Good books that get it: How the other half lives

Most of our kids know that they've got it good. And they know, ok, they're supposed to be grateful. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Talk to the Ipod.

But kids who grow up in Ann Arbor mostly grow up on the right side of the tracks. There is a wrong side, and there are kids over there. How do we helped the privileged middle class crowd get themselves a clue? Lecturing does not work. Nor does confiscating the laptop and the cell phone.

But sometimes when a kid reads a book about another kid who lives in a different economic or cultural universe - they get sucked in. Caring about an individual - this is what can change a middle schooler's life.

I have read a number of books by Walter Dean Myers, and you can't really call him a young adult novelist. He's a novelist, he's a brilliant writer; I'm not sure honestly how many times he's won the Newbery, the YA version of the Pulitzer. He's unnerving, frequently, and he's able to merge genres seamlessly, as he did with one of his more
recent books, Autobiography of My Dead Brother.The book is a cross between a graphic novel, almost, but not quite, in comic book format. There are selections of comic book ostensibly written by the narrator within the storyline; the illustrations are by Christopher Myers, son of the author, and winner of a Caldecott Medal and Coretta Scott King Award in his own right. The illustrations are stark and powerful. They can draw a reader into the story, especially a kid who isn't much on reading.

The speaker in the story is actually a kid who has it pretty good, considering that he lives in a not so good area. But all around him things are decaying, and his parents, two people who love and support him, are struggling to provide what the boy needs to succeed. Meanwhile, his closest friend Rise is moving in a different direction, and a third friend, CJ, has musical skill that mark him a someone of a separate universe. The three of them may make it...it's unlikely that all of them will.

The numbers are simply against it, from the opening scenes of yet one more young man in a coffin, to the pressures of gang violence and the choices that these boys have to make - PSAT's or bodega burglaries?

It is not as easy as it may sound.

There is no schooling for girls, as well as no electricity in much of the rural part of India, as they learn in Gloria Whelan's Homeless Bird, and when the young girl is widowed at 13, her life is supposed to be over. But people have this nasty tendency to survive for maybe another thirty or forty years, even in India...so Koly has to find a way to live. Fighting the power may work in our culture, but it can be dangerous when you are 13 and completely alone.

These concepts can be a real shock to the system.

There are plenty of other books out there, but a minority that most folks don't consider, unless they spend time pretty far up in the UP, is the Native American - or as they call themselves, Mohicans, Potawatomi, Abnaki, and so on. Sherman Alexie is an intense but funny writer, in the Angela's Ashes tradition - the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian is so brutal it's funny, and based, in large portions, on Alexie's life. But the kids don't miss the point. It's a pretty harsh universe, and when the boy realizes that he has gotten the same math book that his mother had, 30 years ago, he hurls it at the obnoxious math teacher in a rage - and is immediately suspended.

To the man's credit, the teacher tells Alexie's character that he will never get anywhere unless he gets away from the reservation high school and transfers to the white high school. Which he does, and becomes a sort of mascot for the white students. Then he becomes a successful basketball player. But as the season progresses, the racial tension between the schools mount. His old school friends become resentful at his escape from the rez, and, ironically, the white students end up protecting the part-time Indian from his part-time peers.

Brutal.

It just doesn't go down like this in Saline.

These are books that'll keep you up all night, reading, and talking. And reading some more. Most of these writers have written a number of books. And no book hogging. Don't Bogey the book.

Remember - you're the grown up.