It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?
{Celebrating the books we’ve read in the past week
&
the titles we are currently reading.}
This meme is originated by Jen and Kellee at TeachMentorTexts. Thanks!
Whoa, Whoa, Whoa! Did I mention that our digital school newspaper, the Panther Press, came out today? Give it a LOOK!
If you like realistic fiction that’s ripped right from the headlines of the news, you’ll enjoy this gritty book. Quinn and Rashad are two high school students—one an athlete, the other more of an artist. More importantly, one is white and the other is black. When Rashad is roughed up by an officer—an officer that Quinn knows—it makes the national news and threatens to divide the high school and town. Where will Quinn and ‘Shad wind up when everything shakes out? What stories are hidden beneath the surface? How will these guys face up to the way things have always been?
All American Boys is told from Quinn’s and Rashad’s points of view in alternating chapters. The two-author, two-POV format works. Powerful and current, All American Boys won’t soon leave your mind.
In an unforgettable new novel from award-winning authors Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, two teens one black, one white grapple with the repercussions of a single violent act that leaves their school, their community, and, ultimately, the country bitterly divided by racial tension.
A bag of chips. That’s all sixteen-year-old Rashad is looking for at the corner bodega. What he finds instead is a fist-happy cop, Paul Galluzzo, who mistakes Rashad for a shoplifter, mistakes Rashad’s pleadings that he’s stolen nothing for belligerence, mistakes Rashad’s resistance to leave the bodega as resisting arrest, mistakes Rashad’s every flinch at every punch the cop throws as further resistance and refusal to STAY STILL as ordered. But how can you stay still when someone is pounding your face into the concrete pavement?
But there were witnesses: Quinn Collins a varsity basketball player and Rashad’s classmate who has been raised by Paul since his own father died in Afghanistan and a video camera. Soon the beating is all over the news and Paul is getting threatened with accusations of prejudice and racial brutality. Quinn refuses to believe that the man who has basically been his savior could possibly be guilty. But then Rashad is absent. And absent again. And again. And the basketball team half of whom are Rashad’s best friends start to take sides. As does the school. And the town. Simmering tensions threaten to explode as Rashad and Quinn are forced to face decisions and consequences they had never considered before.
Written in tandem by two award-winning authors, this tour de force shares the alternating perspectives of Rashad and Quinn as the complications from that single violent moment, the type taken from the headlines, unfold and reverberate to highlight an unwelcome truth.
Here is a great review and exerpt from NPR.
Hey— Did you remember that Reading Records are getting collected on Thursday?!?!
•For every parent who leaves a comment on TODAY’S POST with what YOU’RE reading, I’ll give your child a BUSTED ticket…
Did anyone comment on last Monday’s blog post?
{Eat the Book} 
