Unbound: Celebrating Women's Voices

Our juniors, seniors, and teachers were graciously invited to an author event, Unbound: Celebrating Women's Voices, at the Indian High Commission, in collaboration with the Dhaka Lit Fest.  Some of our students kicked off the evening by reading poetry.  Of course, they were awesome! 
Thank you to the Indian High Commission for a lovely evening and to Ms. Jahan for organizing the trip.

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

A Newbery Honor Book
A Coretta Scott King Honor Book
A Printz Honor Book
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature
Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature
Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award
An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction
Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner
An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of 2017
A Vulture Best YA Book of 2017
A Buzzfeed Best YA Book of 2017

An ode to Put the Damn Guns Down, this is National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller Jason Reynolds’s fiercely stunning novel that takes place in sixty potent seconds—the time it takes a kid to decide whether or not he’s going to murder the guy who killed his brother.

A cannon. A strap.
A piece. A biscuit.
A burner. A heater.
A chopper. A gat.
A hammer
A tool
for RULE

Or, you can call it a gun. That’s what fifteen-year-old Will has shoved in the back waistband of his jeans. See, his brother Shawn was just murdered. And Will knows the rules. No crying. No snitching. Revenge. That’s where Will’s now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother’s gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he’s after. Or does he? As the elevator stops on the sixth floor, on comes Buck. Buck, Will finds out, is who gave Shawn the gun before Will took the gun. Buck tells Will to check that the gun is even loaded. And that’s when Will sees that one bullet is missing. And the only one who could have fired Shawn’s gun was Shawn. Huh. Will didn’t know that Shawn had ever actually USED his gun. Bigger huh. BUCK IS DEAD. But Buck’s in the elevator? Just as Will’s trying to think this through, the door to the next floor opens. A teenage girl gets on, waves away the smoke from Dead Buck’s cigarette. Will doesn’t know her, but she knew him. Knew. When they were eight. And stray bullets had cut through the playground, and Will had tried to cover her, but she was hit anyway, and so what she wants to know, on that fifth floor elevator stop, is, what if Will, Will with the gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, MISSES.

And so it goes, the whole long way down, as the elevator stops on each floor, and at each stop someone connected to his brother gets on to give Will a piece to a bigger story than the one he thinks he knows. A story that might never know an END…if WILL gets off that elevator.

Told in short, fierce staccato narrative verse, Long Way Down is a fast and furious, dazzlingly brilliant look at teenage gun violence, as could only be told by Jason Reynolds.

Why you should read this book:

• This book is out of my "comfort zone."  I normally am not drawn to books in verse. Push yourself out of your comfort zone
• It's on the YALSA Teen Top Ten List for this year.
• I wonder what this life would be like?
• A quote that stuck with me:

but if the blood

inside you is  on the inside

of someone else,

you never want to 

see it on the outside of 

them.

Find Long Way Down in our library at: REALISTIC F REY

Poetry Month

 Here is my favorite poem:

  (Harper Collins Tumblr)

I found this funny sign for Poetry Month for our display. We a bit behind this year given it's already April 19!

Thanks to Pinterest for the image, traced to the Literary Hoots Blog and several other libraries around the United States.  Oh, the fun of trying to cite Pinterest!

Ms. Shuborna created our book display with some of our "better-looking" poetry books to try and generate some interest.  Poetry is a hard sell in MS/HS.  I weeded non-fiction this year and would have had to weed 99% of the poetry if I were to go by checkouts alone.