Arc Review: What Lane? by Torrey Maldonado

Image: Penguin Random House

What Lane? by Torrey Maldonado. 138 p. Nancy Paulson Books/ Penguin Random House, May 5, 2020. 9780525518433. (Review of arc courtesy of publisher.)

Sixth grader Stephen's friendship with his best bud, Dan is changing. Ever since Dan's cousin, Chad, moved to the neighborhood, Chad has done nothing but challenge and contradict Stephen. He has even gone so far to say that "They shoulda kept Spider-Man white." Stephen is biracial and Dan is white. Now Chad's casual racism and constant micro-aggressions are getting under Stephen's skin. He and his dad are close and have lots of heart-to-heart conversations about race, racism, and the Black Lives Matter movement. As Chad escalates his dares to do things such as trespassing or riding the top of a subway car, Stephen realizes that he will not be treated the same as his white friends if they are caught. 

Mr. Maldonado, a teacher born and raised in Brooklyn, vividly portrays the uncertainty of a young, bright boy navigating race in an unfair society. I love everything about this book from its cover through its short, tightly written chapters. I love the tween boy dynamics and that Stephen's parents were so in tuned-in and involved. The author lays out the issues, including white ally-ship in a thoughtful accessible way for tween readers and some clueless adults who may need to understand their white privilege. 

What Lane? belongs in all library collections.

Teen Tuesday: Dear Martin by Nic Stone

Dear Martin by Nic Stone. 224 p. Random House Children's Books, October, 2017. 9781101939499. (Borrowed from public library.)

Like Starr in that other auspicious debut, Justyce McAllister straddles two worlds, only he boards at his tony prep school and doesn't have the intact family and extensive extended family support that Starr had. He's a top student with his eyes on an Ivy league education; but he begins to question all that when he is arrested as a suspected carjacker when all he was trying to do was help his drunk ex-girlfriend get home safely. Luckily for him, his friends and their parents have his back and charges are soon dropped, but the experience causes him to question everything and everyone. He tries to sort through his feelings by writing letters to the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. Interspersed between his letters and the narration of events are bits of dialogue.

Stone packs a lot into this relatively short book. There will be tears and anger. While some characters receive short shrift (I for one, wanted to know more about his tough-love mother), readers, both reluctant and avid alike, will tear through this and have much to think on. I have a student who discovered Jason Reynolds' book Ghost at the end of his seventh grade year. He came back to eighth grade wanting Patina, then read every one of Reynolds' books before moving on to Kekla Magoon's How It Went Down and Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give. He devoured Dear Martin as well.

I read this one with my ears. While narrator, Dion Graham turned in his usual stellar performance, the lists and sections of dialogue are more difficult to convey. Either way, Dear Martin is a must-read and must purchase for high school and public libraries.

Waiting on Wednesday (arc review): Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes. 224 p. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, April 17, 2018. 9780316262286.

The cover on the right is the cover on my arc. The cover on the left looks to be the finished cover. I think both covers are powerful but the red one does pack a wallop.

I'll put this out there right now - no library collection is complete if it is missing any of Ms. Rhodes' books. She is a masterful middle grade writer whose superpower is making tough subjects accessible to tender young readers. 

Twelve-year-old Jerome is the narrator of this timely yet heartbreaking tale. We meet him as he realizes he is dead and views his own dead body bleeding onto the playground dirt. A white police officer has mistaken his toy gun for a real gun and fatally shot him. 

Jerome isn't even allowed to play with guns but his new friend, Carlos gave it to him to play with. He witnesses his family's grief and his father's anger and wants to comfort them. He realizes, with a start that his grandmother is aware of his presence but unable to see him. No one can see him until he crosses paths with the daughter of his shooter. Why is it she can see him when no one he cares about can? Jerome isn't alone in this limbo, he is soon joined by another victim of a racial killing - Emmett Till.

As Jerome tries to navigate this new reality, he confronts hard truths and feels myriad emotions from sadness to anger. Through Jerome, thoughtful readers might come to reflect on their own biases as well as society's and work toward overcoming them.

Audiobook Review: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Unabridged audiobook on 10 compact discs; 11.75 hours. Read by Bahni Turpin. Harper Audio, February, 2017. 9781470827137. (Review from audiobook borrowed from public library. Print copy purchased.)

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter lives in Garden Heights but attends a private school about 45 minutes away. Her father is an ex-gangbanger and ex-con but owns a grocery store in the neighborhood. Her mother is a nurse who works in a neighborhood clinic. They are committed to the neighborhood, but after Starr witnesses the murder of her best friend, Natasha in a drive-by shooting at age ten, her parents made the decision to remove their three children from the public school. Their family is not perfect, but is intact and striving. 

Starr talks about straddling two worlds with her two personas; her private school persona and her neighborhood one. She also has a white boyfriend, which her daddy doesn't know about. Her private school friends and boyfriend have never been to Garden Heights. This delicate balance is disrupted when Starr reluctantly attends a neighborhood party. She's catching up with Khalil, a childhood friend and former crush, when gunshots ring out. Khalil grabs her hand and the two flee in his car.  When they are pulled over, Starr recalls the rules her daddy drilled into her. But Khalil questions the officer. Starr focuses on the badge number - 115 and is terrified, especially when Khalil is dragged out of the car by an increasingly agitated 115. When Khalil ducks back into the car to check on Starr, 115 shoots him in the back. Three times. 

This remarkable debut sucked me into Starr's world immediately and I was sorry to leave it. The setting is so vividly evoked and while a specific city was never mentioned, it could be anywhere. All the characters are so memorable! Even minor characters are so fully fleshed out that I feel I could recognize them. While tragedy is never far away, there are hilarious moments that provide respite. I listened to 4/5 (8 of 10 discs) of it and finished the book reading with my eyes. If you have never experienced a performance by Bahni Turpin, this is a great place to start. She has a remarkable range of voices, which added depth to an already deep and important book. 

The Hate U Give has received a remarkable six starred reviews and has spent quite a number of weeks on the NYT best seller list. (Should "best seller list" be capitalized?) The book was on my tbr pile for quite awhile. I would get to it eventually, but what made me move it up on the pile was an eighth grader. One day toward the end of the school year, I got a inter-classroom phone call from the eighth grade science teacher who asked if I was busy/ had a class. I was not, so she told me that she had a student dying to talk to me about a book and could she come up? Absolutely! The library is on the second floor and the science classroom is on the first. She must've run from the classroom because she arrived in seconds, panting and attempting to tell me why I HAD to read this book once she learned that I had not yet read it. I take student recommendations very seriously and intended to crack the book open sooner rather than later, when I heard that Bahni Turpin was the narrator for the audio. I ordered it through Inter-Library Loan (ILL) and waited and waited. The audiobook was worth the wait and while the performance was incredible, I HAD to find out how it ended and couldn't sit through the last two discs to find out. I was so glad I had the book to finish reading it without needing to drive somewhere. 

The Hate U Give lives up to the hype. It is, if not the most, one of the most important books of 2017. It is intense and timely and wholly influential. I expect it will be life-changing to all teen readers who discover it and I expect to do my part to get it into as many hands as possible.