Tight

Tight

Torrey Maldonado

            Bryan loves superhero comics and he loves to play arcade games – every time he plays Ms. Pac Man he gets the high score. He also lives with his family in a housing project in Brooklyn, and life isn’t always easy.  His dad is in and out of jail – he just can’t seem to control his temper enough to keep out of trouble.  When he’s home, he spends much of his time hanging out at the bodega and telling Bryan he can’t be soft.  But Bryan has never been one to get into trouble, even though he sometimes feel his temper rising, the same way it does for his dad.  He spends his time in his mother’s office at the community center, drawing and reading his comics.  Until one day when Mike comes by and both of Bryan’s parents encourage them to be friends. Mike seems cool at first – he too loves comics and drawing – but he also runs hot and cold.  And he starts encouraging Bryan to do increasingly dangerous things – skip school, run through the turnstiles at the subway without paying, and subway surfing.  Bryan hates doing these things, but he’s in over his head and he doesn’t know how he’s going to get out.

            For the most part, I enjoyed Tight.  Bryan is Puerto Rican, but that doesn’t play heavily into the story.  I think the dilemmas Bryan faces are realistic for a kid his age (he’s in the sixth grade), as well are the emotions he deals with when his father goes back to jail.  My main issue with the book was the abrupt ending – I think that adding a few more pages would have left me feeling much more satisfied.

Spooked!

Spooked!  How a Radio Broadcast and The War of the Worlds Sparked the 1938 Invasion of America

by Gail Jarrow

Fake news.  We’ve all heard the term.  “News” that has been made up to deceive or scare the reader or listener.   Well on October 30, 1938, people across the nation were fooled into believing that the world was being invaded by Martians.  Silly? Maybe, but think about it:   if television and the internet didn’t exist and you got most of your entertainment and news by radio, imagine how you’d feel if the program you were listening to was interrupted by breaking news?  The broadcaster says strange cylinder have landed near Grovers Mill, New Jersey.  Suddenly these beings appear and start to kill everything in their path.  Earth is doomed – you can hear masses of people being murdered.  Would you panic?  Would you flee? And how would you feel once you found out it was just a radio play, based on a book by H.G. Wells?  And you’ve been fooled.  Badly. 

I've known about Orson Welles' radio broadcast, but I confess that I had some misconceptions about it.  I had always been told that masses of people panicked and fed the area around Grovers Mills, but Jarrow argues that while many people may have been fooled and scared by the broadcast, there wasn't a mass panic and traffic jams all over the place.  I thought Jarrow did a great job of laying the background for the broadcast and talking about the repercussions.  This was a fun piece of nonfiction, and I look forward to recommending it to my students.

Escape from Syra

Escape from Syria

Samya Kullab, Jackie Roche & Mike Freiheit

Amina is your normal young girl, about 10 years old when this book begins.  She lives in Aleppo, Syria with her mom, her dad and her brother.  She works hard in school and does well.  Everything is good until one day a bomb goes off.  Everything she knows changes immediately.  Although her family is fine, they are forced to flee the increased fighting in Syria as rebel soldiers fight the Assad Regime, and then ISIS joins in. Amina and her family end up in Lebanon but life isn’t good there either.  There is very little money, and when her little brother gets sick, the family has to go into debt to pay for his medicine.  Perhaps the only way out is to leave the Middle East altogether and go to Europe, or North America.  But being a refugee has its own dangers and Amina and her family are caught in the middle.

Escape from Syria is a great introduction to the tragedy of the Syrian civil war.  While Aminia is a fictionalized character, her story has happened to millions of people who have fled the war.  I thoroughly enjoyed this graphic novel.