What Can(t) Wait by Ashley Hope Perez 
Marisa’s dad is a Mexican immigrant. He’s had a hard life in the shadow of his stepmother and as an adult always reminds his kids that: family is everything; hard work is what matters; and you’d better never embarrass him. He’s tough and the best thing we can say about his relationship to Marisa is that he’s disapproving.
Of course, lots of parents disapprove of their teens. After all, if teens didn’t try to find their own way, away from their parents, what would the point of adolescence be? The problem with Marisa’s father’s disapproval is that it isn’t the kind that will help her improve her life. Just the opposite. If she’s a really good girl, it’s going to hold her back.
Marisa is very bright, is taking AP Calculus and getting good grades. But what matters most to her dad is that she work her shifts at Kroger’s (a grocery store—I don’t think there are any in California, but it’s a major chain), turn over half of her paycheck to her parents, watch her niece (the child of a sister who got pregnant in high school), cook meals and help keep up the house. With such a schedule, Marisa is having a hard time concentrating on her schoolwork. When she starts dating the boy she’s always liked, she starts to wonder if she can make it out of her Houston, Texas barrio. Though her mother is nice, she has a way of laying the guilt on pretty thick. If Marisa goes away to college, what will her mother do? How will she get by?
Marisa’ AP Calc teacher reminds her of her considerable gifts as a student. She encourages her to push on. But there’s a cultural divide, and the teacher doesn’t quite get what is holding Marisa back.
On this Thanksgiving weekend, I’m grateful that I picked up this book. I know I often tell you that great books will help you understand people whose lives are very different from your own. But it’s also good to read a book in which the protagonist is just like you. And Marisa is a girl a lot of students will recognize in themselves. Have fun reading this quick book, full of hope and realism.
Start Something that Matters by Blake Mycoskie 
A perfect book for Thanksgiving.
“Many of life’s failures are people who didn’t realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
–Thomas Edison
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
–Winston Churchill
Quotes like these dot the text of Start Something that Matters. Its author, Blake Mycoskie, is the founder (or as he calls himself, ‘chief shoe giver’) of TOMS. For every pair of shoes that TOMS sells, it gives one away to a needy person. It’s this ‘One for One’ business model that Mycoskie discusses in his book. But Start Something that Matters is about much more.
Mycoskie asks: What matters most to you? Should you focus on earning a living, pursuing your passions, or devoting yourself to the causes that inspire you? And then tells his reader that s/he doesn’t have to choose, but can do all of these things. He, of course, is a living example. And the reason I so like this book is that Mycoskie shows how important it is becoming to be a creative thinker, to be a storyteller. Because without a memorable story, no one cares about your company or your charity, or the project you are trying to get your schoolmates interested in. Stories resonate with people in a way that facts wouldn’t.
To start something that matters, you will need to move beyond story and face your fears, do the thing you didn’t think you could. You can’t wait until the time is right because it never is. You have to be frugal and imaginative. You have to allow a broad forum of ideas, give free speech to those working with you. You must have an environment of trust. With trust, even mistakes can lead to good outcomes.
Best of all, you should start early. Like now. In high school. Work on your dreams. Start that club, that service project, whatever. Check out Start Something that Matters for hints on getting it all going. Create the model by which you intend to live your life.
When Deanna was only thirteen years old, her father caught her having sex in the back of a car with Tommy, a seventeen-year-old friend of Deanna’s brother.
Bad, yes. Embarrassing, yes. But what ruins Deanna’s reputation is that Tommy—who, after all, is much closer to adulthood—goes to school and tells everyone, making a joke of Deanna. With her reputation, Deanna’s school and social life are also destroyed. She is tagged as the school slut, and just about every comment directed at her is a nasty joke or sexual innuendo. There’s no escape for her, though she hangs on by writing in a journal.
Fortunately, Deanna has two friends, but the relationship among the three is complicated, and, in anger and jealousy, she even alienates them. Meanwhile, her brother has become a father far too early and is living in the family basement with his girlfriend and their baby daughter. Three years after the event, Deanna’s father is still angry and cannot forgive her. The family is a wreck.
When Deanna decides to get a job at a pizza place, she finds Tommy working there as well. What could be worse? And yet having to face Tommy forces the two to actually talk about what happened and why. And in that, there is healing.
This is a super-short, super-quick, and super-good read about life-changing events and how to move on into forgiveness. I recommend it to all. But be advised that it has some profanity and explicit discussion of teen sexuality.
Blink and Caution by Tim Wynne-Jones
While on the prowl for ‘guy books’ this week, I found a star.
“Guy books” is a sort of weird idea for me because it means that guys should like them. But girls should like them, too. When people in the book universe say ‘guy book,’ what they really mean is ‘not exclusively girl book.’
Blink and Caution is the story of two runaway teens, living on the street, desperate. We meet Blink first—so nicknamed because he is so nervous, so full of ‘Captain Panic’—that he has a tic, blinks constantly. He is prowling through a hotel, hoping to find some decent food leftover in the hallway, a room service tray put back out with lots of the meal left. Unfortunately, what he finds is a weird sort of criminal event across the hall. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but after a group of four men leave the room, Blink finds a wallet with 600 dollars and a cell phone. By picking up most of the money and taking the cell, Blink unwittingly enters into a crime that is national news.
