The friendship between Henna, P, and Lora was a very sweet addition to the book. The way that they all encouraged each other and pushed Henna was something that I would love to push for in a middle school classroom. This age is such a hard time for friendships and having a good example of what healthy friendships look like is so important.

One of my favorite parts of this book is how gentle the author approaches grief that comes from someone you love being ill. She does it in a way that is really powerful and impactful.

This book was another pick that I think will be great for middles grades. She‘s 12 years old, which fits middle grades age range, and she is learning more about herself throughout this book. I was very excited to read this when I saw it was on the list.

Overall this book was a great pick, especially with the age range I am looking to teach. Lina‘s growth from arriving in the United States to her becoming confident enough to stand up for what she believes is right and wrong is inspiring. It‘s a great lesson that you could teach middle schoolers alongside the struggles of coming to a new country.

The book addresses some really important themes of resilience, overcoming adversity, and perseverance. Lina faces many challenges, especially with her sister who she can‘t fully understand anymore. She living in a place she feels unfamiliar with and she‘s longing to be seen. Her teacher chooses a book that resonates with Lina and when the book faces backlash, she has to step out of her comfort zone and fight for a future where she is seen.

When I first picked this book up, I knew that it was catered towards middle school students from the cover and synopsis on the back. The book based around a girl coming from China to live with her parents in the United States after the pandemic. She believes that it will be exactly like her parents were portraying it but when she arrived it was much different than she expected.

A powerful quote I liked in the book:

“Stop it,” whispers Cata. “Manu can still lead a meaningful life without martyring herself.”

“Sure,” says Saysa, yet her stare doesn‘t stray from mine. “But why settle for being a son of the system, when you can mother a movement?”

Very powerful.

After reading more of the book, I found myself getting more int it. I am a big fantasy reader so I really enjoyed reading an about that. Throughout reading it, I was able to see themes of immigration and family, which added to the story. This would be a book I would want my 7th grade class to read and dissect.

Initially when I picked up this book, I wasn‘t sure how I felt about it. The fantasy aspect on top of the underlying serious topics felt too far apart to be connected when I first started adding it.

When I reached the end of the novel, I found myself feeling very emotional about it all. Reading about how they reunited with their mother was so touching and heartfelt. I‘m not normally very emotional when it comes to reading so it was very moving to find myself feeling so emotional about it all. This is definitely a book I want to add to my school library. I‘m curious if its at my placement schools library.

I think it‘s really important how the author showed that Hassan was more than his disability and that he could help himself. I think it was a pivotal point where Omar realized this about Hassan and overall thought it bonded the more as well.

I really loved the choice to make this a graphic novel. It‘s more impactful this way as we are able to see wha the camps were like and how they ran. It helped me feel more connected having that visual. Using this as a medium for this work was a fantastic choice by the author.

This was another book that I wouldn‘t gravitate towards reading, but I am really glad that I did. I feel that I was made aware of many things that I hadn‘t considered before. Alongside that, it will be a beneficial tool in future classrooms that I will be teaching as well

Something that I found to be very important was the discussion of how there is power in peaceful protesting and an acknowledgment that protests can get out of hand so fast. In a future classroom, I hope I can find an accompanying novel that depicts peaceful and un-protests to go alongside this novel.

This is a heavy, but informative book about the history of racism. Slater resents it in such a way that is not only informative but relational to jokes and situations occurring within schools today. It‘s been an interesting and truly eye opening read and I am curious how this could be adapted to a reading done within public schools.

My overall impression of the book is that it is super applicable to a classroom environment and something that I will utilize in my future classrooms! I am not a nonfiction reader so this was definitely outside of my comfort zone. It helped open me up to reading more nonfiction books in the near future. P.S. I posted these least two posts last week but for some reason they never finished uploading? I think it was due to the spotty area I was in.

I found the “Ten Steps For Effective Disagreements” to be useful and something I want to utilize in m future classrooms. It does a really good job explaining how to open up the room to discussions of handling disagreements being had. This is not only applicable to classrooms but in daily life as well.

I don‘t typically care for nonfiction, but this one hasn‘t entirely bored me yet. I think the author does a good job of drawing the readers in, but I have yet to feel really drawn in. Hopefully that changes the further I get into the book.

One of the quotes in this book that stood out to me was in the prologue, “ Lily was thirteen, and she couldn‘t remember if she‘d seen a group of Chinese girls like this before: in bathing suits and high heels, their hair and makeup perfectly done. They looked so American.” This is what was presented as a “good” Chinese American citizen. I think this is impactful because of the time period and how they experienced extreme racism during this time.

I found it really interesting to see the lesbian community at the Telegraph Club. Through Lily, we see the diverse relationships within this community, and it also shows how the club is both a social hub and a sanctuary where people like Lily can explore their identities.

I liked Lo‘s heartfelt portrayal of Lily‘s journey to self-discovery in 1950s San Francisco. I thought Lo captured how complicated it was for Lily to explore her queer identity and the cultural tensions with such sensitivity and depth.

Overall, I really loved this book. The way it addressed depression, suicide, and other sensitive topics was done in a way that was very impactful. While there was much sorrow throughout the book, I still saw hope weaved throughout which I thought was so beautiful. This is definitely a book that I would want to teach at some point in my teaching career.

The next thing that I loved about this book was that it was written in verse. I feel it really added a depth to the novel that you maybe wouldn‘t get out of a book that was written in the typical writing style. I personally loved this and it helped me have a better unsaying of what was going on within the book.

One thing I really appreciated about this book was the trigger warning at the beginning of the book and even hotlines at the end of the book. The book deals with sensitive topics such as depression and suicide so including these triggers as a book that is catered to young adults is especially important.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading the book. I enjoyed it at an adult reader and I think it could be very useful to use in a middle grades environment. While the reading level is for more of a middle school level, there were several stories in the book that could be utilized in a high school classroom.

I really enjoyed reading “The Beans and Rice Chronicles of Isaiah Dunn”. It dealt with discussing alcoholism in a really gentle way that is show through a child‘s eyes. It hits you where it hurts while reading about it though a child that doesn‘t fully understand the situation and has to navigate it all with that lack of understanding.

I liked the book more than I thought that I was going to. The different messages behind the short stories are applicable to many different students and the length of the stories are short enough that they won‘t dissuade any learner from reading it.

I commented on this in another post that I made, but throughout the book, I felt like I was there through every moment; emotionally and physically. I particularly felt emotional when it came to Javier and his grandfathers relationship.

When I was reading Solito, I noticed something interesting; Zamora was using Spanish punctuation (¿?; !¡). I really enjoyed this as it not only made us aware that they were speaking Spanish, but opened us up to an new way of experiencing a book.

Solito was truly an amazing book to read. I felt every raw emotion from Javier and truly felt like I was experiencing it all beside him. Zamora did an amazing job writing this from the viewpoint of a 9 year old and did it in such a way that I knew not only what was on, but what/how of looked and how it felt for Javier as well. Everything about Javier and how he was written was authentic, genuine, and real to the very end.