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Sharon Draper is a great author and Fire from the Rock is no exception. Sylvia is torn between changing the world and living a normal teenage life in 1957 Arkansas.

On Fire

1. Perfect historical fiction where a character interacts with real-life events and people. When Faubus does his TV broadcast, you can hear the hatred.
2. Sylvia remains a teenager. She struggles with wanting/needing to be a hero, but never is she completely unrealistic. When considering integration she also considers what her sorta boyfriend wants and if a rival girl will horn in.
3. Not everyone is one side of the integration spectrum or the other.

Ice Cold

1. The only frustrations I truly had were directed towards characters and I think I was supposed to be frustrated with those characters. I wonder what it would be like to have Ms. Draper as my high school English teacher.

All in all a great book that students will love and Social Studies teachers will thank you for.

As teachers are starting to take their students through The Diary of Anne Frank, I’ve been asked for book recommendations. Here is a list (that will update) of books that I think connect well to World War II and its issues:

1. Soldier X by Don Wulffson
2. The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom
3. Boy at War by Harry Mazer
4. Revolution is not a Dinner Party by Ying Chang Compestine - Actually takes place during China’s Cultural Revolution in the 70s, but the secret police, mob rule, and underground resistance are very similar to Nazi rule.
5. Faithful Elephants by Yukio Tsuchiya
6. Number the Stars by Lois Lowry
7. Maus by Art Spiegelman
8. War, Women, and the News by Catherine Gourley
9. Journal of Scott Pendleton Collins by Walter Dean Myers
10. Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston

Imagine George W. Bush as president (shouldn’t be too tough).

Now imagine him putting his face on giant posters everywhere you walk.

Now imagine people being pulled from their daily jobs and schoolwork to instead recite the teachings of George W. He then institutes a youth program that rewards kids for selling out their teachers, friends, and family that don’t quite agree with how life is going (or the spies just don’t like the people).

Thankfully we have a president and not Chairman Mao:

The Revolutionary

1. Revolution is Not a Dinner Party is a stellar debut by this author. Ying Chang Compestine has written cookbooks (and is the spokesperson for Nestle Maggi) and a couple of children’s books, but this is her debut in a novel. She writes most of this novel from her own childhood in China, which is scary once you’ve read the book.
2. This novel fits perfectly in any Anne Frank/WWII unit of study, even though the Cultural Revolution in China happened after World War II. You still have youth squads (the Red Guard and the Young Pioneers) busting up people who stand in their way and disagree with the dictator.
3. Students will relate to her mother-daughter struggle as well as her love for her dad, but the thing that kept me reading was the suspense of who was going to get dragged off next or if the main character’s family would be overheard by their next door neighbor, Comrade Li. Her dad is an awesome character who, when demoted from surgeon to janitor, still operates on his enemy’s (Comrade Li) friends after hours because he is so skilled. What’s really cool is that her dad did that in real life, too.

The Distant

1. She sets up the peaceful life before the giant upheaval for the first 20 pages. If a student were to pick this up on their own, they might not get what life is like because it is not the US. Once the Comrade moves in, though, stuff starts heating up and I finished the book in one and a half days of not-putting-it-down.

This is a very valuable book that may get overlooked because of its cover and, frankly, some prejudices that we still have about China. I am booktalking this on Monday and hopefully it stirs up some circulations because the book, society challenging and historical as it is, is worth the effort.

a natural lyrical gift
…
Rarefied as Rembrandt,
a student like this appears once

Your Own, Sylvia is probably one of the most accessible biographies for students. Hemphill does a great job presenting the birth and death of Sylvia Plath.

The Beautiful

1. There are lots of interesting details, presented in a way that is intriguing. (I never would have pictured famous poet Sylvia Plath as a guard on the high school basketball team.)
2. Each little snippet is a poem - but a fictionalized poem by one of the people that knew her. The above quote is from Wilbury Crockett, her high school English teacher. But what’s extremely cool is that this quote uses words that Crockett actually said.
3. The accessibility/readability of the book helps to paint a bigger picture of her life and motivations. The footnotes amidst the poems help to put events in historical context.

The Tragic

1. Sylvia Plath ended her life violently. The book leads up to this, but does not paint it as the focal point of her life.
2. There are no traditional paragraphs, only poems and footnotes.

Fans of Sonya Sones or Kelly Bingham will definitely enjoy this.