Recent Reads

I have been reading like crazy this semester, as some of you know I am taking an adolescent literature class, and a drama class. Thanks to both of these I've been able to read many books that fit the genres we have studied. Here are the latest:

No Choirboy: Murder, Violence and Teenagers on Death Row - This nonfiction book is exactly what it sounds like. Susan Kuklin takes readers inside America's prisons and visits with men who were put on death row as teenagers. The convicts tell the story of their crime, arrest, sentencing, and what it is like to be on the row. It is a troubling story, but interesting all the same.

Whirligig - This postmodern novel tells the story of a troubled boy who attempts to commit suicide when driving home from a party, but ends up killing another girl from his high school. For whatever reason, Brent isn't sentenced to any jail time for vehicular manslaughter or anything (even though he was intoxicated) but he does have community service and he has to make amends with the family. Her mother requests that Brent build whirligigs in her memory and place them in the four corners of the US. In between this story, Paul Fleischman  tells the stories of the four people those whirligigs affect.

Life is a Dream - This is a play translated from the Spanish Golden Age. I wouldn't call it my favorite, but we had to read it and perform a scene in which we focused on new historicist ideas. We chose a scene from this play, and a scene from Mean Girls (the movie) to signify today's time period and our language of intelligibility. We ended up driving around the parking lot with Briana yelling out of the sunroof at me some lines from both texts. It was hilarious - and we got a really good grade.

Make Lemonade - A "groundbreaking" novel by Virginia Euwer Wolff in which the entire story of a fourteen year old girl is written in free-verse. So it's poetry! I just started it, so I don't know much about it yet - but I like it so far. It is a quick read and it's interesting enough.