Kate Mester
Wow. So many accessible entry points here for teen readers into unjust policing, the black lives matter movement, activism, and the arts. Medina's poemlike text is very well done and the graphics are so emotionally and contextually additive to the story. The back matter is some of the best I've seen and gives readers needed history if they didn't already come to the story with that knowledge. Ordered a small group set of these for the library and I can't wait to get them into a class and pair them with so many other great works: March Trilogy, Yummy, New Jim Crow, Between the World & Me, Racial Profiling, THUG, All American Boys, Dear Martin...the list can keep going on.
Will be great for my school's Activism Club and all MS/HS students looking for direct steps in leadership and actionable societal change.
Great bio of an artist I knew nothing about. Would be a great read-aloud paired with some of his music and some video of his work.
Really interesting first person account (the author was a teen at the time) of the uprisings in Cincinnati in 2001. The art was just ok but a repeating panel showing more squares of the story filled in each day was a standout. This would be a quick read to kick off discussions around protests against systemic police violence for 8th to HS.
They're such a captive performer that I always want to hear everything they wrote in their own voice and cadence, so I highly recommend their one-time-only performance of these pieces as well: https://youtu.be/VOOtavtqm-o
This was a vulnerable turn towards the supremely personal - the end of a rela and beginning of a new one - so it was a little less for me than their universally observed pieces but it was still all the things I expect from Tempest: clever and raw, earnest and deep with some aly humor.
Probably the best written Draper book I've read. Really liked the genuine family and community relationships. Stella is a strong character that upper elementary and early middle grade can relate to while learning a little about history. A few too many”main character heroically saves something” situations, but that's true for any Draper book.
Deserving of many of it's positive reviews, a cute twist on the start of school story.
3.5 Novel in verse by a spoken word artist. Felt very authentic but not super substantial. Definitely think kids will like it and strongly relate to it. Will booktalk it soon.
The story was interesting and I appreciated the contextual details and actual treaty, but the simple black & white drawings made it hard to see the details, as the panels were mostly small.
A 15-20 minute read with strong relevance. It's fun and cool and includes some exact scripting for uncomfortable conversations. Can be read by middle school to adult. I just learned to say “What pronouns do you use?” instead of “What pronouns do you prefer?” so you're not saying gender is a preference. So helpful!
Got turned on to this series by a former student, and I'm still enjoying it. It's hilariously depraved, has clever small-detail sight gags and references, and an intricate plot that spirals larger each volume. Hope the rest of the volumes keep up this pace
Only moved the plot a bit, but was totally worth it for a long Poyo backstory. As the Devil himself says, that is one bad*** mf-ing bird!
I will need to return to “summer, somewhere” and “every day is a funeral & a miracle”. Phew.
His own story is worth a read, but he really takes it somewhere when he goes into arguments for feminism, LGBT rights, and treating mental illness in the black community. Truthful, thoughtful, and easy to read without being easy reading.
Pg 132: “Unless we recognize that liberation for black men based in patriarchy and male dominance is liberation for no one, least of all black women, but not for black men either. It turns us into the very oppressors we claim to be fighting against. It makes us deny parts of ourselves in service of an idea of masculinity that does more to destroy than build.”
And pg 145: “One of the privileges of not being a part of a marginalized group is believing you can set your own benchmarks for bigotry.”
And pg 209: “We make a grave mistake every time we invoke the history of oppression to diminish the reality of racisms' present. Progress is real, but the narrative of progress seduces us into inaction. If we believe, simply, that it gets better, there is no incentive to do the work to ensure that it does.”
These ideas (and so many more here) should really be chewed upon and digested by so many, particularly in the current political climate and as we try to move forward collectively past Jan 20th. Let's listen, hear, and act on them.
A quick but interesting look into how she started her writing journey and the accident and recovery that pushed her creativity and ideas.
2017 Batchelder winner. Lovely illustrations and simplistic tale. Rather a heavy handed folk tale, could have done with a lighter, more story-centered touch.
For the first 2 hours of the (audio) book I was annoyed and told myself I was going to quit, that RR had 2 good books in her, (Landline was unforgivable), and from now on the books will be middling to as bad as this, a fifth rate Harry Potter knockoff. And then the book finally settled into the relationship, and that's when it finally got tolerable and more interesting. RR excels at writing relationships with realistic emotional observation, and the crappy HP fantasy fanfic was a distraction to that. Know she created these characters for Fangirl, but wish she had kept their relationship and scrapped the setting and plot for her realistic wheelhouse.
Highly recommend for MS/HS collections. Bolden helps Anderson put her arguments into YA-friendly form. The text is there from the adult version but slightly edited and updated and now broken into 22 chapters instead of 5, including original source photos, pull out boxes with clarifying historical information, and further readings. An excellent and essential adaptation for all HS American history classes.
Jason Reynolds just gets real kids/teens. Glad to see his first MG is as authentic and withit as his YA.
Layman pulled out the central mystery (chicken = death and the connection to the space writing ) for so long with hardly any breadcrumbs until vol 11, so this left the final volume with tons of exposition. The explanation was semi-satisfying but big blocks of text didn't pace well with the graphics or the plot. Also, the first ending seemed understandable, but the addendum ending really erased a lot of the goodwill earned by the series. Overall, a twisted, interesting, and funny series. Would recommend to mature older HS students.
A 3.5. I feel like Guy Lockard's reading style is more suited to the MG/YA that I've usually heard him on. It didn't work as well with such adult story lines, he sounded too much like an excited teen. A really interesting story, especially because I knew nothing about his life other than a few songs, but I wanted more depth in his relationship storylines. He reveals he has a son in a pivotal moment, but then only says one other thing about him. Same is true about his relationship with Keshia, whom he's now married. I wanted more there. My library order with these copies should be in any day, so I'm quite excited to share this story with kids. Have already hyped it with a few and they're going to be pumped when it gets in!
I continue to read these because the audiobooks are so well done, it I wish they would keep the same reader. The voices &a performance on this one weren't up to par with the others. The plot itself was a bit slow, but it really ratcheted up in the second half. Wonder how many books in the series he's going for, because it could easily have been half the length, cutting secondary stories.
See why it's winning awards and will definitely be book talking it. Very much liked how casually queer it was (no centering a coming out story, the characters are just normalized queer) and that the parent characters were all written as supportive, especially around such tough teen-life-choice topics. Also liked that the color palette was limited to back, grey, white, and light pink as the art really added nuance to the story. A thoughtful and compelling graphic that gives insight into self-worth and moving beyond toxic relationships. Strong recommend.
Dropped a few reveals into Lockwood's past. but nothing really happened until the final quarter of the story. Don't know why Stroud's drawing out this series that started so strongly. This book felt like filler. Still enjoy the audio narrator's ability to create distinctly voiced characters, but if the next book isn't the conclusion, then it won't be worth it to keep up with the series.
2.5. I was excited for this one but I'm not sure it's fully cooked yet. Some really great ideas and meaningful themes (family secrets, gentrification, class struggle) but the characters had no there, there, even Margot herself, but especially the secondary characters, and the plot mostly dragged but then zoomed into a kind of gritty events crash at the end that wasn't really dealt with.