Patricia Hruby Powell

Author, Grant Farley, takes from his own life growing up in northern California in the 70s for his debut novel, “Bones of a Saint” (Soho 2021). Fifteen-year-old RJ is a clever and irresistible “bad boy” who lives in a trailer and cares for his younger siblings while their mother works hard for low wages. RJ is especially protective of his disabled brother, Charley. And when Charley becomes endangered, RJ steps up.

The dead-end town of Arcangel has been ruled for generations by a gang, the Blackjacks. The gang spends its energy enlisting the poorest young people to continue its criminal legacy. The police turn their heads. Heck, members of the gang are police. The Blackjacks have left RJ alone—until now.

Ed the Head says, “The Blackjacks are POed at that old city dude for buying the Miller place. He stole their best flatland hangout.” The Blackjacks decide that RJ must drive the old man out of his newly purchased home.

RJ has one friend, Manny, who’s pretty different from him, but they’re both poor and live under little supervision. RJ says, “I’m skinny and he’s fat. I’ve got five younger sibs and he’s got four sisters. I lost my dad when I was three and his sister Theresa killed their mom just getting born…” His information comes out fast, succinct, and unique.

So RJ sets out to drive out the old man, Mr. Leguin. But he likes him. Clever RJ tells stories, but the old man tells better stories. They entertain each other and convey information by metaphor.

RJ’s mostly-Catholic world view is pretty much summed up here: “Mr. Sanders, with his Canterbury Tales, he taught me about pilgrims that lived in a past that went back hundreds and hundreds of years. And Father Speckler, with his New Testament, he preached about a future that won’t come until forever and ever, amen. Neither way does me any good now against the Blackjacks. All I can do is live in my own here and now.”

RJ knows he could disregard the Blackjack directive. He also knows there would be big consequences. He says, “Maybe God made free will just for His fun. If God cranks the world up and lets it go without knowing where it’s headed, well that’s got to be a whole lot more fun for him.” Free will or fate. Catholics side with free will. Hope you get an idea of the unique and fabulous voice here.

The story twists and turns and Mr. Leguin delivers information to RJ which just might help the teen escape his rough circumstances and release the town from the grip of the Blackjacks. Know any clever young readers who want to read a unique voice? Or such an adult?

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore. She teaches community classes at Parkland. talesforallages.com

Sixteen-year-old Nala attends her cousin’s activism group and falls for Tye, who is acting as MC in “Love is a Revolution” (Soho 2021) by Renee Watson. Nala likes music and parties and fun. She wants to spend the summer watching movies and trying new flavors at the creamery. But she also wants Tye. So she changes her narrative a bit, claiming to be an activist.

Nala regularly visits her grandma at the elder residency, but she tells Tye she’s doing a service project at the elder residency. “Maybe my lie could turn into the truth.” Maybe she could exhibit photos of the residents in the common room. It’s a little predictable, but it takes quite a while for Nala’s “doing good” to take place and the journey is interesting.

Out on a date, Nala marvels at how good Tye is—while she is living a lie. She doesn’t really like herself too much and yesterday this caused her to be upset. She held it back, then says, “The thing about tears. If you don’t cry them, they come out in other ways or just wait for another time. And here they are.” And now she’s crying in front of this amazing boy. Tye is so nice, he works to comfort her. She wonders if she deserves this.

In certain ways Tye is not totally honest—such as how about how he’s feeling. He’s always “fine” even when he’s not. Nala says, “Sometimes you have to acknowledge what’s hurting you. How else will you ever heal? We sit and sit, letting the sadness sink in, holding each other and watching the boats sway and sway until the sun has vanished…” Nala clearly has something to teach Tye.

Nala tells her aunt she intends to go to college—but does she? She makes a list: “4 Things I want to study in College (If I go): 1. Maybe Communications 2. Maybe Photography 3. Maybe Business 4. Maybe there’s a course on How To Be Yourself.”

