “I like this book” or “this book is good,” what do they mean?
 
Students: [Awkward talk at tables as students realize that, yes, on day one we will talk to one another about books, and then the classroom gets louder as students realize they have lots to say about what is “good.” Some are playing up to what they think the teacher wants to hear -- plot, flashback, figurative language. Others are beautifully subversive, talking about farts or violence as being signs of a good book.]
 
Teacher: What if we talked about books not only as like or good but also appreciating what books have to offer. Is it possible to appreciate a book but not like it?
 
Students: [Talk with elbow partners. Some sharing out. A discussion  ensues.One girl talks about a book that made her cry — she didn’t like it, but she appreciated that it moved her heart. Another reader says about a book a teacher made him read that he admits that it was written well, but it didn’t allow him to escape into the worlds of books he likes --Naruto, Rangers Apprentice. One student says that he first likes a book, and then, in re-reading, he comes to appreciate it. Teacher tries to get students to build on each other’s comments, asking names, making introductions.]
 
Teacher: Okay, so if you like a book, then you probably appreciate it, too. And you may not like a book but be able to find something to appreciate -- that a person actually wrote a book and got it published, that it has some good ideas about human beings, that there might be a good part or a non-cliche ending. Maybe it is not your genre. Maybe it is not a topic you like to think about. Still, it might be for someone else, and maybe you learned something. Let’s share some titles that you read in class or outside of class last year. Did you like it? If not, what might there be to appreciate, looking back at your younger self?
 
Students: [Talk to the other elbow partner. Teacher walks around out, nudging some thinking, helping recall titles. Teacher asks follow-up questions about genre, topic, theme, characters, human issues, etc. In these exchanges, teacher is also learning names and noticing how students already talk about books, engage with others.]
 
Teacher: Okay, let’s get into the books. Here is a book, Orbiting Jupiter by Gary Schmidt. Is there anything to appreciate about it before we even open it (cover, title, author, length, blurbs? Do you think you might “like” it? How do you know-- what is your gauge or personal criteria that you’ve developed over the years? What else do you need to know about it to decide? 

​Students: [Shout out now - -feeling comfortable. Some say they like short books. Some say they don’t like realistic. Some guess it is about Jupiter the planet. Others notice the title is not capitalized, do they are not sure if Jupiter is a proper noun. Many are skeptical and quiet -- or just quiet, reading the room (or thinking about where they will sit at lunch).]
 
Teacher: Page one: “Before you agree to have Joseph come live with you,” Mrs. Stroud said, “there are one or two things you ought to understand.” she took out a State of Main Department of Health and Human Service folder and laid it on the kitchen table.My mother look at me for a long time. Then she looked at my father. He put his hand on my back, “Jack should know what we’re getting into, same as us,” he said. He looked down at me. “Maybe you more than any one.” My mother nodded, and Mrs. Stroud opened the folder. This is what she told us. Okay, so what do you think? What questions do you ask yourself or another reader when you talk about a book?
 
Students: [Talk to neighbors. Share out. Teacher asks follow-up questions guiding toward some of the language they might use in class. Does it (the story) sound good? What’s the genre? Who is the narrator? Do you like him? What’s going on? Does the premise seem interesting? Is the writing style with dialogue and sort of short sentences something that suits you? Do you like short books?]
 
Teacher: How about this one -- The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee. Let’s take a look at the cover. What does the publisher want you to think this is about -- based on the cover?

Students: [Talk and share out. Teacher poses follow-up questions to get at assumptions but also some publishing decisions about the image, the excerpts, the font inside. There is an interior designer for books just like a cover designer -- what do you notice? What does the publisher want you to notice? What identities are visible here (gender, race, culture, class)? What objects--hat (symbolism)? Will you like what the cover is selling? Is there something to appreciate?]
 
