I first met Fawn when I was interviewing at UNLV. She was a new graduate student who had done some adjunct work for the department I would eventually be joining. She was an excellent teacher and an important asset to our undergraduate English Education program. Before too long we were treating her as a valued colleague. She did such a good job, that secretly, I think that many of us hoped she would stay around. Reason, however, prevailed and we pushed her to finish. 

I want to make it clear that I have sat in on several excellent doctoral defenses (not including mine) that were informative celebrations. Fawn's defense was a completely different experience.  Fawn's presentation not only covered the project of her research, it began to critique her own product. She had clearly spent the two weeks since she had turned the finished work over to the committee examining the limitations of her research. In most cases she had accurately anticipated our question--not concerns mind you--just ideas we wanted to discuss. The defense was an enlightening experience. I am not at all surprised that Fawn found and excellent job. I am also not surprised that teachers in her area would seek her to help with collaborative projects. 

This year, the word “unprecedented” has been thoroughly worn out. So much so that the Oxford English Dictionary described 2020 “as a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in a single word.” This. This, the year of a global pandemic, emergency remote instruction, #BLM, and a divisive presidential election. This, the year of 8 minutes, 46 seconds that came to symbolize a long, long history of systemic violence against Black and brown bodies. All of this was the backdrop of a shared book club reading with 6th, 7th, and 8th graders of Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Ghost Boys. Books like this one create the space for us to process moments like those of 2020 and dialogic interactions plant the seeds for change.

Ghost Boys is the story of Jerome, a young black boy with a toy gun who is shot and killed by a police officer who “feared for his life.” But that is both the beginning and the continuation of a story that is sadly all too familiar. Jerome is not able to move on from this world and is visited by Emmet Till and other ghost boys– Black boys who died too young because of racial violence. A heartbreaking distortion of Peter Pan, which is a motif used throughout the book of children robbed of the chance to grow up. Like the other ghost boys, Jerome must bear witness: “Everyone needs their story heard. Felt. We honor each other. Connect across time,” Emmet tells Jerome. And who is the only person that can see Jerome? Communicate with him? The officer’s daughter, Sarah. Why? Because as Rhodes tells us, “Jerome says, ‘Only the living can make the world better.’” ​

Until next time.

It is coming! If you are connected to NCTE, ALAN, or the English Education communities you have probably heard a few rumors about the ALAN Workshop. The current President, Ricki Ginsberg, has done a wonderful job putting together a workshop during challenging times. She has coordinated with publishers, NCTE, authors, and the ALAN board to piece together a wonderful workshop. Clearly, it will be in an online format this year. Fight through the Zoom exhaustion and join the fun.

Like many of you, I have been extremely busy trying to figure out Zoom, Google Meets, WebEx and all of the ins and outs of virtual teaching. I have registered for NCTE and the ALAN workshop, but it is finally becoming real as the books start to arrive. Attendees who registered and paid for a shipment of books find that the books really do show up.  They have started to flood Facebook and Twitter with pictures of their books in an homage to past workshop. In the past, people arrive at the hall early Monday morning to pick up their book boxes and many open the boxes and set them on their tables.

Of course, this year we will all be attending from our offices, kitchens, living rooms, or carved out spaces we have been using as our offices. My box arrived on Monday and I dutifully open the box and took a picture.

I have been trying to capture all many of the images that have been shared on Facebook. I have placed them below in a slideshow. Do you see your display? If I missed yours let me know.

The program will be outstanding. Some of the featured speakers include Angie Thomas (Breakfast Speaker), Samira Ahmed (Keynote), and Eric Gansworth (keynote). If you are familiar with these authors you are well aware of what they have to offer. If not, get ready to add a host of books to your "to be read" list.

Browse the program. Is one of your favorite authors going to be presenting?  I hope so.  Schedule the time so you don't miss the presentation. 

One of the most important parts of the ALAN Workshop is the chance to hear from authors that you have never heard of before. At a workshop I found  Padma Venkatraman (Climbing the Stairs), Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (The Smell of Other People's Houses), Chris Lynch (Inexcuseable), Jeff Zetner (The Serpent King), Adriana Mather (Haunting the Deep), Varian Johnson (The Parker Inheritance), Kristin Bartley Lenz (The Art of Holding on and Letting Go) and so many more. 

Do yourself a favor and listen to people who are entirely new to you. I promise, you will find new friends.

Until next week.

Today, as our guest contributor, we have Anita DuBroc. I met Anita when she enrolled in the Holmes MA program at LSU. Now she is a PhD student working on her dissertation in literacy at the same institution. In this post, Anita talks about getting some inspiration from another post in Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday. It is source of happiness when the work and ideas of others is shared on the blog and, in turn, inspires others. Thanks Anita.

BookTube is a subcommunity of YouTube that is based on books and reading. Alison Wender and Tara Anderson Gold wrote a wonderful post based upon BookTube for YA Wednesday in February 2018, which I have linked here. They have inspired me to go down the rabbit hole of BookTube for my own research and the results have enlightened and diversified my reading habits. I discovered BookTube during my first year of teaching and since then, it has challenged me to be a more thoughtful reader and book recommender to family, friends, and students.
​
 BookTubers are content creators who are also readers and sometimes even writers. Many BookTubers are librarians or work in the publishing industry. Some BookTubers have even been hired by publishing companies because of their work in BookTube. 

​Booktube is rooted in young adult literature. The advent of YouTube as a social media platform coincided with the YAL boom during the early 2000s. As those early booktubers have grown, their reading interests have evolved; they discovered new interests, authors, genres, and series. The BookTube community is a space for readers in the digital world that brings together several social media networks where readers can not only share recommendations, review books, and plan their future reading: BookTube is also a space where literary analysis can happen, too. 

BookTube videos usually feature one person, the booktuber presenting a book review. A booktuber may begin the month with a video of his or her to-be-read list (TBR) of books expected to be read over the month. Then, at the month’s conclusion, the booktuber will review those books. These videos give the viewer a sneak peek at potential reads. Review videos also show when a booktuber DNFs (did not finish a book), which suggests that it is okay to not like or finish a book, an important idea that all readers should keep in mind. Life is too short to read books you don’t like!
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While book reviews are a staple in the community, there are numerous other video types that would be useful when translated into the classroom. Many readers participate in reading challenges, which occur over a defined period of time. Another example is a read-a-thon where a creator delivers a prompt with a challenge. For example, last year the Book Roast hosted The Magical Readathon, with prompts based on the Harry Potter series. Nonfiction November is happening this month; created by several booktubers, it challenges other booktubers and viewers to read at least one nonfiction book over November 2020. 

Reading challenges can also feature a time limit, such as Dewey’s 24 Read-a-thon where readers read as much as they can over a twenty-four hour period. The most easily accessible reading challenge is Goodreads’ yearly reading challenge which is hosted on their website, www.goodreads.com.
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Tags are also a mainstay in BookTube. Similar to an email chain, a list of prompts or questions is created with booktubers responding to the prompts based on their bookshelves or reading experiences. Book tags include “Unpopular Opinions,” seasonal picks, or ones related to a particular monthly theme (such as Black, female, or LGBTQIA+ authors), or Top 10 lists. 

Book chats videos feature literary analysis, much like what is done in a classroom, though in an easily accessible and enjoyable format. Book chats can feature a specific theme, author analysis or genre analysis. These videos can also feature author videos or collaboration between two booktubers (a collab video).
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What’s most unique about Booktube is the active comments section included in each video. Here, viewers can interact with the booktuber and with other viewers/readers. Thus, the reading recommendations, critiques, and analysis do not remain only with the booktuber as a reading authority, but with the viewers and booktuber exchanging ideas and opinions. 

Young adult literature is one of BookTube’s favorite genres. With the growing popularity of young adult series, readers have more books to choose from young adult authors. Fantasy and science fiction are the latest popular genres in YAL amongst booktubers. Authors Tahareh Mafi, Sarah J. Maas, and Leigh Bardugo have risen in popularity in the last two years with their fantasy series.
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I have discovered numerous young adult titles through BookTube, including John Green, Gabrielle Zevin, and Melina Marchetta. I have been encouraged to diversify my reading to include other ethnicities, nationalities, races, and gender identities. Booktubers have advocated for multicultural books and authors. For example, Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give has spurred an emphasis on young adult books with Black characters and by Black authors. The Artisan Geek offered her advice to viewers about how they can diversify their reading as she took on a personal challenge to be purposeful in her reading. 

​Some BookTubers only read YAL, while others infuse YA titles with adult titles, as with readalikes (If you like this, then you should read this…), where YAL books are paired with canonical or contemporary titles with similar themes or characters. Many booktubers have taken on issues with young adult literature as a genre in their videos including what they would like to see more of in the young adult genre. Charlotte, at Wonderfully Bookish explains the ideas she wants to see in YAL and turned her video into a Tag video and invited increased discussion in the video’s comments section, especially book recommendations. The videos challenge teachers, publishers, and librarians to help students find books and authors that respond to these wants and needs. The conflicts presented in these videos would bring a great discussion into the classroom about diverse representation in school reading. 

BookTuber Ariel Bissett has also issued a challenge to both students and teachers in her video “Is BookTube Educational?” (2018). She has convinced some of her own university professors to accept video essays in lieu of traditional literary analysis papers. BookTube has numerous classroom possibilities to help motivate readers, create a classroom culture of reading possibilities, and teach important digital literacy skills.

Ehret, Boegel, & Manuel-Nekouei (2018) suggests that BookTube can be used in the classroom to teach students important digital literacy skills. They suggest creating a BookTube channel for your classroom where students can post book reviews, book recommendations, or literary analyses. Using Google privacy features, teachers can set the channel to private and monitor the comments section. Through the comments section, students can also discuss their classmates’ opinions and exchange information based on books, literary film adaptations, and reading challenges. Del Mar Suárez and Gonzalez Arguello (2020) include a wonderful evaluation rubric they used with their language--English--for a Specific Purpose for students in Spain. 

BookTube is not without its criticisms. Many booktubers take issue with the community’s lack of diversity in book choices and popularity and the lack of diverse representation among booktubers. Some also find conflict with the professionalization of BookTube; several booktubers, including Ariel Bissett, have begun careers in publishing or writing due to the skills and networking based in BookTube. Several publishing houses have begun BookTube channels.  

BookRat Misty is a Michigander who reads middle grade titles, graphic novels, and YAL. She also hosts a blog TheBookRat Blog  which includes a plethora of author interviews, links to fellow booktubers, and her own hand-drawn creations to keep track of reading progress. She also hosts reading challenges and book chats throughout the year.

A Clockwork Reader is a college student who loves YA fantasy and eschews the traditional TBR list. She is also open about her own life in her channel.

Words of a Reader, Lesley is a Brit who advocates for children’s literature and creates thoughtful book discussions based on issues within the BookTube community such as What Makes a Classic Book?

Merphy Napier’s How to Find the Best booktubers [for you] notes how BookTube viewers can find the right BookTube channel to fit their preferences. Much of her suggestions include narrowing search terms to favorite author, genre, or reading preferences.

