ISBN 978-0735264496. Grades PreK-2. Tundra Books. October 1, 2019. 40pp. $21.99 Hdc. Ho’onani: Hula Warrior.
2019.Zuiker Press. Hardcover Paperback $12.99. 96 pages. 9781947378124. Middle Grades.
![Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks by [Reynolds, Jason]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/516ezXC%2B3tL.jpg)
ISBN 0781481438285. Grades 5 – 9. Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy. October 8, 2019. 208p. $17.99 Hdc. The book I’m most excited for is “Look Both Ways,” the new story collection by Jason Reynolds which features 10 stories about the events that occur during one daily walk home from school. I can’t recall a more intimate of an experiences in terms of what goes on during that walk from the school to home. Now of course Jason’s new title deals with the walk shared from the bus stop to home, but in my small town, we didn’t have a school bus. We walked, and I took this walk each day from 5th grade through 9th grade. My walking buddies were not determined by popularity, lunch table groups, or recess partners and friends. It was a much tighter-bound group: the girls who lived in my neighborhood. This group was connected by territory and parental alliances that went back decades. At the beginning of our bond, our diverse group had only experienced school integration for a year. Since I wasn’t allowed to walk home alone from school until I was ten years-old, I didn’t know about the walking-home group until my first day of fifth grade. That day I walked home alone, behind an a group of females I recognized from the neighborhood. I decided to follow them because I was a little frightened of this new challenge and I had no idea what the best route was. When the group noticed me at their rear and stopped to wait for me to catch up, I remember the relief I felt from the sense of security this brought. The older girls from junior high walked a different route, so our little diverse group operated with total autonomy. In this late sixties’ time period, we had a lot in common, like: Girl Scouts, church on Sunday mornings, household chores, ![Light It Up by [Magoon, Kekla]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51D505HDGYL.jpg)
ISBN 9781250128898. Grades 7 & Up. Henry Holt. October 22, 2019. 368p. $18.99 Hdc. With so much controversy over #BlackLivesMatter and so many people of the dominant culture who STILL don’t understand what the hashtag means, here is another narrative which concerns the senseless racially profiled killing of yet another black child. This time around Kekla places the story’s setting in the same neighborhood as her groundbreaking “How It Went Down,” the novel that inspired Jason Reynolds and Brendan Keily’s “All American Boys.”
Candlewick. 223pp. May 27, 2014. 9780763662677. Grades 7 and Up. Just finished reading this and I’m honestly choking back the tears. I can’t believe how skilled the author’s handling of the main 3 characters’ dignities with such poignancy. There’s Biddy whose mother abandoned her to a grandmother that was filled with nothing but hate and resentment for a baby that survived an oxygen deprived birth and grew up to survive 2 separate rapes. There’s Quincy who grew up in one foster home after another after surviving a traumatic head injury from a brick that was caused by her mother’s boyfriend when she was six. There’s Ms. Elizabeth, the senior citizen that took both girls under her wings and helped them to understand, at last, what family really means. That both girls have survived such a traumatic life of sexual,emotional, and mental cruelty and still look to a future is extraordinary for…
She knocked it out of the ballpark to those that caught her opening address which expressed the needs for representation not only in the books we read, but literally in the classrooms of K-12 and Higher Education. She mentioned the absence of voice in today’s curriculum-chase to master profit-driven standardized tests, which has resulted in the absence of opportunities to exercise student voice. Her comments on the need to address POCs history and cultural differences which causes us to see with a totally difference gaze than those from the dominant society were so spot on, I felt like I was listening to a testimony in church.
Cicely Wolfe’s That Night is more than a story of adolescent teen girls losing a friend to death, for we all understand the impact that loss has on youth. They are not at the point in their life to even think that there is an end to something they have only just started. This at times, is why so many of our youth are fatalistic about the choices they make, the actions they take, and the procrastinating they do. Not to say all of these themes are present in That Night. In the case of fatalism, that is definitely present, for readers are immersed into the emotional shocking accounts of Kayla –popular high school soccer player, friend and bestie with Sarah and Cass, and girlfriend to Paul– found dead from a heroin overdose at a house party. What happens next is an account of the reactions these characters have to Kayla’s death, and their interactions with their peers, their families, and others in their community
out of the way; it gets the actual experience of opioid use out of the way; AND it pushes the impact the death and use of an opiate has on those that are left behind front and center. Many who work with rehabilitating drug user will tell you that the user has no care for the trauma they bring to their families and love ones. They will use them as they use the drug…until they use them up. Even the drug addict that does care can’t control the physical need for the drug over their emotional senses.
