I remember two competing impulses warring inside me when I was a child. The first impulse, perhaps the stronger of the two initially, was the idea that I wanted to be different, special, an individual. I wanted to be noticed…
Category: personal growth
Loving Someone With Depression: A Review of When Reason Breaks
This past spring, I joined with six other writers, librarians, and activists to create the 2015 We’re the People Summer Reading List. The most recently published book on that list is Cindy L. Rodriguez’s When Reason Breaks, the debut novel…
Review: Roller Girl by Victoria Jamieson
Serena Williams just won her twenty-first singles grand-slam title, and yet there has been more discussion about her body and femininity than about the sheer brilliance of her performance or her dedication to her sport. The U.S. Women’s National Soccer…
Skycraping Part II: The Interview
This week, we open with an interview with Cordelia Jensen, author of Skyscraping, a novel in verse (reviewed last week here). 1. The story of HIV-AIDS is an ongoing one. What can we gain by reading about an early 90s…
Skyscraping, Part I: The Review
In her acclaimed graphic memoir Fun Home, now a Tony Award-winning play, Alison Bechdel shows how she discovered and came to terms with her sexuality while her father kept his own a secret until his death by suicide soon after…
The Intersectionality of Black and Gay: A Review of Zero Fade
In an acclaimed piece on reviewers and diversity, author Malinda Lo addressed some of the familiar criticisms leveled against diverse books by reveiwers who just don’t “get it.” Most common criticism #2 was “so many (too many?) issues.” She saw…
Peace, Bugs, and Understanding by Gail Silver and Youme Nguyen Ly
I have to admit a religious bias here (words that I can barely imagine ever writing) but I heard a very liberal minister give a series of sermons a few years ago about just this Buddhist strategy for learning how…
An interview with Rad American Women A-Z’s Kate Schatz
Kate Schatz’s recent release, Rad American Women A-Z, is an artistic-historic compilation of leftist women whose accomplishments have sometimes been forgotten but who paved the way for women of all kinds to have the rights we have today. What rad…
Grief and What We Have in Common: A Review of The Boy in the Black Suit
Seventeen-year-old Matt has just lost his mother to cancer. His father has slid into alcoholism, and Matt takes a job at family friend Willie Ray’s funeral home ostensibly for the money but really because he finds solace in the grief…
The Morris Finalist Blog Tour: An Interview with Isabel Quintero
Welcome to the Morris Finalist Blog Tour, featuring the outstanding 2015 debut authors and their books! In December, YALSA (Young Adult Library Services Association, of the American Library Association) announces the list of finalists, and we learn of the winner…