Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes

***Last entry!***

At least for the summer reading.
This book was a mixture of poetry and narrative from 18 different high school kids living in the Bronx, New York. You have many black and Latino students, but with a few white kids too. At first, there is the typical clichey-ness of a normal high school. But an English teacher starts letting students read poetry they wrote for themselves in class. Soon everyone starts to understand each other better, and they start to become more like a big family: they don't always get along, but they respect and care about each other.

Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy

This book is a verse telling of the author's aunt's experiences at the Lodz ghetto in Poland during WWII. Only 12 children made out of Lodz at the end of the war and this woman was one of them.

I love books about the Holocaust, sick as that is. I always am shocked by some new horror. In this book, it was how the children survived the deportations: by hiding in open graves at the cemetary.

I Don't Want to be Crazy by Samantha Schultz

This is a memoir, told in poetry, of a young woman who battles anxiety disorder. It describes well the frequent panic attacks, what she was thinking before, during and after them.

I didn't know much about severe anxiety problems before. Sometimes the author describes periods when the attacks happen more often, paralyzing her, stopping her life, and even making her depressed. I could easily connect with the character, her life before this was so bad.

God went to Beauty School by Cynthia Rylant

Hey, sorry for the delay. Been away for the weekend, plus I decided to take a one day break to get started reading a book that came out in a series I love (the Hunger Games books. They're amazing!). But I'm back now.

This series of poems deal with the idea of God coming to earth (again) to experience His creations first hand. He does every ordinary thing people would like going to school, taking bath, getting a cold, and rollerblading. One poem even talks about this being the reason, maybe, for God coming to earth as Jesus, to experience the pain that afflicts the people He has created.

I thought this was a very interesting set of poems. They were interesting, with some very deep reflections on God, but they were also amusing.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

This book, based on a Mexican folk tale, is about a poor man who finds an extraordinary pearl at sea. He wants to sell the pearl and use the money to have a nice formal wedding with his wife and to educate his son so that he can escape this life that they have been trapped in. But there are many greedy people who try to steal the pearl and even do harm to the man. Eventually, the man is beaten, and his dreams all come to nothing.

I found this story sad, but it has an interesting message: sometimes being stubborn causes you to lose more than what you started with.

Aleutian Sparrow by Karen Hesse

This book in verse tells the story of an Aleutian girl during WWII. The Aleutian Islands are a part of Alaska, right off of the coast. The Japanese attacked the islands, and the people there "relocated" to camps on the mainland. Because of the way they looked, they were discriminated against, and the government would neither help them nor give them enough freedom to take care of themselves. After the war, the Aleutians who were left after disease and poor conditions, returned to the islands, where their homes had been left in ruin.

I found this very interesting because I had never known anything about the Aleutian Islands and especially about what happened to the people there during WWII.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

I've read this book several times for school before, but I wanted to read it again just on my own. It is a series of vignettes (really short, short stories) about a Latino girl growing up in Chicago. Some of the stories are sweet or funny, but many of them show how trapped people can get, especially women. One story even talks about a girl who gets married before she is in eighth grade. The last story talks about why she wrote this book and why the character (who is basically like Cisneros) left her neighborhood behind:

"They will not know I have gpne away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot [get] out." (page 110, last sentences of book)