BookTube Recommends: Underrated YA Books is a wonderful collaboration video of booktubers recommending their favorite underrated YA books. The video would be a great introduction for those looking to find their way into BookTube.
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Angeltrazo's Asian American Book Club: Young Adult Books Angel is a Ph.D student in cultural studies at UC – Davis and admits to loving YA despite being 25. Her recommendation video is a response to the Filipino-American History Month, which this month. She recommends a mix of fiction and nonfiction books by Filipinos and Filipino-Americans. 

Ehret, C., Boegel, J., & Manuel‐Nekouei, R. (2018). The Role of Affect in Adolescents’ Online Literacies: Participatory Pressures in BookTube Culture. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 62(2), 151–161. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.881

Del Mar Suarez, M and González Arguello, M. V. (2020). Becoming a good booktuber. RELC Journal, 51(1). 158-167. DOI: 10.1177/0033688220906905

Semington, P., Mora, R. A., and Chiquito, T. (2017). Booktubing: Reader Response Meets 21st Century Literacies. The ALAN Review, 44(3). 61-67. Retrieved from http://www.alan-ya.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/J61-66-ALAN-Sum17.pdf

Sorenson, K and Mara, A. (2013). BookTubers as a Networked Knowledge Community. In M. Limbu and B. Gurung (Eds.). Emerging Pedagogies in the networked knowledge society. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. 
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If you have any BookTube or booktuber recommendations, please include them in the comments below! 

Until next week.

​Two weeks ago, I began a discussion of some of the reasons a few educators are reluctant to use YA literature in the classroom. I discussed the first reason, YA literature is quality literature, in a blog post on Oct. 21, 2020. I, of course, believe that a great deal of YA literature is of high quality and deserves  to be included in a variety of ways in our classroom. Today, I take on the second objection --The YA classification isn't the classics and don't students need to know them and have a flow of literary history? Well, this has several parts that I will address below.

I want to look at that objection in several ways. The first is use the term "YA classification" versus YA literature. The second part is that it isn't the classics. The large assumption here is that even if YA selection is of high quality, it still isn't the classic. Finally, the last part of the discussion for this week-- Don't students need to know the flow of literary history. Let's take a look.

I find that my students often think about YA literature as a genre. As a group of books that can be easily encapsulated and put to the side. I use the term classification because it gives my students pause. They often wonder what I am talking about. Then I get to explain. YA is Literature written with a big L that is part of all Literature. Just as every other text in the larger world of Literature, texts within the YA classification can easily be assigned into a genre--poetry, drama, science fiction, fantasy, etc. The classification of YA has more to do with the audience the work is written for and/or marketed towards. It has very little to do with it's quality and genre.

I believe my preservice teachers and others who are just beginning to explore YA have a limited view of how vast the offerings can be. I find that I am reading more and more nonfiction , but I still am not reading as much fantasy, science fiction, poetry, drama, and romance fiction. I still find my interest locked on to older realistic fiction.  

First, define a classic. In many cases it still means dead white male writers from Britain or New England in the USA.  Oh, in some periods people include a few female writers as a way of "expanding" the canon, Jane Austin, Edith Warton, Mary Ann Evans, Kate Chopin, Virginia Wolff, Flannery O'Connor, etc. Creating lists like these tend to demonstrate how white, elite, and colonial they really are. Even if we stay in this tradition, how old is a book before it is a classic? Are we ready to include Toni Morrison or Alice Walker? Do we want to include Walter Mosely? I do, but he is still alive and writing. And, granted, perhaps his best work is in the detective genre and does that really count. After all we have neglected, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross MacDonald. 

Clearly, defining the classics gets messy and complicated. Even establishing who gets to argue which books are/or might be included is political and complicated. The degree to which diverse authors are included is quite complicated. For example, teacher might include Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, (a wonderful book, but the way) and claim or feel they have represented "African" literature. While, Achebe is a member of Igbo people within the borders of present-day Nigeria, it would be a huge overstatement to say the selection represents all African literature, a continent with 54 countries. It would be similar to suggestion that a work by William Faulkner would be a representation of all work from the Americas.

Having students read a single work or five to ten "classic" works in any given course it would still make it difficult to say that we have taught or introduced them to the classics. Any attempt is limiting and bound to marginalize many groups--especially those that are members of some diverse group.

At the same time, one might argue that the YA classification has its own "classics." In many ways that list would also be quite white, yet it would include an equal number of women-- S. E. Hinton, Judy Blume, Lois Lowery, Cynthia Voight, etc. The list of males might include Paul Zindel, Robert Cormier, Jerry Spinelli, Mel Glenn, etc. In addition, there are at least four Black American Authors that should be included--Walter Dean Myers, Julius Lester, Virginia Hamilton, and Mildred Taylor. 

If the term classics suggest a text of high quality, critical reputation, and longevity then It is past time to recognize that the YA classification has its share of classic texts. Then after that, the debate about the nature can rage on.

Do students need to know the flow of literary history? Do they need to know major dates--1066, 1660, or1832? Do they need to know about the great vowel shift? Do they need to know how deeply the metaphysical poets influenced T. S. Eliot and through Eliot most of modern poetry for at least a decade? Do they need to know how Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren developed and preached New Criticism in a way that dominated literary theory, Literary textbooks, and literature courses for at least a couple of generation and is still a powerful influce today? Who doesn't respond to the demands of paradox, tension, and irony when reading and analyzing a text?

Well, if all of our middle and high school students were planning on being English majors, that might be a fine plan. New flash, they aren't.

Okay, then. let's assume that for some reason Literary History is essential knoweldge. 

It isn't that hard to teach. It is a couple of power point lectures with a couple of quizzes. It isn't any more difficult to teach than the times table in Math, the period table of elements in Chemistry, or the process of photosynthesis in Biology. All of these can be reduced to the presentation of facts that can be repeated until mastery. Does the accumulation of this information develop a love of learning or a love of reading? Does it promote joy and quest for the next book? 

I doubt it. So, go ahead take a day or two and lecture on literary history. Give a test. Most of your students will do just fine, but they won't run out and read Milton or Gerard Manly Hopkins. More likely, your students will read what you encourage them to read, they will read what you are excited about. They will read what their peers are reading. 

Remember the Harry Potter phenomenon? Many pundits passed on the book. It was felt to be too long, a long with a number of other objections. Yet, once it got in the hands of readers it spread by work of mouth and became part of a reading revolution.

In summary for this week, the YA classification is large and full of representative works from every genre. It has been developing its identity since at least 1967. It is logically to assume that their is a growing body of classic text. And, if you think your students know about literary history, then go ahead and give them a lesson or two. At the same time, decide on your goals. If they include developing fluency, comprehension, and a love a reading then a healthy supply of YA texts in your classroom might be a great solution.

​Until next week.

This week we have another post from Katie Sluiter. Katie is a busy mom, a middle school teacher, a graduate student and who know what else is on her to do list. I always appreciate having current teachers as guest contributors. Their insight and expertise is valuable as we consider what can and can't be done when we work to promote choice reading among our students. 

Take a look are the rest of Katie's posts when you get a chance.

Previous post by Katie Sluiter:
YA in the Middle School Classroom
When We Love Books; Writers Are Our Rock Stars: Why Author Visits Matter
​Revisiting the Classics I Never Visited in The First PlaceMoving to Sameness: Climate Change through the Lens of The Giver
This One Time...at nErDcamp...
​Getting Books in the Hands of Readers

Until next week.

Today I visited (virtually, of course) an English Methods at Sonoma State University taught by Assistant Professor Fawn Canady, a former doctoral student at UNLV. It was great to have free rein to talk about reasons to use YA Literature in secondary English Language Arts (ELA) classes. For the life of me, I don't understand why this is still a question. Yet, I think it goes to show how embedded traditionally structured English course are within schools. We still depend on "tried and true" texts that are already in book rooms and are familiar to teachers. 

Granted, it is expensive and difficult to acquire enough new copies of a book or of several books to provide more options in the classroom. But, if we do have the funds to score, let's say two hundred copies of To Kill A Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Jane Eyre, or of A Separate Peace, is that the best use of the funds for a school with a highly diverse population. I do like all of these books, I enjoyed teaching them, and many of my students read them multiple times. At the same time, all of these books promote a white dominate cultural narrative. While informative, they do not represent the needs of many of the students in today's classroom. 

It might be a better idea to 20 copies of 10 YA titles and implement a variety of Literature Circle strategies and let students have some choice. If you can buy 400 copies then buy 20 YA titles, and if you can buy 600 buy 30 YA titles. You see where this is going. Now imagine the range of titles, topics, and genres that you can include. What if you enhance this project by include the Librarians and have schools districts support libraries and media centers? 

I would like to cover some of the points I made in Fawn's class today. Some of the traditional complaints against YA Literature include:

1. YA isn't quality literature. 
2. The YA classification isn't the classics and don't students need to know them and have a flow of literary history?
3. We have standards to meet.
4. We don't have the books and we have to teach what we have?

I will briefly discuss each point. Today, I will discuss the first one and the others in subsequent weeks. 

The debate on this topic should be over. The first article I published in 2005 dealt with this issue. I discussed how Joesph Bruchac creates a novel, The Heart of a Chief,  that uses symbolic language, strong character development, and a dynamic plot to demonstrate that quality literature exists within the YA classification. I realized that all of my training as an English major could be used to demonstrate the literary quality of many novels in the classification. I probably could have written paper after paper analyzing and explicating quality YA literature, Instead, I turned a bit more attention to encouraging preservice and in-service teachers to use these books.

Sure, many novels within the classification are not of high literary quality. Many are just pulp fiction. It has always existed since the Ragged Dick novels and the abundance of serial novels that brought us Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins, and  the Sue Barton Nurse novels. However, the ones that of high literary quality are worth reading, sharing, and celebrating.

While it is true with YA literature it as always been true of adult fiction. For every William Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy, we have 20 to 30 writers who might spin a decent story like Ludlum, Grisham, Patterson, Clancy and others. Some adults with National Book Award (and other awards) and many don't.  Just has some YA fiction win the National Book Award for Young People's Literature (and other awards0 and many don't. It doesn't mean they aren't fun or worthy reading. Take Twilight, for example. it is a fun read with a twist on vampire mythology, but should it be the focus of curriculum unit? (Not automatically, but I would even argue that combined with a collection of other materials, It might be the center of a curriculum unit.)

If you are looking for literary quality, look closely at Neal Schusterman's Scythe.  It is another book that takes a spin on another myth, the myth of the grim reaper. At the same time, the difference in literary quality between Scythe and Twilight is significant. No one would question the monetary success and popularity of Twilight, but it wasn't a Printz Honor book. If don't believe me read them both and apply your English major analytical skills and see how it plays out. 

Be careful, I am not saying that Twilight isn't fun, enjoyable, and compelling, yet Scythe is several steps above in literary quality and equally fun, enjoyable, and compelling.

If you want YA with literary quality. I think you have to read widely, look at the long and short lists of the all of the awards, and follow the advice of scholars, teachers, librarians, and readers that you come to trust. I think that the Weekend Picks in this blog are often a good place to start. In addition, many of the books highlighted in the blog post have staying power and literary quality. Mind you, this isn't always true, sometime we overestimate the quality and staying power of a book. Most of the books discussed here are in the clear discussion of literary quality. Many will stand the test of time some will fall short, but in reality they won't fall too far from it pedestal. They aren't pulp, but what if they were? I learned a lot about plot, character, and setting reading the pulp fiction of Louis L'Amour before I realized that How the West Was Won or Sitka were a step above many of the others. Then I found the western novels of A. B. Guthrie Jr.-The Big Sky, The Way West and These Thousand Hills, Walter Van Tilburg Clark-The Ox-bow Incident, and Owen Wister- The Virginian and I discover a whole new group of Westerns with an elevated level of literary quality.  