Her aunt is pressing her to write her personal essay for college admissions. JT, a contemporary and usually a pain in the neck, says, “Maybe you are writing it for your aunt Ebony and not for yourself.” Yep, she has to find out who she is—she realizes this.

This love story about a plus-size African American girl will speak to many young readers about love, self-love, honesty, and coming of age.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  She teaches community classes at Parkland.         talesforallages.com

Twelve-year-old Ana-Marie Jin is the National Juvenile Girl’s Figure Skating Champion in “Ana on the Edge” (Little Brown 2020) by A.J. Sass. Ana trains in the Bay Area, lives with her supportive mother, and has a devoted best friend, Tamar. Ana is progressing so quickly she must leave Tamar behind and train with her coach Alex at a rink across town.

Ana is determined to do so well in competition that she’ll bypass Regionals and progress straight to Nationals, in order to save her single mom a load of expenses. Her mom works three jobs in order to pay the huge expenses of the sport. A Russian super-star choreographs Ana’s new free skate. Alas, it’s princess-themed and danced to sweet lyrical music. This just isn’t Ana’s thing. She’s a strong powerful mover. Ana doesn’t tell anyone how disturbing this choreography is to her.

New skater, Hayden, a transgender boy who has recently come out, arrives at the rink. Ana introduces herself as A and Hayden thinks she’s a boy. Ana likes this, so she doesn’t correct him, as they develop their friendship. “I am a girl,” she thinks to herself. But she doesn’t identify as a girl exactly. “If I’m not a girl, then . . . what?”

She gets her hair cropped very short and Hayden’s whole family thinks she’s a boy. She stands Tamar up a couple of times, in order to see Hayden, which, of course, strains her BFF friendship.

Ana is not exactly nailing her new lyrical skate dance. Her choreographer advises, “Feel the music. Become the princess.” Anna quips to herself, “What does she want me to do, sprout a crown?” And then the costume arrives. A sequined dress! She hasn’t performed in a dress since she was a little girl. And it costs thousands, as does the choreographer. She thinks, “I’m a strong skater who lands jumps on perfectly timed crescendos.” She’s all about “speed and power instead of portraying a delicate character.” She can’t tell her coach, her mother, Tamar, and especially not Hayden about her feelings.

To me that’s a weakness in the plot. Why can’t she question Hayden who has just recently come out? Why would she think he wouldn’t understand a situation similar to his own? But I go along with it because the identity crisis is so intriguing. And I’m sure there are young readers experiencing something similar to Ana’s.

So there’s no one she can confide in, but she does some great thinking, like: “Maybe I’m not a boy like he thinks, but it doesn’t feel right to call myself a girl, either. I need to find a word that describes this in-between feeling.” And if the reader doesn’t already know, you learn about non-binary identity as A does.

Thank heavens for A’s supportive mother, even if she is presently confused. Is there a young person you know who might benefit from this story by “expert” A.J. Sass, whose pronouns are he/they and has medaled in U.S. Figure Skating?

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  She teaches community classes at Parkland.         talesforallages.com

Ellie’s family has been driven from their small Maine town to a little patch of land on the mountain due to the Great Depression in “Echo Mountain” (Dutton 2020) by Lauren Wolk. Her father had been a fine tailor, her mother a music teacher, but no one could afford such things in the early thirties and their poverty is deep. They’ve been on the mountain for a couple of years.

Twelve-year-old Ellie and her father take to living off the land, but her sister and mother do not. Samuel, at six, would be fine anywhere, it seems. Ellie has become something of a mountain girl. In the opening scene, their dog Maisie has given birth to a litter, but one puppy is dead. Mother instructs Ellie to bury it. Instead, Ellie douses it in a bucket of cold water. The puppy gasps and lives. Ellie is a natural healer that she describes as a flame in her chest which guides her. When Samuel asks why she did that, she says when he’d dropped snow down her back, she’d gasped. Why not the puppy?

Early in the story, Father is not present. He’s asleep—a prolonged sleep—a coma. The reason is uncovered gradually. But Daddy had taught Ellie to be self-sufficient. As an empath, she feels for people, animals, trees, the mountain itself, which stands her in good stead to be a healer. Not only does she try to cure her sleeping father, but the hag she finds up-mountain.

