Welcome to the final weekend of January 2026! We are again delighted to welcome one of Leilya Pitra's teacher candidates, Juliana Portillo, from Southeastern Louisiana University as our Weekend Picks contributor this week. Juliana has chosen a romance, Debating Darcy, for her YA Weekend Pick.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s Shout is a memoir written in poetry that tells the story of how she lost her voice and how she slowly found it again through writing. Many readers know Anderson from Speak published in 1999, and Shout feels like a powerful companion text, showing the real-life experiences that shaped her fiction. The book is emotional, honest, and deeply personal, but it is also hopeful in how it shows healing through expression. 

​I was outside and reading Art Spiegelman’s renowned 1986 graphic novel Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History when my grandfather walked past me. Seeing what I was reading, he said, “When I was in college in the sixties, it would have amazed me to be assigned comics as coursework.” Indeed, it would have been amazing for such a genre to be assigned in the literature classroom in his day, but academic legitimacy is exactly what Maus helped establish for comics and for the graphic novel. This first volume of Spiegelman’s two-volume work centers on the experiences of the author’s father surviving the chief horror of the Second World War, namely, the Holocaust. Told from Spiegelman’s perspective starting in 1978, the author interviews his father, Vladek Spiegelman, to tell his story in a comic, but must unwillingly listen to his father’s present-day troubles of his life in Queens, New York. Their strained relationship and Vladek’s declining health lead to many breaks in the Holocaust narrative, which stretches from pre-war tremors to mid-1944, still a year before the fall of Nazi Germany. The novel sees Vladek evade capture by the Nazis around western Poland, yet the central conflict of the work is the strained relationship between he and his son since the suicide of Spiegelman’s mother.

Further, volume one ends without a specific resolution to his and Vladek’s relationship, searing the reader’s hope of a happy ending in either 1944 or ‘78. I found Spiegelman’s attempt at an objective portrayal of his father to be quite noteworthy. ​

​Spiegelman’s Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale, My Father Bleeds History helped bring validity to comics within academia. Though knowledgeable on the subject prior to reading, I gained much understanding of the experience of life after the Holocaust through the real, rugged picture of Spiegelman’s relationship with his father. I thoroughly recommend this graphic novel to those who like or even dislike graphic novels, as its quality comes not only from the text and images but from each reader’s interaction with the work’s difficult themes. 

Welcome to the second week of January 2026! We are delighted to welcome Leilya Pitra's teacher candidate student, Allie McCauley, from Southeastern Louisiana University as our Weekend Picks contributor this week.

The book, Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, is a young adult literature novel published in 2017. I was given a choice of two novels for one of my methods courses, and I decided to read this novel. To me, it was a great choice. 

When each character gets on the elevator, they reveal their backstory and how they died. It gives William moments to reflect on what he has to do. Every character’s backstory is different for each character, but they all connect into the same idea of the cycle of violence and how it impacts generations of families and communities. ​​

Through these encounters, William begins to question the “rules” he has been taught about revenge and what it truly means to honor his brother’s memory. Personally, I do not find any of these characters relatable. However, they are realistic and meaningful to the story. Each one represents a different perspective on grief and retaliation, showing how pain and loss can shape a person’s choices.

The language of the book is poetic. Reynolds writes in shorter, concise lines. He gets the thoughts across all of his characters very thoroughly. His book reads like a big piece of poetry with the reader knowing exactly what the characters are doing, except for ending, where readers are left thinking what may happen next. 

It wasn’t your typical lengthy paragraph to convey a story, but short lines that got the point across and helped you imagine what you would do if you were in William’s shoes. ​While I did not really have any expectations for this book, it by far exceeded what I thought it would be. It was so heartfelt and it seemed I felt exactly what William had been thinking and going through. 

The only unexpected moment was the ending. I wanted more. I wanted to know exactly what William’s choice was with having to take an educated guess. I think any reader would enjoy this book, especially students in our public high schools in Louisiana, who may connect with the characters on personal levels. ​

The other book that I can compare it to is All-American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. This book focused on the story of Rashad and Quinn following a police brutality incident. Both of the stories put a male black character as their main character and tell their story about life and the challenges they are facing. Both are great books that give an insight into what it is like to be a young black male living today’s society. As for comparing it to the same genre of young adult literature, this book does tell the story of a young adult. Like many young adult literature novels, it conveys a story of a person trying to navigate their way in the world or trying to deal with whatever problems they are facing. 

​Overall, I would recommend this book. It was really interesting for me to read and I was never sure what or who was coming next. While I do wish the ending would have been more, it was such a great graphic novel. The pictures paired well and really helped me visualize what William was going through. I would give it a 4.5 out of 5 stars. 

Happy New Year, everyone! We are delighted to have our former editor/curator back with us to start 2026 off right. Leilya Pitre is our January contributor, and she has this to say about the upcoming Weekend Picks:

"Let this year be the best for every one of you—let it allow you to carry out your dreams and take you to the place where you want to be. This month, I am featuring my students--the teacher candidates who are already in or getting ready for residency in local public 6-12 schools. These are my future colleagues, and I know each one of them will be a wonderful teacher because I see that caring and nurturing is in their nature.  Let me share my choice first."

The novel that haunted me long after I turned the final page is A Land of Permanent Goodbyes (2018). The author, Atia Abawi, worked as CNN and NBC war correspondent stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan, for five years. Her journalist talent allowed her to create vivid imagery and emotionally charged, unsettling narrative that made me immerse in the realities of war, loss, and displacement during the Syrian refugee crisis.