Category: Controversial Issue/Debate


New Series–Quick Reads

Filed under: Controversial Issue/Debate, Fiction, Hi-Low/Quick Read, Horror/Mystery/Suspense, Romance, Sports, Supernatural, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
November 2, 2011

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Two New Series 

I’m always on the lookout for books that appeal to teens who are English learners. Unfortunately, they aren’t always easy to find. Most books written at a reading level that challenges you and pushes your reading skills are boring—they don’t discuss teen issues.

I found two new book series that I think may work for English learners. The first is called Night Fall. It’s horror fiction. The second is called Surviving Southside. It’s about urban (inner-city) teens at Southside High School. We now have some of the titles in our library and others are on the way. Come on over to the library and check one out—if you like it, check back for new titles. Let me know what you think!

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“Unwind”

Filed under: "Banned Book", Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Family Problems, Fiction, Human Rights Issues, Literary Read Alike, Sci-Fi/Futuristic, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
October 25, 2011

Unwind by Neal Shusterman 

“The Second Civil War, also known as “The Heartland War,” was a long and bloody conflict fought over a single issue.

“To end the war, a set of constitutional amendments, known as “The Bill of Life” was passed.

“It satisfied both the Pro-life and the Pro-Choice armies.

“The Bill of Life states that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen.

“However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively ‘abort’ a child . . .

“. . .on the condition that the child’s life doesn’t ‘technically’ end.

“The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called ‘unwinding.’

“Unwinding is now a common and accepted practice in society.”

So opens the YA novel Unwind by Neal Shusterman. I read the first few pages aloud on Saturday at a banned and challenged book event because I figured no one else would have chosen this book to read as it’s fairly new. From the above opening prologue, you can guess that the book is controversial. But it’s a thoughtful piece on the value of the individual in a free society, and on what happens when people just can’t admit that they don’t have all the answers.

It’s also a great read.

Connor, who can’t control his anger, is sixteen and his parents have had it. He discovers that they secretly plan to unwind him, and he heads out on the run. Risa is a ward of the state, who, having failed at becoming a top-tier classical pianist, will be unwound because there just isn’t money for the state to keep useless teens. Lev is a ‘tithe’—because of his parents’ religious fervor, they will unwind him—their tenth child–as an offering to God.

All three are on the run. If they can make it to age eighteen, they might go to jail for awhile, but they are safe from being unwound.

The novel presents a sort of future ‘underground railroad,’ through which dedicated folks help unwinds escape to freedom. But generally speaking, teens who are about to be unwound have criminal records or anger issues—so hiding them in bunches can lead to an explosive situation. The actual unwinding process (at ‘harvest camp’) is bone chilling. (Note: If you are a sophomore on up, you can’t help but notice the nod to The Lord of the Flies—including a boy others call ‘the Mouth Breather’ because he has asthma. If you need to write a paper connecting LoTF with contemporary literature, this would be great fun.)

Action-packed, full of suspense, posing some deeper questions—this is another book for varied readers looking for very different things. I think just about everyone will like it. And that includes guys who usually don’t read. Check it out!

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“Into the Beautiful North”

Filed under: Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Family Problems, Fiction, Human Rights Issues, Multicultural by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
October 24, 2011

Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea     

Tres Camarones, Sinaloa, Mexico just isn’t what it used to be. Looking for work, nearly all of the men have disappeared “into the beautiful north”—the United States. Nayeli, the young woman who has this revelation, decides to do something about it. After seeing her Aunt Irma’s favorite movie The Magnificent Seven (a classic Western, super popular in the 1960s), Nayeli decides to take her three best friends and cross the border. She is going to bring back seven Mexican men to help protect her little town from bandidos and drug smugglers. And she has secret motives as well. She wants to find her crush, a cute Southern California surfer who was also a Christian missionary in Sinaloa years before. Even more importantly, she wants to find her father, who disappeared into Illinois three years earlier.