Below is a collection of recent YA novels that I believe are of high literary quality and will stand the test of time. And no, I won't pick a favorite. In fact, I know their should be a few more. Put a few of them on you to be read list. Try them out and let me know, Maybe you will have a blog post for me in a few months.

Until next week.

Once again Lesley Roessing has a remarkable list of novels for your consideration. Check out all of her other contributions at this link.

No one can doubt that this is an especially traumatic time for our students. While children aren't becoming sick from the coronavirus in the same numbers as adults, the impact—present and future—of the pandemic on our students cannot be measured. Children are worrying about sick and vulnerable relatives and friends and suffering grief over the death of loved ones. They are experiencing the psychosocial impact of social isolation, heightened anxiety, lack of mental healthcare—counselling and psychotherapy—provided by schools, mental strain that past public crises show children typically suffer, suspected reduction in abuse reporting, and an increase in family  job and food insecurity.
 
There are students who already were struggling for various reasons, and they are particularly vulnerable. These are the children that may be hiding in plain sight in our classrooms or, more typically now, in our remote classes.
 
Three years ago, YA Wednesday posted my guest-blog “Hiding in Plain Sight: A Different Diversity” about some of these children—children of incarcerated parents, children who are homeless or living in poverty, children experiencing mental illness or children whose parents exhibit mental illness, and children living in foster care. Statistics show that it is likely that they are in our classrooms in unimagined numbers.
 
This blog is an update of “Hiding in Plain Sight,” limited to novels that I have read since that writing and featuring characters who represent those children. 
 
It is essential for children to see their lives reflected in books, appreciating those stories as mirrors acknowledging and valuing their struggles and acknowledging their resilience. They can also employ these stories as maps to help them navigate their lives. But it is equally vital for readers to see the lives of those they may see as different from themselves—their classmates and peers who are experiencing these challenges—to gain understanding and compassion, stories as windows into the lives of others. Today, thanks to perceptive, empathetic authors—many of whom experienced these same challenges, these novels with their unforgettable characters are available to diversify school, classroom, community, and home libraries.

Currently, an estimated 2.7 million children—or 1 in 28 of those under the age of 18—have a biological mother or father who is incarcerated in a local jail, state prison, or federal prison. According to the National Resource Center on Children and Families of the Incarcerated, approximately 10 million children have experienced parental incarceration at some point in their lives.

The Paris Project – Donna Gephart
​Seventh-grader Cleveland Rosebud Potts has her future planned out. She is going to do everything she needs to get away from boring Sassafras, Florida, and move to Paris for eighth grade. She has been saving money from her dog-walking business and learning French from CDs borrowed from the library. As part of her Paris Project, she still needs to learn to cook a French meal, eat in a French restaurant, view French Impressionist paintings, and be accepted and earn a full scholarship to attend the American School of Paris. She has been wearing the beret her father gave her daily as inspiration.
 
However, many roadblocks have occurred on her way. Her father is a gambler, betting on dog races, and stole not only from his boss which has earned him a 7-month jail sentence, but took all of Cleveland’s savings, and as the daughter of a criminal, most of her clients have fired her. Her mother cleans houses to try to keep ahead of the bills, and her older sister Georgia works many jobs saving for her dream, to attend the University of Vermont the following year. When she video visits her father in prison, she has ambivalent feelings—she misses the funny father she loves but is furious with his actions and their effect on the family. Because of her father’s crime, the other girls at school ignore or laugh at her and she sits alone at lunch; in fact, people in town are wary of the whole family. “Life got divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’ that awful day when Dad was arrested for stealing money from Mr. Ronnie Baker.” (64)
 
Cleveland is not only determined and focused, she is spunky—she doesn’t complain the she only has a few outfits, her sneakers have holes, and her stomach frequently rumbles from hunger. And she does have one true friend—an eighth grader who also lives in the trailer park and is working on becoming a chef like the mother who left him and his father. Declan teaches her to cook French food, helping her to check that off her Paris Project list. However, when he becomes friends, and maybe more, with the son of her father’s former boss’ (the man who put her father in jail), Cleveland has to decide how to act. “'Do you like Todd?… I mean do you ‘like’ him?” “Yes.” I understood that the words I said next mattered. A lot. I took a slow breath and gathered my thoughts. “That’s really great, Declan.” (162-3)
 
One friend decides to leave the pack of mean girls, and Declan and Todd stop by Cleveland’s locker with hugs and high fives, and “When it came to sisters, [she’d] hit the lottery,” (178). Together her support system, along with her strong mother, Cleveland navigates life after and “after that” when her dad is released from prison. Preparing for the Paris Project ends up taking on a whole new meaning as Cleveland sets new goals.

​Love, Jacaranda – Alex Flinn (This also would fit under “Foster Care”)
 
“I’ve been alive sixteen years, and this is the first time since my granny died that anyone has ever noticed me.” (10)
 
Jacaranda is a high school junior and works as a bagger at Publix in Florida. Her mother is in prison for attempted murder and, after her aunt refused to care for her, Jacaranda started her journey through the foster system. Her future goals are to graduate high school and possibly become a Publix manager one day. But as of now her goal is to get a solo in her high school spring concert.
 
When a customer asks her to sing, she sings the Publix jingle and is recorded by another customer. The video goes viral, and Jacaranda’s life changes. An anonymous benefactor sees the video and sponsors her enrollment in a prestigious arts school in Michigan where she realizes that her dreams can be much bigger.
 
The reader lives with Jackie, as she now calls herself, through her daily emails to her sponsor as she navigates her new world, taking nothing for granted—real meals, new clothes, friends who help her as she also helps them, mentors, visits to New York City, even jealous classmates, and ever-widening opportunities. She loves everything about her new life and doesn’t take anything for granted. “Do you know what I love most as MAA? You might think it’s the surroundings or the people or the opportunities. I love all those things. But the best thing is the predictability…. I didn’t have that type of predictability in foster care, and I sure didn’t have it with my mother.” (253)
 
And she even has a wealthy boyfriend—a wealthy, nice, compassionate boyfriend. But as she fits in and earns roles in the school musicals, Jackie constantly worries that Jarvis and her new friends will no longer accept her if they find out she is poor and her mother is in prison. “It was always so shameful being poor, even though it’s a matter of luck when you’re a kid.” (131) Jackie tries to keep her background and her mother’s situation a secret even as she meets a classmate who is brave enough to share her own past homelessness.
 
Reading Jacaranda’s story through her emails to her benefactor lets readers live through not only her linear story but learn about teachers, her past, and thoughts that may not be accessible in even a first person story narrative. It also allows for short read-alouds at the beginning of ending of a class period. Alex Flinn’s new novel tells a story of poverty, acceptance, resilience, and relationships.

​Every Shiny Thing – Cordelia Jensen and Laurie Morrison (This also would fit under “Foster Care”)
 
Readers follow the journey of two new friends from different types of lives as they discover themselves and how to navigate their lives.

Lauren is a wealthy teen who goes to a Quaker school. She is very close to her brother Ryan but, when he is sent to a boarding school for teens on the autism spectrum, Lauren is sure that he isn’t happy, that the school is not meeting his needs, and that her parents sent him away. She then realizes that all teens who need it can’t afford the help Ryan is getting and she designs a scheme to raise money, selling the “shiny things” that she feels her affluent family and friends don’t really need. Her scheme spirals out of control as she begins stealing items from stores, family, and friends, selling them on line, and the thrill of stealing takes over. She even involves her new friend Sierra.

Sierra’s father, a drug addict, is in jail; her mother, an alcoholic, who Sierra has cared for years in a life of poverty, is also in jail. What she wants is her family; what she needs is a stable loving family—and a friend, but not a friend who gets her involved with her own addiction.

Sierra moves in next door to Lauren with her foster parents Carl and Anne, an interracial Quaker couple who are surviving the trauma of losing their own child. She pushes them away, anxious to get back to her old life, but “In the end, he [Carl] had me find the proof/ before the statement./ A new way to think.” (p 235) Sierra and Lauren’s friendship guides them in finding a new way of thinking. Sierra realizes she can love her mother but she can’t help her, and she can let Carl and Anne help her. “I know I can’t be your mom, Sierra,/ but I can be your Anne.” (p. 333) Lauren realizes that she can stop worrying about Ryan who is happy in his new environment and she can’t save the world, but “I do know this: I’m not going to forget about Hailey or zone out when I walk past someone asking for money on the street. I won’t. Because someday, maybe, I’ll be able to do something more.” (p. 353)

Lauren’s and Sierra’s narrations are written by each of the authors in their own unique style: Lauren’s narratives in prose and Sierra’s in free verse, styles which fit the characters’ personalities and lives, lives populated by culturally diverse friends and their families as they traverse the Philadelphia I know so well. 

​Wish – Barbara O’Connor
 
“Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”
Charlie Reese was very careful what she wished for, and she made sure to make her wish every day since 4th grade. Charlie knew every way there was to make wishes and never missed an opportunity.
 
Charlie’s family was “broken”—her Mam hadn’t “put her feet on the ground” or paid attention to her in a long time, her father, Scrappy, had a temper and was in prison getting “corrected,” and Jackie, her older sister, was living with a girlfriend, graduating from high school, and working.
 
Charlie is sent to live with her mother’s older sister Bertha and her husband Gus in the Blue Ridge Mountains where people may or may not eat squirrel. Bertha and Gus are loving, try hard, and even though the cheesy Cinderella pillowcases, Bertha’s endless stories, and Gus’ “Butterbean” nickname for her may not be appreciated by Charlie, they never stop trying. “No, me and Gus are the lucky ones, right, Gus?” (157)
 
Author Barbara O’Connor sweeps the reader into the story from the first page through Charlie’s voice. “My name is Charlie. Charlemagne is a dumb name for a girl and I have told my mama that about a gazillion times. I looked around me at all the hillbilly kids doing math in their workbooks.” (3) Charlie is lost, but in Colby she meets Howard, a true friend, and Wishbone, her adopted dog, knowing that he was for her the first time she saw him, even before she caught him and he became her constant companion. “…I sent my thoughts zipping through the trees to wherever Wishbone was. I wanted him to know he didn’t have to be a stray like me.” (79)
 
The characters were all well-developed and unique, Howard, the boy with the up-down walk who ignores the bullies and the mean kids, whose wish is to have Charlie as a friend, and becomes her moral compass; the numerous Odom kids and the loving Mrs. Odom who is accepting of everyone with their quirks. “I’m so glad to have a feisty female around here to help me keep these boys under control. I been needing a girl on my team.” (109)
 
Charlie’s older sister Jackie comes to visit and as positive, gregarious, and appreciative of Charlie’s new town as she is, Charlie learns that Jackie has grown up with the knowledge that, when she was seven and Charlie was a baby, their mother left them. “Nothing’s gonna change, Charlie.….Scrappy is gonna keep being Scrappy and Mama is gonna keep being Mama and you and I are on our own. (178) But her visit helps to show Charlie just how lucky she is to have a new start in her new town. “You got a good life here, Charlie.” (179)
 
Sometimes you get what you wish for, but sometimes you get even more.

