Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass

In author Meg Medina's YA page turner, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, the reader never meets Yaqui, the bully intent on violence and destroying protagonist Piddy Sanchez. She's off stage, only seen peripherally. That makes sense, as bullying, like domestic violence, is about fear and control. It isn't actually personal.

Bullying is in the news. It's linked to suicide, kids literally dying of humiliation at the hands of bullies.

Medina gets the psychology of bullying right, which, besides it being a heart wrenching fast moving story, is a good reason to read it. A parallel thread appears in this novel about a family affected by domestic violence. The reader sees how bullies operate, and, like victims of domestic violence, why victims fear confrontation.

Piddy's school work is affected. Mr. Flatwell, her teacher states, "Last year you were an A student . . . I've read your records . . . What's happening here, Miss Sanchez? Something isn't right." But because she is afraid of retribution if she rats on mysterious Yaqui, Piddy suffers alone and the reader wants to shake her.

But in the end, Piddy, pretty and smart and loved, all things that Yaqui envies, does get away. Not only does this book show accurately how kids lose their self-esteem at the hands of a bully, it also shows what kids need to survive. Piddy has a mother, an aunt and a friend who, even as those relationships are nearly severed, love her enough to never give up on her. They persist, and we can only imagine how many kids don't have that.

Despite the dark themes, Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass  is an entertaining character driven novel, the characters complex, with evocative and believable motivations. I suspect many kids could see themselves in these pages.

The Outsiders

Upon discovering last week for the first time the 1967 YA novel The Outsiders by author S.E. Hinton, I was surprised how much I loved it.

Why surprised?

Perhaps because of bad timing, I'd never heard a buzz about it anywhere, not in my unenlightened small town where I was a teen in 1967, and not in my MFA program years later in 2010.  There have been so many books published since then, that I never stumbled on it. It's embarrassing to admit.

The Outsiders is an absolutely fabulous book and written when the author was in high school. It was inspired by real-life conflict. The voice is believable and engaging. The characters and themes are universal. The warring factions in this novel, "Soc's" and the "Greasers," (in the photo above looking like my brothers did) are what might be called the "Preppies" and the "Punks" today.

According to S.E. Hinton about kids reading this today, " The uniforms change, and the names of the groups change, but kids really grasp how similar their situation is . . . "

The themes that are suggested through character and story address what we are dealing with today, that is, the false ideas we carry with us about those who seem different.

The plot? The rich Soc kids hate the Greasers, and vice versa. Rumbles, Death and pain ensue. As Ponyboy, the main character in The Outsiders discovers: just because the Soc kids have money and drive fancy cars, it doesn't make them good or bad or untroubled people. Likewise, being a poor greaser doesn't define them either. It is about the individual.

All teen would be wise to consider and discuss what diverse groups have in common.  What false beliefs do we all hold? There simply isn't room for so many "rumbles" on this very small planet.

One false belief I had about S.E. Hinton was that she was a guy. Well, she isn't. Now I know.

A Marked Man: The Assassination of Malcolm X

A Marked Man: The Assassination of Malcolm X, by Matt Doeden, is a well-written, engaging biography of a man of whom there are mysteries that will probably never be solved. The question of who exactly murdered him, isn't resolved.

I would be hard pressed to find man, dead or alive, with a life as full of fascinating conflict as that of Malcolm Little, later known as Malcolm X.
Born in Nebraska in 1925, the son of a minister, he experienced first hand the injustice of Jim Crow America, including violence at the hands of the KKK, extreme poverty, the early death of his father who fell suspiciously into the path of a streetcar and much more. He came to believe that violence was the only way to deal with the "white devils." All whites were evil in his eyes. The early pages of the book deals with how he came to believe what he did, which I found valuable.

There is no question in my opinion, that a book about something as dark as his assassination is appropriate for fifth graders and above. At that age, one of my favorite books was strangely, The Day Lincoln was Shot by author Jim Bishop. The details of the crime fascinated me then; encouraged me to think deeply about such acts. Kids today will do the same while reading Doeden's book.

The events of Malcolm X's life, from his tragic childhood, to crime and prison, to his identity as a Black Muslim, and eventually his transforming journey to Mecca, was a testament to his intelligence, and importantly, how he questioned and changed his perspective through experience. He was constantly questioning what was right and wrong, coming up with different conclusions as he aged, rethinking previous ideas.

At the time of his assassination in 1965, at a age thirty-nine, his thoughts about violence as the only way to freedom for Black American had mellowed. He had grown away from the Black Muslim leadership headed by the powerful Elijah Muhammad and challenged its authority. Because of this, he was in the organization's gun site.

As Malcolm X said, "You'll find that very few people who think like I think live long enough to get old."

Code Talker

Published in 2005, Code Talker, by Joseph Bruchac, is a book about a group of Americans I'd never read about, the Navajos. These young men and the secret code they developed were critical to the Allies during World War 11.

This novel deserves a post here because of how a teen hero bravely dealt with racial prejucide against Native Americans during World War 11.

But also of interest is that Code Talker also raises the topic of fitness, more specifically, fitness for military duty. Lack of physical fitness is seen by military authorities as a threat to national security. Apparently one in four men today are currently fit to serve in the United States Military. Opening the doors to women it is hoped will improve the numbers physically able to serve.