Into the Beautiful North is by turns sad, frightening and comic. Nayeli (karate queen and soccer star), Yolo, Vampie (the only goth girl in town), and Tacho (openly gay, but feeling like a misfit) have a harrying journey through Mexico even before they try to cross the border. Their experiences on their journey—including their dealings with ‘coyotes,’ skin heads, drug smugglers, police, and Homeland Security, are realistic and frightening. Their experiences with kind strangers, some who live in a dump and yet still have the heart to help others, is also realistic.

All the characters are well drawn and quirky: Aunt Irma, the former bowling champion, women’s rights advocate and now Mayor of Tres Camarones; Atomiko, the dump ‘rat,’ who is also hero and protector to the group of friends; Tacho, gay in a closeted society but nevertheless enjoying life and becoming Nayeli’s hero.

The way that Urrea includes all points of view is unusual for a contemporary book, but it works very well. As the group takes a road trip—and later, when Nayeli and Tacho are crossing the United States on their own—the descriptions of the landscape and the atmosphere peculiar to each town are poetic. As the characters see the country for the first time, we readers see it anew through each individual’s eyes (and recognize the scents through their noses and the sensations through their fingertips). Though Nayeli’s ‘hero’s quest’ ends exactly as I knew it would (and from the writing, it seems the author thinks I’ll be surprised), I was wondering throughout the book how Nayeli herself would react to her disillusionment. Urrea did a great job with that.

This is a wonderful book for looking into the hope and desperation of people seeking a better life—and how a home town, with a little help from the good guys (and gals) can work to help all its residents. If your teacher asks you to take a modern novel and describe the hero’s journey, this would be a fun one to use because you’ll enjoy it so much for so many reasons.

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Hunger Games Action Movie Poster

Filed under: Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Fiction, Movie Tie-In, Romance, Sci-Fi/Futuristic, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — Leave a comment
September 22, 2011

Check out the Hunger Games movie poster. Click here to see and hear it in action. Give it a chance to upload–it may take a minute. What a cool riff on the theme of Katniss, the girl on fire.

I can hardly wait: March 23, 2012.

Meanwhile, I’ve bought more copies of The Hunger Games for our library. You’ve got to read all three books before the movie comes out!

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“Want to Go Private?”

Filed under: Controversial Issue/Debate, Family Problems, Fiction, Hi-Low/Quick Read, Mature Readers, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — 2 Comments
August 31, 2011

    Want to Go Private? By Sarah Darer Littman

I want all of you to read this. Really.

Abby is worried about beginning high school because she thinks that life will be even worse than middle school now that there with be more Clique Queens to make her feel bad about herself. Her BFF, Faith, is looking forward to ninth grade as a chance to meet new people who attended the other middle school in town. But when Faith meets Grace and starts hanging out with her—and then finds a love interest with Ted—Abby realizes she was right.

High school sucks.

And home is just as bad. Abby’s dad recently started his own business and he’s never around. Her sister, Lily, is in 7th grade and lives to irritate Abby and fight with her. What Abby does have is her ‘second life’ on ChezTeen.com. It’s just like Second Life, but for teens only. Avatars get in groups, meet up, hang out, go to concerts. And Abby only talks to people she knows. Until she meets BlueSkyBoi.

BlueSkyBoi has the same favorite music as Abby. He thinks they are soul mates. When he asks Abby if she wants to go private, she decides it can’t hurt anything. After all, she’s not giving him her real name or her address. Plus, it feels great to talk to him, even though he is twenty-seven. He always supports her, agrees wither that Faith is being a jerk and not a very good best friend. He’s sweetly jealous, so that when Abby goes on her first date with a guy in her science class, BlueSkyBoi—whose name is Luke—convinces her that she is his girl.

Want to Go Private? does a great job at showing that academic intelligence (Abby is a straight A student) isn’t the same as emotional intelligence. She’s sweet and a bit nerdy even, but she’s very naïve. It also does a great job at showing how an Internet predator grooms his victims. He doesn’t ask her to do crazy things all of a sudden. Luke builds Abby’s trust over months. Even when he starts to ask her to do weird things (“What is your bra size?”), she knows that she wouldn’t put up with that in class from a boy at school. But in her own bedroom, wearing her pajamas, she feels safe.