​Harbor Me – Jacqueline Woodson
 
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 on their own as a group, and talk with each other in another room—the ARTT room (A Room To Talk). Over the year the six come to know each other’s 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).

​The term “childhood mental disorder” means all mental disorders that can be diagnosed and begin in childhood, for example, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety disorders, depression and other mood disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), autism spectrum disorders, eating disorders, and schizophrenia. Based on the National Research Council and Institute of Medicine report, it is estimated that 13–20 percent of children living in the United States experience a mental disorder in a given year.

​​Anything But Typical – Nora Raleigh Baskin
 
As a former classroom teacher and one who now works with classroom teachers, I especially appreciated reading Nora Raleigh Baskin’s novel Anything But Typical which is narrated by Jason, a sixth grader who has autism. The reader sees the world through Jason’s eyes and thoughts as he navigates middle school and home life and translates that world into his story writing. We learn that, like most adolescents, Jason has insecurities, teachers who lack knowledge about him, a longing for friends and a girlfriend, and anxieties about fitting in. What Jason does have is a loving, sensitive, accepting family—his nuclear family, not his relatives, therapists who teach him coping mechanisms, and a talent for writing.

As our classrooms become more and more diverse, we need to offer readers more diverse books so that everyone can see themselves represented and valued in books and readers can learn to respect others who may be different from them through books. This novel would pair well with Kathy Erskine’s novel Mockingbird and M is for Autism written by the students of Limpsfield Grange School as well as Planet Earth is Blue and Same But Different, also reviewed in this section.

​Focused -Alyson Gerber
 
In Alyson Gerber’s first novel Braced, readers were given the opportunity to learn the story of Rachel Brooks, a middle grades student who has scoliosis but also who has persistence and resilience. Rachel learns to re-see herself and her strengths, and she provided, for many readers, a mirror to their lives and the chance to see themselves and their physical struggles valued in a novel. And maybe more importantly, Braced gave readers who have not had to face such challenges an awareness, empathy, and understanding for those who do.
 
In the same way, Gerber’s new novel Focused shares the story of Clea Adams, a seventh grader who has ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). Clea works as hard as she can on her schoolwork but just cannot seem to complete all the tasks; she doesn’t always follow directions, finish assignments, or remember what she needs to do. She feels that she isn’t trying hard enough or isn’t smart enough to achieve. She is also affected socially as she blurts out whatever she is thinking, interrupting conversations and sharing the secrets of others.
 
Luckily, on the plus side, she has a best friend Red, a new girlfriend Sanam, a supportive family, and she is really good at chess, which she loves. Chess is the one activity where she seems to be able to focus. But when her lack of focus and impulsivity cause her to lose her friendship with Red and possibly forfeit her chance to remain on the chess team, Clea needs to take action. She is tested for ADHD and learns that it is her condition that controls her actions, rather than lack of intelligence or willingness to support her friends.
 
Clea learns that she needs to follow the advice of her psychiatrist, parents, and school counselor and to advocate for herself. “I don’t notice if anyone starts whispering about me when I walk back into the room, but I don’t care if they do, because for the first time all year, I got exactly what I needed and I know for sure I did my best.” (262)
 
According to the American Psychiatric Association, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common mental disorders affecting children. As of August 2018, an estimated 10 percent of children (over 6 million school-age children) had been diagnosed with ADHD. And that is one reason this novel offers not only a good story, but is an important read for children with ADHD and those who love, live, and work with them. Focused will provide not only support for some readers who see their struggles valued in a novel but a map to navigate the difficulties of functioning with ADHD, and for others it will provide understanding of, and empathy for, those friends, family, and peers who may be facing some of Clea’s challenges.

Planet Earth is Blue – Nicole Panteleakos (This also would fit under “Foster Care”)
 
In 2018 the CDC determined that approximately 1 in 59 children is diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). According to a study by Boston University, about 30 percent of people diagnosed with ASD "never learn to speak more than a few words."

Nova, an adolescent with nonverbal autism, is locked in her own world with limited communication. She is able to open up this world with the help of her older sister Bridget, the one person who acknowledges her intelligence and takes care of her when their mother can’t. Nova and Bridget share a love for space and space exploration, and their knowledge is vast. As they are taken away from their mother and moved from foster home to foster home, Bridget looks forward to turning eighteen when she promised she will be able to take care of Nova on her own.

When the story begins, Bridget and Nova have run away from their last foster home, and Nova has been placed in a new home with loving foster parents and their older daughter; they all want to get to know Nova, her limitations, but also her capabilities. Meanwhile Nova begins school, repeating sixth grade, experiencing endless testing (her social worker has classified her as “severely mentally retarded”) and getting to know new peers in her special education room, each with their own challenges and abilities. The classmates bond, but Nova is desperately waiting for the Challenger launch with the first teacher aboard; Bridget has promised to find her so they can watch the launch together.

The story is told in alternating third person—the story of Nova’s life with Francine, Billy, Joanie, and school—and first person which the reader views through Nova’s letters to Bridget, letters that would be, in actuality, illegible. I found it very effective to read about people and events and then re-read them from Nova’s perspective.
​
Having read that the story incorporated the 1986 Challenger space shuttle launch, I began reading this novel with a feeling of trepidation. I assume that this would be experienced in a different way by readers who had not lived through the disaster. It is a moving story, and Nova becomes a character we can all champion as she experiences the disadvantages and finally the benefits of the foster system. Readers will learn a lot about space and our space program, but they will also learn how many times people are judged on assumptions.

Same But Different: Teen Life on the Autism Express - Ryan Elizabeth Peete and RJ Peete

Ryan Elizabeth Peete and RJ Peete’s novel Same But Different is based on their own lives. Characters Charlie and Callie are twins; Charlie has autism, and Callie feels that she needs to be his guide, support, rule-maker, and the person who is always there to stand up for him against bullies and those who try to take advantage of his naiveté. This year Callie is starting tenth grade, and Charlie is repeating ninth, but she is still there for him.

In alternating chapters Charlie (RJ) and Callie (Ryan) discuss their lives on the “Autism Express.” Charlie takes us into his world where he “may have autism, but autism doesn’t have [him].” Ryan takes us into her world where it seems that autism may have her a little more than she wants. Ryan does focus on how Charlie affects her life and her relationships with family and peers. It is clear that she loves Charlie and willingly takes responsibility for helping him, but she does stress the negative aspects.

Although every child affected by autism is at a different point of the spectrum and is affected in different ways, a book explaining at least one family’s journey is a valuable addition to the classroom library, as a catalyst for generating important discussions among adolescents. Even though the characters are in high school, the book is appropriate for even young adolescents.
​
Parent-author Holly Robinson Peete provides an insightful introduction, “A Letter from Mom,” and conclusion, “A Mother’s Hope,” as well as a valuable Resource Guide. A very important point she makes is her worry how RJ's future may be affected as a man of color with autism, a person who doesn't necessarily read the signals of our world.

In Sight of Stars – 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 two 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 bad 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. But 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.

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 readers will want to read it multiple times.

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

​Turtles All the Way Down – John Green
 
This novel introduced me to a new favorite character, Aza, whose name takes her through the alphabet and back again. Aza suffers from debilitating anxiety. Green, through Aza, is very effective at describing her condition to the readers, the way it spirals out of control, controlling her life as she tries to figure out who her “self” is. “I was beginning to learn that your life is a story told about you, not one that you tell.”
 
And as much as Aza tries to control herself and her relationships, her thoughts take over, sometimes rendering her helpless, other times dictating her actions. Her thoughts intrude in her relationship with her new boyfriend Miles and almost derail her relationship with her best friend.

The plot involves a mystery, but I saw that more as a vehicle for the characters’ evolving relationships as they all—Aza, Daisy, Miles and his brother Noah—explore the world, face loss, and navigate relationships with parents and friends. “…the world is also the stories we tell about it,” and John Green helps readers understand the complexities of life—especially life with loss and mental illness. 

​Give and Take – Elly Schwartz
 
“My insides are filled with a missing that can’t be fixed with words.” (85) Twelve-year-old Maggie’s world seems to be filled with good-byes. It all began on the first worst day of her life—"Forgot Me Day,” the day her Nana forgot who Maggie was, and then the second worst day, the day Nana died. Maggie becomes anxious that she will forget what is special in her life, and she starts collecting mementoes of small moments. She hides boxes under her bed and in her closet, boxes filled with gifts but also milk cartons and straws from lunches, sticks, rocks, anything that will help her remember.
 
When the family takes in a foster baby, Maggie knows it is temporary to give the baby a good start until she gets her forever family, but Maggie hides away baby socks and diaper tabs. “A little something. To remember. So my memories don’t disappear.” (13) Baby Izzie is adopted and Maggie is filled with a “giant missing.”
 
When her secret is discovered, her parents send her to work with Dr. Sparrow, who helps her work toward “a heart big enough to love a lot and a brain healthy enough to let go.” (267)
 
During all this, Maggie meets a new friend, Mason, who joins their formerly all-girl trapshooting team; helps her little brother Charlie makes friends; finds—and loses—a pet turtle; and has to decide whether to tell a friend’s secret, a secret that could be hurtful to others, risking the loss of that friendship.
 
Maggie, who struggles with anxiety manifested through hoarding, joins her author-Elly-Swartz-sisters Frankie, who in Smart Cookie is dealing with the loss of her mother, and Molly who struggles with OCD in Finding Perfect in my heart. Their stories will help some young adolescents see their lives reflected and challenges honored and will give others the empathy to understand their peers. For the adult who read these novels, they may provide a flash of insight into those in our classrooms and families.

​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. 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 (Dartmouth Psychiatric Research Center in The Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth University).

​Family Game Night and Other Catastrophes - Mary E, Lambert
 
Hoarding disorder (HD) affects an estimated 2% to 5% of the general population. HD is unique from other disorders because its symptoms are tangible and entail a large accumulation of objects that prevent the use of space for necessary or usual human functions. This abundance of objects results from a pathological failure to discard objects and not accumulate more. When hoarding is severe, it presents risk of physical and psychological harm to hoarders and their families. Hoarders cannot see that their behavior subjugates the entire family to a life that is permanently altered. Where severe hoarding exists, families rarely have space for shared activities and they are forced to combine spaces inappropriately. Children often realize if they talk about their family secrets, they could lose their parents and homes.
 
I had, of course, heard of hoarders but did not realize the extent of the problem or the effect on the children until I lived through Annabelle’s secret in Mary E. Lambert’s new novel Family Game Night and Other Catastrophes. Annabelle’s mother is a hoarder, and almost every room of the house is filled with objects, well-organized objects. Mother lives in muumuus, the colors of which signal her moods, and doesn't leave the house.
 
One room is the exception.  On her tenth birthday, Annabelle tossed everything in her bedroom out the window, clearing the room of anything nonessential; she checks once a week for anything not used within the last week. Her younger sister and older brother are not so lucky and live surrounded by piles of their mother’s purchases, new and used. Leslie collects articles about the dangers of hoards and has nightly nightmares; Chad has checked out from family life.
 