Caution is so nicknamed because she considers herself toxic, harmful to those around her. Though the narrator doesn’t say directly why this is, as readers, we soon guess. (We are meant to guess, but Caution just can’t face telling the story). After running away from home, Caution finds herself hooked up with a drug-dealer who controls her, who beats her when he feels like it. She thinks he may kill her. In fact, she thinks she deserves to be killed. It’s a little miracle that she figures out how to run away from him, and of course, he is tailing her, actually has implanted a GPS on her clothing.
Blink finds the picture and phone number of a beautiful girl on the stolen cell. She’s the daughter of an important CEO whom all the news sources say has been kidnapped. But Blink saw him walk out of the hotel room. He decides to call the daughter and tell her that her dad is OK. Big mistake.
When Caution, having been rolled by a meth addict for all the money she took from the drug dealer, decides to steal from Blink, the two become inescapably connected and absolutely over their heads. That they have each other isn’t a given. One might desert the other, fearful of what will happen. But they both also have a sense that there’s nothing more to lose in life. By sticking together, they may learn to trust again and find their way in the world, forgive themselves for their imperfections.
Blink and Caution is super suspenseful. In addition it’s unusual in the telling, Chapters alternate between Blink and Caution. However, Blink’s chapters are told in the second person (“You lower your voice, curl into yourself.” ). It’s hard for a writer to make this work, but Wynne-Jones pulls it off. In fact, his excellent writing is one of the reasons you won’t put the book down. So if you’re a budding writer yourself, read this for a great example. If you’re not, just read it for the great, fast-action story.
What Happened to Goodbye by Sarah Dessen 
I wanted a good book—realistic, but one in which characters could work out their problems. Some good writing. So I picked up Sarah Dessen because I knew she’d deliver.
In What Happened to Goodbye, McLean, now in her senior year, has been on the move with her dad for a couple of years. This following a really ugly divorce after her mother admitted that she was having an affair and in fact, was pregnant, as it ends up, with twins. To make matters worse, her mom’s new husband (and father of the twins) is the coach of the Defriese University basketball team. McLean is named after the previous coach and her dad is a rabid fan. Or was, until his wife left him for the new coach and for the scandal that ensued.
McLean’s dad is a restaurant consultant. He works for a company that buys restaurants and reinvents them, creating profitable businesses. He has to move after each restaurant is fixed. McLean moves with him, reinventing herself at each new school—she changes her name and becomes a cheerleader in one place, a goth girl in another. Yet when the two arrive in Lakeview, McLean makes friends and realizes that she cares about others, especially her super-smart nerdy next-door neighbor, Dave.
Though as a child McLean always had great times with her mom when her dad was working night and day trying to make his own restaurant profitable, and though she is told that her parents’ breakup was both their faults, she can’t forgive her mom and doesn’t want to be around her or her new family. By not complying with the legal terms of custody, she frustrates her mom, who consistently tries to reconnect with her and is willing to involve lawyers to get what she wants.
Though Dessen makes some weird writing choices in the last quarter of the book, giving outcomes of scenes and then giving the details of the scene (thus foregoing some of the suspense), I loved the characters and how they interact with one another. I love how McLean has to come to terms with her new life, with her mother, and with her new friends.
It was fun watching a character work out serious problems in a way that’s not perfect—things can’t be perfect—but in a way that’s positive. Because I liked McLean and wanted a good future for her. I think you will, too.
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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!
Trapped: How the World Rescued 33 Miners from 2,000 Feet below the Chilean Desert by Marc Aronson
You’ve heard about the Chilean (and one Bolivian) miners trapped 2,300 feet underground from August 5 until October 13, 2010–more than two months–after 708,000 tons of rock sealed them in complete darkness. But what do you know about how the rescue played out?
I thought I knew this story from the news reports, but Trapped showed me how little I really knew. It moves back and forth between what happened above ground and what happening underground for that two months.
The lives of the men show their real heroism: how they decided they would not resort to cannibalism (they were slowly starving before above-ground contact was made); how they worked and found leaders. Meanwhile, they could hear drills and knew that people were trying to find them, but the maps of the mine were so bad and so far off from reality that rescuers were hitting the wrong places. With each failed attempt, the men had to keep themselves from despair.
The many problems above ground—drills that worked too slowly and that broke against metal underground, wildly inaccurate maps of the mine shafts—show us why it took folks from all over the world to save the men. The stories of NASA scientists, Center Rock (a drilling company), the ‘paloma (dove) shafts, just wide enough to carry food and necessities and working around the clock—all the details—will give you faith in humankind. Knowing what happened affirms the resilience of the human spirit.
This is also a cautionary tale, as noted in the afterword. Though the miners lived because they behaved so well in the first 17 days when they had no contact from above ground and were rescued with the benefit of great technology, a big reason they were trapped is because the San Jose Mine, where they were working, had no escape routes. Mining is always very dangerous, but the mines are required to have two escape routes. In addition, the mine owners never updated their maps of the mine shafts, making rescue very difficult, ‘a shot in the dark.’ The author cautions us to also be people who ‘behave well,’ just as the miners did—and that means valuing miners and being alert to companies that have good mining practices.
This easy reading, tiny book—a little over a hundred pages—has lots of bonus material: diagrams, charts, color photos, a glossary, a timeline, and useful websites. In addition, the couple of pages on “How I wrote this book” discuss “What I learned that could be useful for students writing research reports.” It’s both powerful and succinct. I recommend this book to all our teachers and students, including those who are working on their reading skills. Check it out!
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!
