The Rock and the River

The Rock and the River by Kekla Magoon

I was drawn to this book by its subject matter: the shift in the Civil Rights movement away from the sit-ins

and marches of the early 1960s to the more militant, separatist ideology of the late 1960s. At the heart of the book are two young men, Sam and his older brother "Stick", who are the sons of a prominent Civil Rights activist growing up in Chicago. The conflict centers on the older brother's move away from the methods of his father as he gravitates to the Black Panther Party.

All in all, I wasn't too impressed by this book. The characters seemed pretty flat, the dialogue stilted and unrealistic, and the storyline too simplistic. While I appreciate the author's attempt to dramatize for young readers this very important and interesting time period, she failed, for me at least, to create a realistic alternate reality that seemed life-like for me. I just couldn't get lost in the book because it didn't seem real.

Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

In this mostly memoir, Vance tries to shed some light on the plight of working class white Americans in the

midwest, the segment of the population that were largely responsible for propelling Donald Trump to the White House. He uses his own story, which was filled with family dysfunction, as a way to explore why this group of people has floundered economically in the post-industrial economy. His conclusions seem to suggest that it is the culture of the area itself that is largely to blame. He points to a discrepancy between people's expectations for life and their behavior that many inhabitants cannot see. When a co-worker at a warehouse Vance was working at to make money for law school was fired for chronic tardiness and hour-long bathroom breaks, he complains that the supervisor merely had it out for him from the beginning. But while Vance does seem to offer many causes of this demographic's state of affairs, he posits very few solutions. Vance is a good story teller, and he certainly has a personal story worth telling, and I appreciated the way he zoomed in and out from his own life to the life of his larger community. He deftly wove these two stories together.

Goodbye Stranger

Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead

We read this book in advisory in the wake of our dress code "scandal" last year. I'm not exactly sure how the

two relate, but it does bring up issues of identity and gender as they relate to developing teenagers. The book contains two parallel stories. In one story, a girl named Tabitha, Tab for short, is coming to terms with how the transition from elementary school to middle school is impacting her friendships with people she's known since they were very little. These friendships are strained after one of Tab's core friends, Emily, engages in an inappropriate texting back-and-forth with a boy, which ends up shared around the school. In the other story, an unnamed girl is dealing with something she did to stab a friend in the back so that she could enter the good graces of another one of her friends, who is mean but popular.

Students seemed to find the voices in this book authentic, and enjoyed reading it. However, the topics seemed to hit a bit too close to home for them to really want to discuss it. It was almost like talking about it would reveal some uncomfortable secrets that most of the students had. Maybe I'm wrong about that one.

Another Kind of Hurricane

Another Kind of Hurricane by Tamara Ellis Smith

I used this book as an "anchor" text for our study of Hurricane Irene and its impact on our community. It's

about two boys. One, Henry, is from Vermont, and he is struggling in the wake of his best friend Wayne's death on Mount Mansfield. His grief eventually leads him to New Orleans, where he meets Zavion, who is struggling emotionally and physically in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Students LOVED this book. What I appreciated about it as a teacher is that while it is fairly "easy" in terms of its lexile, it is rich with meaning. It provided lots of opportunities to talk about symbolism and metaphors, to really dig past the plot of the book into its deeper meaning.

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

This nonfiction books is an account of the Great Migration, during which millions of black Americans fled the

South between the onset of World War I and the mid-1960s. As a student of American history, I'd been aware of this migration, but the sheer scope of the movement was astonishing. In addition, Wilkerson presents up-to-date research that debunks many of the misconceptions of those who made the migration, including that they brought disfunction to northern cities, so often promulgated by whites, often to disasterous results. In fact, most of the migrants were better educated, more likely to stay married, and more likely to be working than their counterparts born in the north. Perhaps most astonishing in the book was the reminder of just how racist the north was. After a march in Chicago to protest housing segregation, MLK mentioned that while he'd seen hate in the south, he'd never seen anything so vitriolic as what he experienced in the north.

What was great about this book was how Wilkerson told it. She intertwined the stories of three migrants -- Ida Mae, George Sterling, and Robert Pershing Foster -- who made their journeys from and to different places at different times. These characters revealed their stories in great detail, and Wilkerson told them in such a way that you were sucked in. You wanted to keep reading because you needed to know what would happen to these people. What a great way to tell history.