According to Stew Smith a blogger for Military.com, " . . . as our adult population grows in waist size and decreases in fitness level, so has American's children's weight and fitness. These are our future military members, police officers, firefighters, and EMT's."

Lack of physical fitness, however, was not a problem in the 1940's for the Navajos who had been recruited into the Marines for their unique language skills.  The protagonist, sixteen year-old Navajo, Ned Bagay, discovered that the "white" boys of U.S. Marines struggled more than the Navajos during basic training.

According to Ned, narrating years later as an old man to his grandchildren:

I was not surprised. Those things that . . . a Marine recruit needed to learn were part of our everyday Navajo life back then. We were used to waking great distances over hard terrain while carrying things. We would stay out with our herds of sheep overnight and in the worst weather. Going for two or three days without eating was not unusual for us . . .

Code Talker provides a fascinating glimpse of the Pacific fighting during that war, and how our prejudices against certain groups diminishes everyone. But more peripherally, though not insignificantly, it touches on how the sedentary lifestyle of American children will affect their ability to join the military and also to perform other necessary jobs as firefighters, police officers, EMT's and much more, not to mention live long, healthy lives.

Rachel's Secret

I found a copy of the YA novel Rachel's Secret, by author Shelly Sanders, on the shelf of new books. It wasn't a new novel at all, but had been written in 1964 and reprinted in 2012.

Rachel's Secret is an historical novel about a Jewish pogrom in the Russian town of Kishinev in 1903. From the title and blurb on the back cover,  I expected intrigue and history adventure. I got both. This is a riveting story about teens discovering the courage to do what they have to and saving lives.

The inciting incident occurs right away.  On page 22,  sixteen year-old Rachel, a Jew living in the town of Kishinev, witnesses a gruesome murder of her friend, a gentile boy, named Mikhail, by his uncle, a disgruntled policeman.

However, being a Jewish girl, who will believe Rachel if she goes to the police, especially if the perpetrator is a police officer? She keeps quiet and it isn't long before the bigoted newspaper launches a propaganda campaign to blame the murder on the Jews with their foreign religion, beginning a witch hunt. The violence against jewish shops and people, always smoldering, explodes one night.

What will Rachel do afterward? Will what she knows ever be revealed?  And what can Sergei, a gentile boy who has befriended Rachel, do about the murdering of innocents? Can one teenage gentile boy act against his entire community? Will he?

The story is based on a true event involving Sanders' grandmother and written in evocative prose that hooked me immediately. The stakes were high for Rachel, life and death.  The reader soon gets this, and is the reason the story is impossible to put down.

October Morning

I discovered this inspiring 2012 novel in verse, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard, in the library yesterday as I browsed the YA new book section. This memorable cycle of sixty-eight poems is about the death of 21 year-old Matt Shepard, a college student who was beaten unconscious then hung on a fence to die by two young men, because he was gay. Like the murder of Emmet Till, who died because he was black, such an event inspires art. To just tell the facts of such a story isn't enough.

The story was written by children's author and poet, Lesléa Newman. Newman's evocative and beautiful poems look at that dark and frightening night from different points of view.

For instance, In her poem Something Snapped, Newman imagines what might have gone on in one of the killer's heads: I can't explain it./ He made me feel/ jumpy. My blood/ tore up my veins/ like a black pickup/ gunning down the highway./ My heart pounded/ like a fist/ banging on a door/ I didn't dare open./ I got hot under the collar. I was sweating bullets./ Who did he think he was?

Other poems endeavor to take us inside the heads of ordinary parents, find themselves fearing for their own kids' lives. Other poems take us inside the heads of the girlfriends of the killers. Other poems are from the point of view of a local church lady, the judge, a lawyer, and inanimate witnesses, if you will, such as the fence and the truck.

Those, like myself, who are also interested in the craft of poetry, will find at the end of the book an explanation of the poetic forms used by the poet.

This is an memorable book that I hope ends up in the hands of parents, teachers, high school students and anyone concerned with social justice.

Fracture

When a novelist sets out to write a scary story, it helps to have a sense for the dark and frightening. Megan Miranda, the author of the YA novel, Fracture, knows what situations are intrinsically scary.

For example, falling through thin ice in a lake at night, is definitely horrifying. Our protagonist, a girl named Delaney Maxwell, does just that, and the book begins in a hospital ICU. Will she ever be a normal teen, possible valedictorian, like she was before she almost froze to death?

 Hypothermia is a creepy but rather interesting medical issue. There is a rule in medicine that a doctor never declares a cold, drowned, hypothermic patient in cardiac arrest dead. That "dead" heart, once warm, might beat again, and the cold brain might think again. So doctors and nurses warm cold patients like Delaney and she lives.

And here's something else that's scary: a mentally disturbed nursing assistant who believes he is helping the elderly and sick by murdering them. Yes, Miranda's character Troy is a deranged and lonesome dude.

Then there's the handsome heart-throb popular boy who suddenly has a seizure and . . . I won't tell you the rest.

The way Megan Miranda keeps death and danger always lurking in the background with compelling characters and settings kept me turning pages.

This novel felt to me like two genres in one: Horror and romance. Unthinkable events take place but in the end things fall into place, mostly, and love does mend the world inside Fracture and provide hope.

This was a fun read that left me wondering what would happen next . . . to me.