Perhaps it was because they were fearful of her becoming addicted to the same thing that killed her, for it is well known that opiates have been used for centuries as a painkiller and that it is in many pain-killing drugs, In a manner, this was one of the issues that really bothered me: the obsession of not having Kayla labeled an addict and the ignoring of her need for comfort from the knee injury. As a reader, I found myself in constant irritation with the adults, due to the one fact that they refused to acknowledge and attend to her complaints and needs. Just as Todd and Edward’s research* on the informational needs of teens who were addicted to drugs that looked in other places for help when no info was available in any of the libraries they went to (2004), youth do the same thing for almost anything they need help and information on. Their sense of inquiry and need is so strong that if they can’t find it in one place, they start seeking out help from other places. This can lead to serious trouble if they are not monitored, as in the case of Kayla.
future in a place they have lived for generations and felt as if they were safely cocooned from street crime.
Long before there was #MeToo, there was “Speak.” Published in 1999, Laurie Halse Anderson’s semi-autobiographical novel about rape was a bestseller and later a movie starring Kristen Stewart. It remains revered and controversial, appearing on high school curriculums across the country and on the American Library Association’s most-banned-books list.
Now Anderson is stepping up to the microphone again, this time with a little more anger and a little more candor. Her new book, to be published in March by Viking Children’s Books, is called “Shout,” and in it she writes not only about her own experience as a rape victim but also about the pain and heartache readers have shared with her in the two decades since “Speak” appeared.
“Speak,” by Laurie Halse Anderson (Square Fish)
In the intervening years, Anderson has addressed untold numbers of young people — in schools and libraries across the country — about sexual assault. She has shared her own experience of being raped at 13, one year younger than the protagonist in “Speak,” and how, like her, she kept silent about it. (Anderson waited 25 years before telling a therapist what happened to her.)
Going public has turned Anderson into something of a confessor. “I have not spoken at an event where one or two people haven’t come up to me in tears afterward,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Philadelphia.
The notes come to her through email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram — even on crumpled pieces of paper handed to her after events. The message is almost always the same: Me too. I was assaulted by a boy, my friend, my dad, mommy’s boyfriend.
Anderson typically directs young people to groups such as RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) and encourages them to talk to safe adults. But given the outpour — amplified in part by the #MeToo movement — she felt a need to do more.
“I see my responsibility as helping people move away from ‘me too’ to ‘us too,’ ” she says — to create a sense of community to combat the isolation that Anderson felt as a young woman and a rape victim. “I hope that some readers will find it and feel less alone,” she said. “America’s teenagers are hungry for honesty and they are hungry for hope — and that’s what I’m trying to give them.”
Anderson began working on “Shout” in October of last year and says that it came more quickly than any of her other books, which include “Chains,” a National Book Award finalist; “Wintergirls ”; “The Impossible Knife of Memory”; and others, including a graphic novel version of “Speak,”published this year. All told, Anderson’s books have sold more than 8 million copies. Viking has announced a 200,000 first printing of “Shout.”
“When I started ‘Shout,’ it was just my rage: Why can’t we talk about these things?” she says. “Watching these brave people speak up as part of #MeToo just let me take the lid off, and that felt good. It was a second liberation for me.”
[A moment on ‘Oprah’ made her a human rights symbol. She wants to be more than that.]
“Shout” is written in free verse. In the first half, Anderson shares her own experience and how it led to the writing of “Speak.” The second half is what she calls a manifesto about “listening to and reflecting on a culture where sexual violence is rampant.” The language is sometimes graphic and often empowering:
We should teach our girls that snapping is OK, instead of waiting for someone else to break them.
As such, Anderson’s book fits in the growing movement among kid-lit writers to speak out more directly about social issues. Books such as “The Hate U Give,” by Angie Thomas, and “Long Way Down,” by Jason Reynolds, have led to frank conversations about violence and teens. The #MeToo movement has sparked authors to talk about sexual misconduct in their own ranks. The shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., spurred writers such as Raina Telgemeier toward greater activism.
Anderson expects that “Shout” — aimed at high school students and up — will be challenged just as “Speak” still is by some readers who object to its unvarnished discussion of sexuality and violence. But Anderson, now 56 and a grandmother, is undaunted.
“All of those teenagers were kind to talk to me,” she says. “They educated me.” She sees “Shout” as a kind of thank-you note to them and a “shot of advice about how liberating it is when you write about what you’ve been through.”
Brichi's Lit Spot
Brichi's Lit Spot 