A fishercat has gouged the hag’s leg. Ellie finds her unconscious with magots roiling in the wound. Ellie is about to cauterize the wound with a heated chisel when the woman awakens to stop her, saying the magots are eating the dead flesh of the wound—a cure. Voila! Ellie has a healing mentor and at least one reader is fascinated.

The hag’s wound needs honey for disinfectant. Whereas she feels bad for the bees that will sting her and die, she makes a fire from a flint and tinder, creates a torch, extinguishes it. She smokes the bees out of their hive and takes the honeycomb. A couple of years ago her father had taught her to make fire, saying you must learn by doing it. Ellie asks the age-old question, “How am I supposed to do something that will teach me how to do it if I don’t know how to do it in the first place?” Practice.

When Ellie comes upon a long-abandoned foundation she says, “When I put my hand on those boulders, I could feel how much they missed the steady weight of a cabin above them. The idea they had been of use.” Ellie is wise. She’ll keep silent and shoulder the burden of blame rather than make her loveable little brother or even her annoying sister know her father’s accident was their fault. She recognizes, when she meets Larkin, that “loneliness shared is loneliness halved.”

I love this book, and as a young reader, I’d have devoured it. It might have changed my life.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  She teaches community classes at Parkland.         talesforallages.com

Ibi Zoboi met Yusef Salaam in an African literature course at Hunter College taught by Dr. Marimba Ani in 1999. Yusef Salaam was one of the five Black teenaged boys who were wrongfully convicted of murder in Central Park a decade earlier—a story documented in Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five.

Yusef had “freed his mind” while serving a sentence for a crime he hadn’t committed, by writing poetry in prison. Since their first meeting, Haitian-American Ibi Zoboi had become the acclaimed author of American Street, Pride, and others. A few years ago, she asked Yusef to collaborate on a book. That book became the co-authored Punching the Air (Balzer & Bray 2020) the much-decorated best-selling novel-in-verse, about Amal, using some of the poetry Yusef had written while in prison along with the words of master poet, Zoboi.

The fictional character Amal, speaking of his court prosecutors, says, “Their words and what they thought/ to be their truth/ were like a scalpel/ shaping me into/ the monster/ they want me to be.”

Waiting for the court’s decision, Amal says, “The jury finds, she says/ As if this is a game of hide-and-seek/ and I’m curled up under some table/ my body balled up like a fist…”

Once convicted, he says, “There is nothing left to do now but think about God: my country’s Money/ my mother’s Allah/ My grandmother’s Jesus/ my father’s American Dream/ my uncle’s Foreign Cars/ my teacher’s College Education/ my lawyer’s Time.”

Once in prison, everything inside him is dying—his dreams, his life. His frustration is over-whelming. “Some of us put up more walls/ some of us look as if/ we will break down all the walls/ Most of us become the walls.” He is sinking into hell.

Then he finds poetry and drawing, which will be his salvation. “I paint words and voices, rhymes and rhythm/ and every whisper, every conversation beats a drum/ in my mind/ at full blast.” But the making of art doesn’t make everything okay. Maybe this reader’s outrage peaks when one of the white guards continually but secretly displays his tattoo to the Black inmates—a black baby with a rope around his neck.

Only gradually does the reader discovers of what Amal was accused. We live with Amal through his imprisonment where an invisible line divides the rich from the poor prisoners, the white from the Black—it’s subtle and treacherous.

Sometimes this beautifully written book is just too hard and I had to close the book. I realize that is due to my white privilege—a Black person cannot close the book on the potential and real ongoing threat to their life and freedom.

The theme of the book is contained in the lines, “my punches will land on a wall/ my punches will be paintbrushes.” If you care about the plight of America, I suggest you read this book then hand it to another reader.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Lift As You Climb; Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue all signed and for sale at Jane Addams bookstore.  She teaches community classes at Parkland.         talesforallages.com