On the day the newspapers, organized by weather report, finally fall off the kitchen shelves onto Leslie, seventh-grader Annabelle was sure things would change. And they did. Their father left home; he knows something has to change, but he doesn’t know how to change it. Their grandmother Nora comes to help, and there is a disastrous Family Game Night.
 
But as difficult as life is in a house filled to the brim with purchases, Annabelle’s secret is safe from her friends and potential boyfriend. Annabelle has instituted a strict Five- Mile-Radius Rule. No one is invited to meet within a five-mile radius of the house. When she first visits a new friend’s house in fifth grade, “I thought families like Rae’s, with houses that perfect, only existed in books or TV shows.” (17) When her secret is discovered, she realizes that her friends do not let it affect their friendships; they are real friends.
 
This is a novel about a strong adolescent who helps her family through a challenge as are many of our students, although their challenges may be different ones. 

Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe – Jo Hackl

“Turns out, it’s easier than you might think to sneak out of town smuggling a live cricket, three pocketsful of jerky, and two bags of half-paid-for merchandise from Thelma’s Cash ‘n’ Carry grocery store. The hard part was getting up the guts to go.” (1)

As the story begins, Ariana “Cricket” Overland's father and grandmother have died, her mother has left, and she is living with her Aunt Belinda who is secretly planning to pawn her off on Great-Aunt Genevieve. Her mother, a creative artist, has struggled between depression and wild adventures for years and is obsessed with a Bird Room she once saw, a room where “Everything was alive.” Cricket is sure that her mother will return to lay her grandmother’s headstone and, having said she wished her mother could “just be normal” (106) the night before she took off, Cricket wants to find the Bird Room and prove that her mother is not crazy and maybe find a treasure using clues hidden by the mysterious Mr. Bob. “I couldn’t stop Mama from leaving, and I couldn’t stop Daddy from dying, but I could sure do something now. (11)

When Aunt Belinda abandons her in Thelma’s Cash ‘n’ Carry, Cricket takes her pet cricket, spends all her money on supplies and food, writing an IOU for what she can’t afford, and takes off for Woods Time, as her father would say. Living in a tree house and following her father’s guidelines for survival, she survives raccoons stealing most of her food and supplies and an ice storm, and explores the ghost town, torn down and abandoned by a lumber company, until clues—and a snake bite—lead her to Miss V, the one person whose house still exists, a woman who helps Cricket discover that not only her mother, but she, “contains multitudes.” “I thought about what Miss V had said about Mama being more than what the neighbors thought…. And it wasn’t who I was, either. I was my own, whole person.…Maybe it was time to start taking chances on me.” (203)
​
Ariana Overland is an adolescent a reader wants to champion. She joins the ranks of literary strong girls as the resourceful and resilient hero of an adventure story about family and identity written by a new author with an incredible voice.

​Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson
(This novel was also reviewed in “Stories of Surviving Loss & Abandonment”)
 
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 fun. 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. 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 and battles weather, a broken finger, hunger, fatigue, and evading the police once he is listed as missing, 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.

​The True History of Lyndie B. Hawkins  - Gail Shepherd
 
This story of 11-year-old Lyndie Baines covers a lot of territory, but it is primarily about truth and the effect of lies or sometimes just not knowing the truth. The novel also shares the effects of war on those who serve, their families, and their communities.
 
Lyndie’s father, his friends, and neighbors served in the war in Viet Nam. Some never returned, some returned with physical scars, and others, like Lyndie’s dad, returned with psychological scars, scars which affect their families and lives.
 
Lyndon Baines (yes, named after that Lyndon Baines), an avid student of history, knows this isn’t particular to the Viet Nam conflict; she has read many letters written by Civil War soldiers. She doesn’t realize just how damaged her father is, but she suspects that he and her mother, a former activist who now stays in her bedroom with constant headaches, are not quite okay. “I don’t think my parents know how to head us in the right direction” (24).
 
Lyndie struggles in her school, where she doesn’t fit in; she struggles in her new home with her parents; Grandpa Tad; her proper Southern grandmother Lady, to whom keeping family secret private and keeping to schedules is primary, even when the family needs help and even if perpetually-grounded Lyddie needs a normal childhood; and she struggles with the type of person she wants to be—more like her altruistic best friend Dawn. She is a fighter, but she also cares about things deeply.
 
And then D.B. enters the picture, a former foster child released from a juvenile detention center to live with Dawn’s family, at least for the school year. Lyndie decides she needs to save D.B. despite her father’s words, “Take care, what you lend your heart to” (73). Through her relationship with D.B., Lyndie learns that things are not always what they seem—with him, with Pee Wee, with her family.
 
When things come to a crisis on her twelfth birthday, Lyndie has to take steps to expose the truth, “’No,’ I correct myself. We’re not okay. Not really.’” (267) and make things right—for her, her family, and D.B. and put all the scraps together.

​The number of children in foster care has increased in recent years; in 2019, there were approximately 440,000 foster youth nationwide. Each year, approximately 20,000 youth will age out of the foster care system when they turn 18 or 21, or when they finish high school (depending upon the state in which they live).

​Far from the Tree – Robin Benway
 
Melissa Taylor was their mother. That is what Grace. Maya, and Joaquin have in common. But it is enough to make them "family" when they meet as teenagers. All three were given up at birth or shortly thereafter: Grace to a loving middle-class family; Maya to a wealthy family who then had their own biological child—and their own problems; and Joaquin to a lifetime of foster homes. Then 16-year-old Grace becomes pregnant, and after her baby Milly is adopted, Grace yearns to finds her biological mother.
 
When the three siblings meet, they immediately bond and help each other, not only to find the part of their identity they thought missing, but they help each other fit into their present families and lives and discover that it is possible to have two families and feel complete. Maya is able to accept her place as the only brunette in a family of tall redheads and forgive a mother who is an alcoholic; Joaquin is ready to value himself and trust enough to let himself be adopted; and Grace can forgive herself for giving her baby a life apart from her.

Reading this winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, I laughed and cried. These are characters who get under your skin as soon as you meet them. 

​Orbiting Jupiter – 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 school and 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). I loved 14-year-old Joseph, a foster child who has been repeatedly hurt by others; to 12-year-old 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, Joseph's foster parents who have taken in a teenager who served time in juvenile detention and are trying to help him heal and become whole again; to the teachers and coach who see the positive in Joseph.
 
As Joseph searches for his baby daughter Jupiter, for someone to love, his past comes to haunt him.

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

​The Season of Styx Malone – 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, Styx 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 sure 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.

​According to the Children’s Defense Fund, 11.9 million 5 to 17-year-olds live in poverty in America, which is 1 in 6 children; in 2018, the number of poor children was 11.9 million, 16.2 percent of all children. More than 70 percent of these children come from working families. The homeless student population has climbed in recent years. The National Center for Homeless Education (NCHE) estimates that about 1.36 million public school students experienced homelessness during the 2016-17 school year, an increase of 70% in last decade.

​The Benefits of Being an Octopus – Ann Braden
 
“Some people can do their homework. Some people get to have crushes on boys. Some people have other things they’ve got to do.” (52)

And seventh-grader Zoey has a lot she has to do. She has to pick up the baby from her mom’s job; she has to meet her little sister and brother at the bus stop, take them home, and many times feed them. She has to keep them busy in the one bedroom they all share so they don’t bother her mother’s boyfriend or mess up his perfectly organized, clean trailer. She has to help her friend Fuschia when she is thrown into an abusive situation and her friend Silas when rumors are spread about him. And she has to get through each day, as unnoticed as possible, so she doesn’t get teased for her unwashed clothes. If only she were an octopus, she could use her many arms to hold her three siblings, do her homework, help her mother; she could camouflage herself and be even less noticeable; she could change her shape and fit in small places. She could protect herself, her friends, and her family.

Zooey used to have a strong, competent mother. But that was before Lenny, Lenny who breaks her confidence with his verbal abuse. How can Zoey convince her mother to leave; how can they afford to leave?

“It’s not enough to know your stuff. Not if one of the things you know for sure is that everyone you’re going up against is better than you.” (42)

There is one teacher who sees the potential in Zoey and forces her to join the debate team where Zoey learns about discrediting your opponent, thinking from new perspectives, and saying what you think with passion. When she hears Matt Hubbard, the most popular boy in the class—but one who has been nice to her—give a speech, “…suddenly, I know. This isn’t some crush on a boy. This is me wanting to feel the way he does. Strong. Confident. Like no one would even think about messing with me.” (68) Through her teacher and her mother’s friend Connor, she gets to the point “…when you start to wonder if maybe you do have a choice about the kind of person you want to become.” (102)

And she needs to help her mother back to the place where she realizes that she has choices and the right to be treated well, even if it means a harder life.

​Clap When You Land – Elizabeth Acevedo
 
One plane crash. One father’s death. Two families’ loss.
 
“Papi boards the same flight every year.” (18) This year when her father leaves for his annual 3 months in his homeland, Yahaira knows the secret he has kept for 17 years.  But she is unaware of who else knows. Not Camino, the other daughter who is practically Yahaira’s twin. Camino only knows she has a Papi who lives and works in New York City nine months a year to support her and the aunt who has raised her since her mother died.
 
When Papi’s plane crashes on its way from New York to the Dominican Republic, all passengers lose their lives and many families are left grieving. But none are more affected than the two daughters who loved their Papi, the two daughters whose mothers he had married.
 
“It was like he was two
Completely different men.
It’s like he split himself in half.
It’s like he bridged himself across the Atlantic.
Never fully here or there.
One toe in each country.” (360)
 
Sixteen year old Yahaira lives in NYC, a high school chess champion until she discovered her father’s secret second marriage certificate and stopped speaking to him and stopped competing, and has a girlfriend who is an environmentalist and  a deep sense of what’s right.  “This girl felt about me/how I felt about her.” (77) Growing up in NYC, Yahaira was raised Dominican.
“If you asked me what I was,
& you meant in terms of culture,
I’d say Dominican.
No hesitation,
no question about it.
Can you be from a place
you have never been? “ (97)
 
Sixteen year old Camino’s mother died quite suddenly when she was young, and she and her aunt, the community spiritual healer, are dependent on the money her father sends. Not wealthy by any means, they are the considered well-off in the barrio where Papi was raised; Camino goes to a private school and her father pays the local sex trafficker to leave her alone. And then the plane crash occurs.
“Two months to seventeen, two dead parents,
& an aunt who looks worried
Because we both know, without my father,
Without his help, life as we’ve known it has ended.” (105)
 
Camino’s goal has always been to move to New York, live with her father, and study to become a doctor at Columbia University. Finding out about her father’s family in New York, she makes a plan with her share of the insurance money from the airlines. But Yahaira has her own plan—to go to her father’s Dominican burial despite the wishes of her mother, meet this sister, and explore her culture.
 
When they all show up, readers see just how powerfully a family can form.
“my sister
grasps my hand
I feel her squeeze
& do not let go
hold tight.” (353)
 
“It is awkward, these familial ties   & breaks we share.” (405)
 
After the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 just two months after 9/11/2001, it was sometimes a spontaneous reaction for passengers to clap when the plane landed, one of “the many ways Dominicans celebrate touching down onto our island.” (Author’s Note).