How Abby progresses from telling Luke her bra size through the many online sexual behaviors he gets her to do is a gripping story. And when she agrees to meet him and gets into that car, the next page of the book is black. Just black. And the next chapters are narrated by her sister Lily, her BBF Faith and the science class guy, Billy, who’s been crushing on her. What happens to Abby then isn’t the whole story. Luke—and that isn’t his real name—isn’t done with her, and has the opportunity to ruin her life, with all the explicit videos he has of her.

I had a nightmare about this after I read it, something that just doesn’t happen to someone like me, who’s read so many YA books. But it’s better to have nightmares about a character in a book that about a real-life student. So even though there are some explicit scenes of online sexual behavior, I hope you’ll read Want to Go Private? Because you’ll get an idea of how a predator can make someone really smart do something really dumb. And you’ll learn without getting hurt.

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What will Hook You?

Filed under: "Banned Book", Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Family Problems, Fiction, Human Rights Issues, Mature Readers, Over 375 pages, Romance, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — 1 Comment
August 30, 2011

After the Moment by Garret Freymann-Weyr. 

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Uglies by Scott Westerfield

I was looking for a love story with some reality to it. I wanted to read a YA love story that didn’t end with the perfect couple, after a few fights, lasting forever in their fairy tale. So I checked some reviews and settled on After the Moment. Here are some of the reasons why:

“expertly-crafted story”

“The author’s feel for character and voice has never been better.”

“Leigh narrates with deep intelligence and heightened feeling.”

“The story focuses on the teens’ emotionally wrenching senior year, which begins in love before a possible date rape sets off escalating tragedy.”

Now I’ve been reading. And this got me to thinking. Because:

100 pages into the book, as the reader, I’ve met Maia, the girl half of this couple in love, long enough to see her eat a piece of cake and bring a suitcase full of sheets and books to a grieving girl. And here’s what I know:

It doesn’t matter that every professional reviewer raved about this book or that the first two pages of prologue are a real hook and that eventually I will get to the heart of the story (but God only knows when). I am never going to get a non-reader hooked on this book. The pace is way off. It has gone on so long about neighbors and their brothers, about what color the protagonist will paint his second bedroom and . . . If I recommend this book to any student who isn’t already a constant reader, I’m doomed. S/he won’t read the book past the first ten pages. And worse, that student will never trust my recommendation again.

That’s why I need to read all these books before I chat them up in the library.

Which got me to thinking some more.

What is one of the best books out there can make a non-reader read? One that has good writing, a great (even important) idea behind the story, but also has a rapid-fire plot line and lots of adventure? Yes, of course, The Hunger Games. But that trilogy is still wildly popular right now, so I don’t need to convince you to read it. Instead, let me move backward a few years because you might have been too young to read this trilogy when it came out: Uglies by Scott Westerfield.

Uglies is one of the best, fastest moving, constant action, suspense-filled YA books I’ve ever read. In the future world of Uglies, all people have an operation at age sixteen to make them ‘pretty’—that is, they all are changed to be perfect, or what is deemed perfect by society. Big-eyed and full-lipped, they appear childlike for the rest of their lives. And for some reason, their intellect remains rather childish, too. (Sinister plot elements ahead!)

While Tally is awaiting her operation so that she can leave Uglyville and join her best guy friend, Paris, over in Pretty Town, she meets a girl, Shay, who has the same birthday as Tally and therefore, should be made pretty on the same day. But Shay doesn’t want to be like everyone else, and her escape propels Tally in a direction she never would have thought possible. Tally has some exciting escapes even before she decides to fight the system, but once she does, danger is around every corner.

A bonus in this novel is that Tally’s method of transportation and escape is often bungee jumping—or even more often, hover boarding. Hover boarding is like skating, surfing or snowboarding. Tally has to be balanced as she quickly evades her pursuers. But she’s not on the water or the snow. She’s flying through the air, and a wrong move can mean death. If you skate, surf or snowboard, you’re going to be able to relate to Tally and Shay immediately.

