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.