Teacher: Page one: Being nice is like leaving your door wide open. Eventually, someone’s going to mosey in and steal your best hat. Me, I have only one hat and it is uglier than a smashed crow, so if someone stole it the joke would be on their head, literally. Still, boundaries must be set. Especially boundaries over worth. Today, I demand a raise. “You’re making that pavement twitchy the way you’re staring at it.” Robby Withers shines his smile on me. Ever since the traveling dentist who pulled Robby’s rotting molar told him he would lose more if he didn’t scrub his teeth regularly, he has brushed twice daily, and he expects me to do it, too. “Pavement is underappreciated for all it does to smooth the way, “I tell his laughing eyes, which are brown like eagle’s feathers, same as his skin. “We should be more grateful.” And now? What do you know? What are you wondering? Ask some questions.
 
Students: [Pose questions. Teacher asks follow-up questions but encourages classmates to talk to each other when responding. Is it what you thought? Who is the narrator? What’s going on? What about the way the character thinks and sees things? Notice the metaphor? Do you like a book with lots of metaphor? Can you appreciate it? Have you read other books like this? How does the first page fit with the cover or not?]
 
Teacher: The Downstairs Girl is set in 1890’s Atlanta. I skipped to the author’s note to learn a bit more about it before I read the book. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed in 1882, a federal law that prohibited the immigration of Chines laborers until 1943.  The Chinese already living in the U.S.  could no longer bring their families from China. What is the genre of this book, then? Do you know much about the 1890s in America? Is it wrong that I read the author’s note before reading the story? Could you learn something by reading this book? Might you like it, too?
 
Students: [The students reassure the teacher that books are organized in different ways -- they are getting comfortable dropping knowledge --  but maybe the author would have put the note at the beginning if she wanted history to be first. Instead, the focus is on the female character on the first page -- the girl is the story. A debate may ensue here about how we read novels. Must we read in order? Can we skip around? Skim? Read the ending first? Who does that?]
 
Teacher: Okay, let’s line up according to our birth month -- quickly! [Students are startled but happy to move. They have to talk to one another to find out birthdays, which are so important at that age.) Now, with members of your birth-month group, pick up a few of the books scattered around. Introduce yourself to your classmates. Discuss the covers. Read the first page out loud. What questions emerge (narrator, identity, plot, symbols, genre)? What do you like? What is good? What is there to appreciate?
 
Students: [Teacher observes, listens. There is a lot to see and notice about personalities, interests, and book-enthusiasm/skepticism in what students say and don’t say, in how they move or don’t move, and in which books they choose or push aside. The classroom is a live with lit-rich chatter.]

​If, in fact, the above scene unfolds in the intended 20 minutes, falls flat in 10, or lasts the entire 50-minute period or 80-minute block, what messages about English, readers, reading, books, authors, and the teacher are being communicated? What foundation for learning is set?  What is the teacher modeling? What is the teacher reviewing, teaching, introducing? And what has the teacher learned about the students -- in just 20 minutes? Clearly, a lot is happening, but the scene is set to value books and readers. What’s next?
 
In the next 20 minutes of class, students will read. Some will read alone. Some will read together. Some will refuse.
 
And in the next days, you will share more books. Students will trade books. You will invite a conversation about all of that, and you will notice and learn about your students.
 
In the next weeks, you and your students will read. You might unpack the word “identity” and teach about intersectionality, or you might review characterization more traditionally. You might unpack genre and invite students to talk about how books are categorized and why.
 
In the following months, you will lead conferences with students about what they are reading. You may read a whole-class novel. You will read poems and news articles. You will assign reading responses and projects. You will find out if students have wi-fi at home, if or can students read at home, when they read to escape and when reading is therapy. You will find out if they play sports and/or have a following on YouTube or Insta. You will learn about their families. Books and their authors will help you start many important conversations.
 
I invite you to think through how your methods match your instructional goals and imagine how you can set up each class a lot like how you, as a reader, uncover and discover a book. You like, appreciate, and question. Reading is both personal and social. Past experiences with reading shape your relationship with reading, books, and other readers, too. 

For additional ideas on how to start the first week of class and for infusing more choice reading, check out these blogs posts on Ethical ELA:

• “A Conversation on Liking and Appreciating Books”
• “9 Whole Weeks of Choice Reading”
• “One 9-Week Plan on Choice Reading in the Classroom (a Follow-Up)”
• “Easing into Choice Individual and Book Group Reading: A Progressive Approach”
• “Choosing Choice in Your English Classes this School Year: Books and Writing Projects for Self-Formation and Class Community”