So, I can recommend books like After the Moment to students I know well enough. We can talk about Leigh’s feeling about the Iraq War and how they relate to the more personal violence that becomes a part of his life; about how he is trying so hard to be a good guy, and how that doesn’t always work. But if you’re just trying to find that first book that will hook you into reading, I’m going for Uglies. And when you finish it, you can go on with Pretties, Specials, and Extras. And then you can move onto other series by the same author. And then books by other authors with similar themes. And then books about other things.

Get hooked.

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“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”

Filed under: Biography/Memoir, Controversial Issue/Debate, Faith-Based/Religious Element, Human Rights Issues, Multicultural, Non-fiction by Ms. Waddle — 2 Comments
August 29, 2011

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot    

Teachers who are thinking outside the box will let you read this for your biography/memoir assignment, and what a great opportunity!

The story of Henrietta Lacks is more than a biography of an individual woman, It’s the story of the first person’s cells that scientists could cause to grow in a lab—that could live outside the body and be shipped around the world, thus making new research possible. It’s the story of a family that knew nothing of the cells or the fact that they had been removed from the cancer-stricken and dying Henrietta. It’s about the effect that this medical miracle had on Henrietta’s children. It’s about medical treatment for African-Americans in the 1950s South.

Henrietta Lacks grew up in poverty in Clover,Virginiain the segregated, pre-civil-rights-era South. Her family were tobacco farmers, and the house she was raised in was once slave quarters. (The author discovers a white branch of the Lacks family, but they refuse to acknowledge their biological connection to Henrietta.) Amazingly, before Henrietta died on October 4, 1951, cells taken atJohnsHopkinsHospitalduring a gynecological exam for her cervical cancer had become the first cells to be cultured in a lab and survive. The cells, known as HeLa, were so strong, that they could be shipped to medical labs everywhere. These cells become the necessary component for medical advances such as the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, understanding the effects of nuclear bombs, and part of the search for a cure for AIDS.

Knowing this, you’d think that Henrietta’s children would have become wealthy. Ironically, they spent years without medical insurance, and for twenty years, didn’t even know that their mother’s cells existed. They couldn’t afford the benefits of the research done with their mother’s cells. In fact, they suffered from secrets as well as con men. Especially hard hit was Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who, without the educational background necessary to understand how the cells survived, became prey to every report that her mother had been cloned or that her cells had been fused with those of other life forms.

Part of this biography of Henrietta and her cells is about the sad way that African-Americans were treated in medical experiments. (In this sense, Henrietta’s daughter Elise, who was sent to a state hospital and diagnosed with “Idiocy”—and then experimented on in a horrific manner—is just as interesting as Henrietta’s story.) But part of this book details the fascinating fact that no one has any rights over their cells, their discarded tissues. Even if this tissue becomes valuable, as Henrietta’s did, and makes millions of dollars for the companies and individuals that market it, it is considered a waste product, trash that the individual has discarded. (And most of the time tissue/cells aren’t worth anything—people have moles, appendixes, and gallbladders removed all the time.) So the horrible way that the Lacks family was treated also figured into the rise of bioethics—of getting informed consent from patients before using their tissue for medical experiments.

This great book embraces so many themes. Deborah’s life with its grounding in both superstition and spirituality is just as important to the reader as is Henrietta’s. The author has the ability to show us so many things about life, science, treatment of Africa-Americans, medical research—and we can understand it all because she is so good at making it clear. The only part of the story that she doesn’t dig into is the life of Henrietta’s husband, David Lacks. I wondered a lot about him as Henrietta’s cancer was caused by repeated STDs that he gave her. After she died at age 31, he allowed a new woman in his life whose cruel abuse of the children permanently scarred them—destroying the life of at least one of the five kids. Yet David is given a pass on everything. Perhaps the author didn’t feel that his story was crucial to the arc of the overall family story, but it was the one missing piece that bothered me. Still, this is one of the best books of its kind. Any student interested in medicine, the history of the treatment of African-Americans by researchers, the rise of bioethics—or just a good story of a suffering family—will want to read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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“Matched” (on Ms. W’s summer reading list)