​Free Lunch – Rex Ogle
 
On the first day of middle school Rex arrives at school with a black eye and his name in the Free Lunch Program registry. This was supposed to be a great year. “I guess it won’t be after all.” (25)
 
When his friends all join the football team, Rex has no one to sit with at lunch. “Having a place to sit in middle school is important. ‘Cause it means you have friends. Popular kids sit at one table. Football players sit nearby. Cheerleaders too. Band kids are in one area, school newspaper and yearbook kids at another. Religious kids have a table. So do the kids who play Dungeons & Dragons. The whole cafeteria is that way. Everyone has their place. Everyone except me.” (56)
 
As Rex lives through a year of avoiding being hit by his mentally-unstable mother and her abusive boyfriend; taking care of his little brother; sleeping in a room with only a sleeping bag; having his one possession—his Sony boombox, a present from his real dad—pawned; surviving a teacher who treats him as “less than;” and moving to government-subsidized housing in view of the school, he still feels the responsibility to help his mother. When his friend Liam steals some candy at the grocery “because [he] can,” the cashier asks to see Rex’s pockets, and Rex learns the double standard for the wealthy and the poor. “I don’t get why folks act like being poor is a disease, like it’s wrong or something.” (53)
 
On the positive side, Rex makes a new friend at school, Ethan, a boy who may have seems a “total weirdo” at first but turns out to be a good person and true friend and have his own family problems, and Rex’s teacher learns to admit and face her own prejudices. Rex comes to the realization that “Mom didn’t sign me up for the Free Lunch Program to punish me. She did it so I could have food….Things are not as black and white as I thought. Maybe some things are gray, somewhere in between.” (188)
 
Rex’s mother finally obtains a job, and he even receives a present for Christmas. “I may not have a million presents, but I have one. And one is better than none.” (188) As Ethan  tells him, “…no one has a perfect life. There is no such thing as ‘perfect.’ It’s just an idea.” (195)
.
However, some lives are indeed less perfect. About 15 million children in the United States – 21% of all children – live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold. Forty-three percent of children live in families who earn less than necessary to cover basic expenses (NCCP). And Rex Ogle, author, was one of them—and Free Lunch is his personal story.

Front Desk – Kelly Yang
 
Ten-year-old Mia becomes an activist and champion of those who cannot, or will not, stand up for themselves [“You don’t get it, kid. I’ve been fighting my whole life. I’m done. It’s no use fighting—people are gonna be the way they’re gonna be” (105)], teaches others the wrongs of prejudice and injustice, and forms a community from her neighbors, patrons, and fellow immigrants.

Mia and her parents emigrated from China to the United States for a more “free” life. In China her parents were professionals; in America they feel lucky to find a job managing a motel. But the owner, Mr. Yao, is unkind, unjust, cheap, and prejudiced. He reduces their salaries until they are working for lodging and a life of poverty. And while this is a novel about Mia who manages the front desk and helps her parents temporarily hide other Chinese immigrants who have been mistreated, it is really a novel of culture, prejudice, bullying, community, and, most of all, the power of writing. “It was the most incredible feeling ever, knowing that something I wrote actually changed someone’s life.” (218)

In America there are two roller coasters, and people are born to a life on one or the other, but Mia and her friend Lupe, whose family came from Mexico, have decided to break that cycle. Although bullied in school and warned by her mother that she will never be a “native” English writer, Mia develops her writing skills to help Hank gain employment after a wrongful arrest, free “Uncle” Zhang whose ID and passport were being held by his employer, share her story with her teacher and classmates, and finally persuade friends and strangers to take a chance on her family.

Mia is a representative of the “nearly twenty million immigrant children currently living in the United States, 30 percent of whom are living at or below poverty.” (Author’s Note). Author Kelly Yang, one of those immigrant children, shares the autobiographical elements of the novel in her Author’s Note.

Front Desk, with its very short chapters and challenging topics would be a meaningful and effective 10-minute read-aloud to begin Grade 4-7 daily reading workshop focus lessons. I would suggest projecting Mia’s letters since they show her revisions as she seeks to improve her language skills and word choices.

​Gem & Dixie – Sara Zarr
 
“It’s not like I get hit. I don’t get touched. I don’t get threatened.… We don’t always have food but I manage to eat.… I take care of my sister.”
“But what does it take to be in danger? What does that even mean? Are things not bad enough? Should things be worse for me before…before I can make them better?”

Gem has been organizing her life and taking care of her younger sister Dixie and her mother most of her life. Her philandering father was kicked out and is a rare presence in their lives, and her mother drinks and uses drugs. I was drawn to Gem from the very beginning when the reader first encounters her as a child taking care of Dixie and leading her on “adventures” in their apartment. As the sisters enter high school, popular, pretty Dixie grows away from the Gem, accepting life as it is and making it work for her. We see Gem, a high school junior, hustling quarters to buy lunch because her father is long gone and her mother won’t fill out the paperwork for free lunches. My heart broke for her as, alone and friendless and somewhat sister-less, she navigates life with the help of her school psychologist Mr. Bergstrom.

Their father’s return leads to an opportunity for the sisters to leave on a real adventure and although they bond for a few days, Dixie opts to return home while Gem, even though she still worries about Dixie, takes the solution that can make her own life better.

Author Sara Zarr created a character who broke my heart even while I was rooting for her.
“Everything that happened, it was only because we wanted our parents to be better, to know how to take care of us.” 

​Genesis Begins Again by Alicia D. Williams
 
“We’re gonna get evicted again. If we get evicted again, you said you’re gonna leave…. I’m tired of coming home and our stuff’s on the lawn…. I’m tired of staying in people’s basements! Why can’t you just pay the rent! Just stop gambling and pay the rent!” (280)
 
Eighth-grader Genesis Anderson’s family has been evicted four times already. Her father has a gambling problem and is an alcoholic but somehow he moves them from Detroit to a house in the fashionable Farmington Hills. But again the rent is not paid, and they will probably lose this home also.
 
Genesis has other problem, problems with other kids at her schools calling her names based on the darkness of her skin. Her parents are from complicated families with ideas about skin color and class. Genesis hates the color of her skin and the texture of her hair, wishing she looked like her beautiful light-skinned mother. “’I can’t stand you, ‘ I say to my reflection.” (10) She thinks her father has rejected her because she is dark like he is. “What if I inherited all Dad’s ways? What if no one recognizes that I’m…one of the good ones?” (154) “Every single night I’ve prayed for God to make me beautiful—make me light. And every morning I wake up exactly the same.” (157)
 
Even though she is finally making friends in her new school, two friends—Todd and Sophia—who know what it’s like to be stereotyped and bullied and like Genesis for who she is, she tries to bleach her skin and relax her hair to fit in, become popular, and please her father and grandmother.
 
Through her chorus teacher’s discovery of her singing talent and introductions to the music of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Eta James, Genesis finds the courage to audition for the school talent show and sing. “I can’t believe it. I did it. I, Genesis Anderson, stepped out onto that stage and sang. Out loud. In Public. Alone.” (249) At the actual performance, she discovers her strength. “I let each word soar. I swoop down to hug the little girl sitting on the curb with all her furniture. I visit the girl in the basement with the wrinkled brown bag passing from hand to hand. I kiss the lonely girl who hears ugly taunts from the mirror. I experience every moment. And I’m not afraid.” (348)

​How to Build a Heart – Maria Padian
 
According to the DODEA, “Children who experience the loss of a parent or other family member through a military line-of-duty death are likely to face a number of unique issues.” Izzy’s father died when she was ten, before her younger brother Jack was born. Her small family, estranged from her father’s relatives, has moved from place to place as her mother, a nurse’s aide, tries to support them.
 
When she moves to a trailer park in Virginia, Isabella Crawford becomes embroiled in the family drama of her best friend. As a member of the acapella group at the private school where she is a scholarship student, she befriends a freshman who is battling her own demons. To make her life even more complicated, her family becomes the recipient of a Habit for Humanity house, and Izzy has to volunteer hours towards its construction.
 
In the midst of all this drama, Izzy, who is determined to keep her family’s circumstances a secret from her classmates, discovers what friendship and trusting friends—and family—really means as she reconnects with her father’s pig-farming family and finds that her wealthy friends and her new boyfriend care about her, not her economic status.
 
Izzy, an adolescent straddled between two cultures—that of her Puerto Rican mother and her North Carolina father—is not quite sure where she belongs but learns to share her world with others. She is a memorable, well-developed character whom I did not want to leave at the end of Mara Padian’s new novel. 

​Isaiah Dunn is My Hero – Kelly J. Baptist
 
After Isaiah Dunn’s father died suddenly of a heart attack, his mother, too depressed to work, took her solace in bottles. “But I do think. About how the world can be good and happy for one person, but bad and sad for somebody else. And how everything can change in just one minute…like it did for me, Mama, Daddy, and Charlie.” (21)
 
Fifth-grader Isaiah, his mother, and his 4-year-old sister Charlise lost their apartment and moved into the “Smokey Inn,” which is how Isaiah refers to their motel. But then they lost even that, living in their car until they were rescued by a former neighbor.
“Every day Mrs. Fisher writes a sentence on the board, and we have a few minutes to write something about it. Today she wrote, ‘My world is a good and happy place.” (21)…I keep my workbook closed, too, cuz there’s no way I’m writing and words about being safe and happy.” (23) And a few days later, “I wanna tell Mrs. Fisher there’s no way I’m writing about ‘my favorite room in my house’.”(55)
 
But Isaiah does have his father’s notebook of stories of the superhero Isaiah Dunn which he reads slowly and savors, and he has a love of words, a talent for writing poems, and the goal of making enough money somehow to move his family into a house. He truly wants to be Isaiah Dunn, Superhero. But life is tough, and young adolescent lives are complicated under the best of circumstances. The reader follows Isaiah’s year as he navigates changing relationships with classmates and faces his own grief, attempting to hold his family together, and we cheer him on as he creates a lasting tribute to his father’s memory.
 
Isaiah Dunn’s story began in the short story anthology Flying Lessons, and author Kelly Baptist develops this engaging character in this novel.

​Jackpot – Nic Stone
 
What would you do if you won the Mighty Millions Jackpot—all or even a portion of two hundred twelve million? What if just some of that money could keep you from becoming homeless again, allow you the dream of college, take care of the health of your mother and little brother?
 
Rico Danger, the main character of Jackpot, is one of the children who live in families with incomes below the federal poverty threshold. “…I think that this is totally what I’ve secretly wanted—being a normal teenager with friends that I hang out with in basements on Saturday nights…”
 
But Rico doesn’t have time to hang out and make friends. She works as many shifts as possible at the Gas ‘n Go to help her mother pay the rent and for other necessities, while juggling high school and taking care of her little brother while her mother works double shifts. Rico plans the budget, does the shopping, and worries about the bills, being the financially-responsible household member. She agonizes about their lack of health insurance, especially when her young brother gets sick. She dreads becoming homeless as they were when her mother’s boyfriend kicked them out. And she keeps her head down at school, ashamed of her thrift store clothing.
 