Filed under: Adventure Stories, Controversial Issue/Debate, Fiction, Human Rights Issues, Literary Read Alike, Romance, Sci-Fi/Futuristic, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — 1 Comment
June 8, 2011

Matched by Ally Condie  

“It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
—William Carlos Williams

Yes, Matched is another future dystopia, but like Hunger Games, this one is a great read. And yet the story itself isn’t similar to Hunger Games. So—enjoy it on its own terms.

Matched takes its title from the important milestone in teens’ lives—at age seventeen—when they are formally matched to their life’s partner. This person is someone they don’t know, living in another area of the country, perhaps. Yet matches succeed because the society has all the data necessary to pick the two people who are most perfect for one another. The two will get to know one another over the next four years, and, at twenty-one, will be united. They will have until they are thirty-one to produce children (maximum two); after that, childbearing isn’t allowed because, statistically, it can produce kids that aren’t perfect. Some members of society are ‘singles’ and don’t receive matches.

Oddly, when Cassia goes to her matching banquet (the only time she is allowed to wear something beautiful and colorful), she is matched with her best friend, Xander. Everyone is envious because she already knows and loves this boy. But later, when she goes home and places his data card into her reader, he disappears momentarily and a different match shows on the screen, another boy she knows—Ky, who is from the outer regions, whose parents are dead, and who was adopted by his aunt and uncle.

Right after Cassia’s ‘match banquet,’ her grandfather has his 80th birthday banquet, which is really the last celebration before death, as the society requires everyone to die on the 80th birthday (data shows it’s the best time to die). On this night, Grandfather lets Cassia know of poems he had hidden, poems not belonging to the 100 preserved by the Society—and therefore illegal to have. One of the poems is Dylan Thomas’s “Go Not Gentle into that Good Night,” and Cassia realizes this isn’t just about death but also about not obeying (gently) the Society when it doesn’t allow individuality.

Cassia says that she, like others, has always believed, “Following the rules. Staying safe. These are the things that matter.” But once she finds Ky in the data port, everything is open to question. She realizes that her father breaks simple rules and laws out of love for the family—and that her mother follows all the rules for the same reason. Cassia needs to find out if ‘falling in love with someone’s story is the same thing as falling in love with the person.’ She needs to know if danger and uncertainty are worth the opportunity to make choices about life and love.

YA dystopian novels are taking a hit right now. The Wall Street Journal (a conservative business newspaper) just published an opinion piece about this. (If you’d like to read it, click here.) This surprises me as the new YA novels are very much like George Orwell’s books (Animal Farm and 1984), which is generally loved by conservatives. I think a discussion of this social issue would be a great topic for a research paper or a literary analysis paper. Another great topic would be to compare Matched to the literary and art works it discusses (and which are outlawed by its Society), particularly the Dylan Thomas poem. By the way—the quote from the poet William Carlos Williams isn’t in the novel, but it was so much of what the book is about, I had to mention it.

If you’re just looking for a good read and nothing more, this is still your novel. The characters are complex and no one is a ‘bad guy’ in the love triangle that evolves. As a bonus, its star-crossed lovers, just like Romeo and Juliet, are bound for trouble.

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“The Marbury Lens”

Filed under: Controversial Issue/Debate, Fiction, Horror/Mystery/Suspense, Mature Readers, Sci-Fi/Futuristic, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — 1 Comment
May 31, 2011

    The Marbury Lens by Andrew Smith

Wow—this is the creepiest YA book I’ve ever read!

Before I get to the details, I do want to admit that it’s deeply flawed—because if you read it and then are disappointed in the fact that the Marbury world and Jack’s ‘real’ world don’t meld well, you won’t think, ‘Dang! Ms. W. will say anything to get us to read a book.’ So for the sake of honesty, I admit that I was mad when the book ended as it did—it felt like the author just couldn’t work out his vision, and so he quit. That said, perhaps he was saving the tie-up for a sequel as so many YA books these days are trilogies. The fact remains that I was riveted by the first chapters and had to finish the book ASAP. The fact remains that I think this is a book that guys who almost never read will be pulled into and have to finish.

The blurb that downloads with The Marbury Lens’ cataloging information is a good summary:

“After being kidnapped and barely escaping, sixteen-year-old Jack goes to London with his best friend Connor, where someone gives him a pair of glasses that send him to an alternate universe where war is raging, he is responsible for the survival of two younger boys, and Connor is trying to kill them all. “

The alternate world is Marbury—it’s a brutal, post-apocalyptic universe where bands of monstrous people with one black eye and one white eye, dressed in nothing but codpieces (little garments to cover their genitals) made of human scalps and necklaces made of human teeth roam the desert and mountains, finding and killing ordinary humans, who are then eaten by hoards of large insects. Connor, Jack’s best friend in life, is one of these monsters in Marbury.

Over and over, Jack uses the lens, or glasses, that are an entrance to Marbury because he knows that in that world, he is responsible for the well being of two younger boys.

I am very interested in what students think of this book, but here’s an important caveat: It has a record attached that says it’s for 9 years and up. I think this is there because all YA books just get that designation automatically from the publisher. But some are for more mature readers, and I (yes, liberal reader that I am) would NOT recommend this book for anyone under 14 years. I do believe that teens can read about scary, terrible things because scary, terrible things happen in the real world, and it helps to know what they are. But in fairness to more conservative readers, I’ll add that I went online to see if I could find a review by a parent. I did find one from a woman who bought the book for her 15-year-old son, but read it first and thought it was totally inappropriate. So, keep that in mind.

Jack, who is drunk and passed out in a park, is kidnapped early on. His kidnapper is mentally ill and a sexual abuser. Clearly he has kidnapped (and very possibly killed) other kids. Clearly, he intends to kill Jack, but he wants to rape him first. Though he doesn’t succeed, the details of his efforts really aren’t for kids. Nor are the details of Marbury, which has reverted to a sort of Dark Ages, with violent hand-to-hand combat, heads cut off and nailed to walls through eye sockets—well, you get the idea.

Jack has redeeming qualities, including his needs to protect the two younger boys in Marbury. He’s actually a very nice guy in a horrific situation. I just needed there to be some explanation of how he got there, how the terror of his kidnapping was connected to Marbury.

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“Speak” (on Ms. W’s summer reading list)

Filed under: Controversial Issue/Debate, Family Problems, Fiction, Young Adult Literature by Ms. Waddle — 1 Comment
May 27, 2011

    Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

I’ve ‘book talked’ Speak often and used Anderson’s 10th anniversary poem to celebrate Banned Books Week this school year. We ‘library ladies’ at Chaffey and Colony have had such a great response to the book that it feels like everyone knows about it. But that may be off the mark—and it is one of the best books about school harassment that I’ve read. So, since it’s on some quality summer reading lists, I didn’t want to leave it off here. If you missed it, this is one to have on your own summer list.

Just before the start of her freshman year, Melinda makes a 911 call to break up a party. When her classmates find out that she was the caller, she is ostracized—no one will speak to her or interact with her in any way, except one new girl that Melinda doesn’t actually like.

Melinda loses her voice. She is utterly silent and alone. It won’t take you very long to figure out what happened to her at the party and why she called 911, but you will feel such compassion for her as she tries to make her way back to normalcy. The way the book is broken into grading periods, with Melinda’s grades sinking further in each quarter, is creative. You’ll identify with the narrative of the kids at school who torment her and of the school employees who are less than helpful. But Melinda has that one great teacher that everyone needs—in her case, it’s her art teacher—and he helps her to find her voice.

While the final scenes in which Melinda must find her voice might be a bit unrealistic, you’ll still be cheering out loud for her. This is one of the books you’ll always remember. After you read it, watch Anderson’s reading of her poem celebrating Speak’s 10th anniversary. Find it here.

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