However, on Christmas Eve, working at the Gas ‘n Go, Rico sells two lottery tickets to an older woman who lets her keep one of the tickets for herself. When it is announced that one of the lottery winners bought the ticket at her store, Rico is sure it was the ticket bought by this woman, the ticket Rico did not choose. As the winnings go unclaimed, Rico plans to find this woman, remind her of the ticket, and hopefully get a cut of the winnings. She swallows her pride and asks Alexander Macklin, the handsome, rich, popular Zan who was also in the store on Christmas Eve, to help her identify and find this lady.
 
As Rico and Zan and his two friends spend more time together, she experiences not only the life she was missing but learns that things—and people—are not always what they seem and maybe they all have more control over their circumstances than she thought.
 
An added bonus were the short chapters told from the point of view of objects, such as the lottery ticket, the taxi cab, bed sheets.

Junk Boy – Tony Abbott
 
Junk Boy introduces reads to two outliers, two dysfunctional families, two stories which become intertwined.

“there is no putting
a tree back up after
it’s broken
and fallen
in a storm

maybe with us
with people
it’s different” (336)

Bobby Lang, nicknamed Junk by the bullies at school because he lives in a place that has become a junkyard, spends his time flying under the radar, eyes down, not speaking. His father is drunk, abusive, unemployed, and listens to sad country songs; his mother who left when he was a baby is, according to his father, dead. Bobby has no self-confidence and little self-worth, but then he meets Rachel, a talented artist who sees something else in him.

“her eyes could
somehow see a me
that is more me
than I am

that is so weirdly more
so better than
actual
me” (273-4)

But Rachel has her own family problems. Her father has just moved out and her physically-abusive mother wants the local priest to “reformat” Rachel who is gay.

As Rachel moves in and out of Bobby’s life, her need helps him figure out
“what was I going to
say
do
be?” (274)

And what he is, or becomes, is a rescuer and protector, a savior. As Father Percy tells him, “It’s what she found in you…” (352)

Reading Tony Abbott’s first verse novel, I felt like I was watching a movie unfold as I followed the protagonist on his hero’s journey. 

​No Fixed Address – Susan Nielsen
 
This novel, which takes place in Vancouver, highlights a very important crisis, in both the United States and Canada—homelessness.
 
However, there are many other issues incorporated into the plot. Besides homelessness, 12-year-old Dylan’s mother is a pathological liar; his father was a sperm-donor. 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 never tries to be a good employee. She is 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. She does suffer from some type of depression but that appears to keep her from searching for jobs, not from keeping them.
 
What I did appreciate in this novel was the resilience and resourcefulness of 12-year-old Felix and the support of his two friends, Dylan and Winnie. The novel illustrates many of the challenges experienced by homeless families to maintain the veneer of normalcy and to stay together and paints a realistic picture of many 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. 

​Operation Frog Effect – Sarah Scheerger
 
When their teacher explains the Butterfly Effect, “It’s the idea that a small change in one thing can lead to big changes in other things…Anything and everything we do—positive or negative, big or small—can influence other people and the world.” (153, 155) and tasks her 5th graders to think about what they could do within their social-issues projects to make a difference, they do—with repercussions they did not imagine.
 
Told through their daily journals, readers learn about the lives and feelings of the eight students in Mrs. Graham’s classroom. Emily, whose two best friends have “outgrown” her, struggles through the year wondering if she will have friends again; when she is left to team with other students, she is upset but may have found newer, truer friends. Kayley is honest to a fault since she always knows best; she tells everyone, even the teacher, what is best and what to do, not afraid to burn bridges since she will be attending a private middle school next year. Aviva is caught in the middle. She still wants to be friends with Emily and do what’s right but is manipulated by what Kayley thinks.
 
Sharon writes her journal in free verse; a typical loner, she hopes for letters in her desk mailbox as she slowly becomes part of a group of friends. Cecilia was born in America but addresses her journal entries to her Abuelita in Mexico, her mother coming to America for a better life for her child. Blake, who loses his home, draws his entries and turns out to be a tech whiz, while Henry writes his journal as scenes and makes jokes, slowly tearing down Kayley’s defenses. Kai, Taiwanese son of professors, is a voracious reader and wants to “be the kind of person who does something.” (230)
 
And Mrs. Graham is the teacher who forces them to think. When she tells them their first-day seats are their teams for the year, some students rebel but they slowly begin to perform and feel like teams, even friends. When Sharon has the idea that her team should experience a night of homelessness as “full immersion” in their social-issues project, serious consequences result, and it is up to the class to fix them—to make the big changes and influence their community. Named Operation Frog Effect in honor of the class frog they saved, the students learn to be part of a team and of a classroom community.

The Great Jeff – Tony Abbott

The Great Jeff is a sequel or companion book, to the 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.

​Where the Heart Is – Jo Knowles
 
“When you learn vocabulary words in school, you memorize the definition. And you have a good idea of what the words mean. But it’s not until you feel them that you really grasp the definition. I have known what the word ‘helpless’ means for a long time. And ‘desperate.’ But I’ve never felt them. Feeling them is different. They fill your chest with a horrible sense of ‘dread’ and ‘guilt’ and ‘despair.’ Those are more vocabulary words that you can’t fully understand until you feel them. (246)
 
The summer before eighth grade is full of changes for Rachel. She turns 13; she has a job working with animals on her wealthy neighbors’ “farm;” her relationship with Micah changes when she realizes she only wants to remain best friends, not start dating him; she questions her sexual orientation when she realizes that her feelings when she is with Cybil are how she used to feel with Micah; and although her family has always been relatively poor since her mother lost her job, the bank is foreclosing and they are losing their house. If home is where the heart is, as her sister’s pillow proclaims, what defines a home.
 
In this new novel by author Jo Knowles, some readers will seem themselves represented and others will learn empathy for those whose lives may leave them feeling helpless and desperate, as is the case with too many of our adolescents who are in situations they cannot control. 

These stories with their resilient characters and challenging issues that will generate important conversations would most effectively be read in book clubs where readers can lead the discussions, offer differing perspectives to a story, and support those to whom these issues may more sensitive. Book club members can meet with members of other book clubs to compare and contrast issues and how they are handled and characters and the decisions they make. Book clubs can be organized under a Resiliency theme, choosing one book from each topic—Incarcerated Parents, Mental Health,  Foster Care, and Poverty & Homelessness—or one topic can be chosen for each class, forming book clubs from the novels listed under that topic.

Talking Texts: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum (2019) describes strategies and workshop lessons for planning, organizing, preparing readers, facilitating, and assessing that type of book club reading.

A middle school and high school teacher for twenty years, Lesley Roessing was the Founding Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project at Georgia Southern University (formerly Armstrong State University) where she was also a Senior Lecturer in the College of Education. In 2018-19 she served as a Literacy Consultant with a K-8 school. Lesley served as past editor of Connections, the award-winning journal of the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. As a columnist for AMLE Magazine, she shared before, during, and after-reading response strategies across the curriculum through ten “Writing to Learn” columns. She now works independently, writing, providing professional development in literacy to schools, and visiting classrooms to facilitate reading and writing lessons. She can be contacted at lesleyroessing@gmail.com or through Facebook Messenger.

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
• 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
• Queer Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the English Language Arts Curriculum
• Story Frames for Teaching Literacy: Enhancing Student Learning through the Power of Storytelling (in press)

A few days ago, I was part of a panel with Chris Crowe and James Blasingame discussing the history and future of YA literature. Yes, I know, three old white guys. I think it is safe to say that none of us think the future should look like us. We are all thrilled that their are scholars and authors who are working to make the field more diverse in many ways. The panel was part of a conference at the Utah Valley University entitled For the Love of Reading. Check it out, it is digital and offered for free. Our panel was put together by Mandy Luszeck, a new assistant professor, at Utah Valley. Thanks for having us Mandy. 

As part of the panel, Mandy asked us about a book that we think is important. I pick a book that I think represents a current trend that is exciting and engaging. The book I picked is We are Not Free by Traci Chee. This book is one of my new favorites. It represents an example of multivoiced novel. This book is amazing and was just announced as one of the five finalist for this year's National Book Award. (I am trying to catch up, really)

Certainly, the multivoiced novel is not new to the classification of YA literature. Paul Zindel maybe wrote the first, The Pigman, in 1968. In 2009, Melanie D. Koss noticed an foreshadowed the expansion of this type of narrative in her article Young Adult Novels with Multiple Narrative Perspectives: The Changing Nature of YA Literature. It is worth a second look or if you didn't catch it in the ALAN review the first time, there is no time like the present. 

In this post, I provide a few examples of a couple of older books and quite a few newer texts that I think are fine examples of multivoiced novels that I hope more people are reading and sharing with students. I will try to refrain from going on and on.

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds & Brendan Kiely  &  I’m Not Dying with You Tonight by Kimberly Jones & Gilly Segal 

If you are in the YA community, you have heard about All American Boys. Teacher like to teach it, Students like reading it, and the YA world loves to promote it. Should you read it? Of course, but as Brendan says, and I agree, he wishes the world didn't need a book like this. In the meantime I love the harmony that this collaboration represents. The two voices ring out and remind us of the multitude of voices that we need to listen to in the world today.

Don't stop here. I paired All American Boys with I'm not Dying with You Tonight not just because the topic is similar, but because it is another fine example of collaboration that allows us to see hope in a world of chaos. Read them both, Share them both, and figure out a way to act in the world that makes it better.   

Below is a slide show of the books covered above and few more multivoiced novels.

Until next week.

A little over a week ago I was relishing in the beauty and the diversity of the new long list for the National Book Award of Young Peoples Literature (the committee will reduce it five in just a few days) and then POTUS started to curtail and banned Critical Race Theory (CRT), especially in the context of Federal Human resources training. It was frustrating to say the least. I think about those of us who have struggled to include more diverse literature in our classes, to promote diverse authors, and to help teachers alter and expand their curriculum to more accurately provide Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Doors (Bishop).

I wrote a blog post about my feelings and concerns: The Long List for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature is Quite Diverse and that Diversity is Important in Our Current Climate

​I shared it through Facebook and Twitter, but this time I also spent a bit more time sending it by a private message to friends, colleagues, and authors who might share both my enthusiasm with the long list and my concern over a thoughtless response to CRT and its inclusion in diversity training.

After a few days, my dear friend and a wonderful YA author, Padma Venkatraman, reached out to thank me for my post.  In addition, without prompting from me, she also wrote a piece. I am thrilled to be able to post it here and cross list it with my earlier post.

​Check out her website and read her books.

As you read Padma's post, glance to the right and take a look at just a few of diverse titles that Padma had at hand. Take another look at the long list and explore the work of We Need Diverse Books.  

We would also like to hear from others who would like to add to the conversation.

Dr. Padma Venkatraman is the award-winning author of The Bridge Home, A Time to Dance, Island’s End and Climbing The Stairs. The Bridge Home won the WNDB Walter Dean Myers Award for 2019, SCBWI Golden Kite, NESCBWI Crystal Kite, Paterson Prize, South Asia Book Award, and other awards and honors. In total, Padma Venkatraman’s books have secured over 20 starred reviews, won numerous national and international awards and honors. Padma Venkatraman’s next novel, Born Behind Bars is scheduled for October 2021 release. Before becoming a full-time writer and speaker, she directed diversity efforts at the University of Rhode Island. Visit her at  www.padmavenkatraman.com ; @padmatv (twitter); venkatraman.padma (ig).  

Until next week.

​Education has come a long way since I first started my teaching career in 2002. I remember during my second year of teaching, in a very conservative district in the Phoenix metropolitan area, being reprimanded by my principal because I had shared part of my life with my students. At the time, I lived with my boyfriend (now husband) and our kids, and I’m sure I shared an innocent anecdote about my family with students in the course of my teaching; as a result, a parent complained that I was living with a man outside of marriage. Rather than the principal telling the parent that my living situation didn’t impact my teaching, the principal told me that if I didn’t keep my personal live quiet, it might end up cutting my career short in that district. I was terrified. I stopped mentioning my family in class, and when I finally married this man in 2005, I breathed a sigh of relief because my wedding ring eliminated all the questions and worry. 

It was in the context of this district (and principal) that I learned to incorporate young adult literature and reading workshop, that I learned to close my classroom door and quietly defy the principal and parents who objected to teaching taboo topics, and that I finally learned to find my own voice and teach beyond fear. Even so, I never dared to teach a whole class LGBTQ+ book in that setting. The one time I taught Stotan by Chris Crutcher as a whole class read, I had several parents complain about the language, and I had to provide an alternate book to a few students. Still, I included books on my classroom library shelf that spoke to students, books that provides “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors” (Bishop, 1990) and matched students with books based on their interests, needs, and experiences.  

One of first books I read with LGBTQ+ characters was Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan (2010).  I know—2010 is pretty late to the party, but being in the district (and city) I was in made it difficult to find books that represented queer experiences. I picked up this book because I knew John Green’s  name and work, but I didn’t know David Levithan. I was surprised and thrilled with Will Grayson, Will Grayson. a book that tells the story of two boys named Will Grayson whose paths cross, and the authors ultimately take readers into their lives of the characters (Will 1, Will 2, Tiny, Jane, Maura) as they laugh, cry, and love. In 2010, the United States was just beginning to change laws about gay marriage and gay rights, and Arizona was even further behind.  Queer students in my classroom had NO representation, and it was this book that began my journey toward finding more books to represent the lives and experiences LGBTQ+ students in my classroom. 

About the same time, I attended my first NCTE annual convention in Chicago. I saw signs for gender neutral restrooms at the conference-this first time I had ever seen this beyond Ally McBeal in the 1990’s, and I was so proud. I knew then that NCTE was my new professional home. I knew that NCTE cared about representation of all groups, about showing respect for all peoples. By 2011, I had already joined the PhD program at Arizona State University, and had started taking courses with Dr. Django Paris, a leader in the field of culturally sustaining pedagogy. So, I knew the existence of those labeled bathrooms was a testament that this organization cared—that every voice counted—and that we needed to listen.

Since then, I have learned a lot more about teaching, about young adult literature, and about the LGBTQ+ community. I have learned from listening to authors like Bill Konigsberg, who speaks up for LGBTQ+ youth and writes about their stories; I have learned by reading books that tell fictional and true stories of LGBTQ+ youth; I have learned firsthand, as I parent of my own gay son, and as I get to know new family members in Washington who identify as queer. 

​This blog post has taken many twists and turns as I’ve worked on it the past several weeks. I began thinking about a possible blog topic as I received feedback on a chapter I had been writing. The chapter focused on a story about a young man in the story committed suicide because he was afraid to come out to his family and friends. The critique I received on the chapter focused on telling a different story about LGBTQ+ experiences—about helping LGBTQ+ youth to see a more hopeful story for their lives. And, I began to wonder if I was, indeed, focusing on telling only one narrative. 

I have been working on a writing project that involves many of the perspectives Adiche (2009). Adiche and the project suggests that we listen to and allow ourselves to tell more than one story. Critical Race Theory (DeCuir and Dixson, 2004; Sleeter, 2017) includes a key tenet focused on counter-stories. Critical Race Theorists (Hughes-Hassell, Barkley, & Koehler, 2009; DeCuir and Dixson, 2004; Sleeter, 2017 ) claim that the stories of African Americans have been silenced by the dominant narrative. Cynthia Leitich Smith (2005) shares how her editors wouldn’t accept her book because her Native American characters lived in the suburbs. Adiche (2009) tells the audience that her editor criticized her novel because it wasn’t “African” enough. All of these examples show the power that telling counter-stories gives to marginalized communities, and diverse youth (i.e. African American, LatinX, Native American, LGBTQ+, among so many other races, ethnicities, and identities) who are able to tell their stories, give voice to the varieties of lives that peoples in their communities. Just as we cannot only know one story about what it was like to live in Nigeria (Adiche’s story), we also cannot only know one story about the lives of diverse groups within the United States. 

When I focused on the dominant story in regard to LGBTQ+ youth—the story of suicide in my recent project, one of my colleagues on the project pushed me to consider telling another story—one that doesn’t end in death, but ends in hope. He pushed me to consider the fact that queer youth hear the story of suicide over and over again—to the point that they roll their eyes when it’s brought up in school. I started to think about how to change the script. LGBTQ+ suicides do occur at high rates, but youth shouldn’t only hear that story when reading about the queer community. The stories of LGBTQ+ youth should not be a single story. Many adolescents in secondary classrooms across the United States may not have read (or studied) a book that included queer main characters. When providing literature options that represent the myriad experiences of LGBTQ+ youth in the United States, it is our responsibility to ensure that stories featuring LGBTQ+ character feature a vast array of experiences that represent the queer experience, and not only the single story of suicide.  

So, in this blog post, I plan to focus on sharing a few YA novels that share stories of hope for LGBTQ+ youth. Some of the books include difficult struggles with queer identity, but will ultimately show LGBTQ+ youth that happiness is possible and perseverance will get them through many of the struggles. Others show an ideal, where the queer youth are loved and accepted by their families and friends. The field of YA literature now features more novels than ever before that represent the queer experience, and provide a backdrop for teachers, teacher educators, and YA readers to consider the LGBTQ+ community through a much larger lens. 

To begin, David Levithan’s novel Boy Meets Boy is a classic. Boy Meets Boy takes readers into a utopian, small town setting where LGBTQ+ youth are accepted for their identities at home and school. The main character, Paul, goes to a school where the star quarterback and homecoming queen is a trans character named Infinite Darlene, where the gay-straight aliiance helps straight kids learn to dance, and where the cheerleaders ride Harleys. Paul’s romantic life takes on Vegas-like odds (12-1 against winning him back) when he blows it with his new boyfriend. This book normalizes relationships

​If this book was used in class (either as a book club, whole class reading, or independent reading), I would suggest focusing on the way this book portrays an ideal—a community where LGBTQ+ youth are completely accepted at school and home. Teachers could ask students who read this book to consider ways their own community could be improved to more closely resemble that portrayed in the book. Students could contemplate Levithan’s purpose in creating such a setting in this book, and the impact it might have on LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ readers alike. Levithan normalizes the experiences of his LGBTQ+ characters; this is important for readers who may not be familiar with this community, and the depictions of the characters make readers fall in love with each of them. I love all of Levithan’s books, and would recommend any of them to readers interested in learning more about LGBTQ+ youth experiences. 

History is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera tells the love story of Griff and Theo. In alternating chapters from the past and the present, Griff shares the memories he has of Theo, who has recently died in a tragic accident. This book is simply a love story. After the devastating loss of Theo, Griff struggles with seeing a future for himself; he has always envisioned Theo as his end game. This book illustrates the beauty (and innocence) of first love. With each memory Griff shares, readers step into Griff’s heart and mind. We see why he loved Theo so much, and how hurt he is by what happened in their relationship and by Theo’s death. I would suggest this book to all readers, but especially as a counter-story for LGBTQ+ readers (NOTE: I recently suggested this book to my 17 year old son, Brandon). All of the adults in the story are accepting of Griff, Theo, and other LGBTQ+ characters. For example, when Theo and Griff come out to their parents, it’s at Theo’s sister’s birthday party. All four parents gather around the boys exchanging hugs and telling the boys how much they love them. This is the reaction all queer youth probably dream of, but that not all receive. For those that haven’t come out to their parents, this story might provide some hope; however, for those who receive a less positive reaction, this scene in History is All You Left Me might feel very fictional. Though it does provide a counter-story to the many negative stories told about coming out, readers must remember that this is but one voice—and one possible experience—for LGBTQ+ youth. 

Anger is a Gift by Mark Ochiro tells the tragic and hopeful story of a group of teens who live in Oakland, California. This book has a diverse cast of characters, beginning with the protagonist Moss Jeffries, who is a gay, Black youth who loves his friends, his mom, and his new boyfriend, Javier. Moss’s friend Bits uses they/them pronouns, and Ochiro’s writing weaves the diverse cast of characters into the story in a normalizing way. For readers who are unfamiliar, or unexposed, to gender neutral pronouns, this book pushes them to consider this. All of the characters in the story are treated with respect in regard to their LGBTQ+ identities by their friends and families even though their status as low SES students living in a tough neighborhood does impact the plot of the story. After Javier is killed in a shooting at the school, Moss has to make a decision about whether he will protest the shooting—taking the footsteps vacated by his deceased father in the process. This book shows that LGBTQ+ characters in a high school setting are not one-dimensional. Ochiro’s story is deep and thought-provoking, and hopeful. 

Bill Konigsberg’s writes a masterpiece with his newest book The Bridge which takes a look at depression as two teen characters meet on a bridge, contemplating jumping. The teen characters, Aaron and Tillie. Each character has their own personal demons, from Aaron’s gay identity, struggling romantic life to Tillie’s adoptive status and bullying experiences. Both characters are struggling with depression when they meet on the bridge that day. The story has four possible outcomes: Tillie jumps, Aaron jumps, both jump, or neither jump. By taking readers into such a gritty experience with depression and suicide, Konigsberg shares a story of hope. This book shows that suicide doesn’t have to be the only route for teens facing depression. I read everything Konigsberg writes. He’s a master at telling a story, and his books help LGTBQ+ youth to imagine themselves in situations where they can express their identities and be themselves. 

There are so many more LGBTQ+ books with hopeful messages for teens to read that will show that being queer doesn’t have just one story, but many. In this post, I have shared some of my favorites and some of my favorite authors. I think that the danger of telling the single story of suicide is real, but we do own it to the thousands of teens that die from suicide each year to tell it. But, we do need to share with our students these other stories that counter that one. These stories that I shared above show LGBTQ+ youth in families that accept them, in relationships that are loving, and with comfort in their own identities. These are the messages that many youth need.

References
Adiche, C. N. (2009). The danger of a single story. Retrieved from (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg).
Bishop, R.S. (1990), “Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors”, Perspectives, Vol. 1 No. 3, 1990, pp. Ix-xi.
DeCuir, J.T. and Dixson, A.D. (2004). So when it comes out, they aren’t that surprised that it is there’: Using critical race theory as a tool for analysis of race and racism in education. Educational Researcher, 33(5), 26-31.
Sleeter, C.E. (2017),. Critical race theory and the whiteness of teacher education. Urban Education, 52(2), 155-169.
Smith, C. L. (2005). Spotlight On CLA social justice workshop: Social justice in Native American literature for youth. Journal of Children's Literature, 31(1), 7-9.