I have seen this mentioned a few times, but I also think it is great to have more representation for Latina authors! Magical realism is not for everyone, but I think that it would be a great idea to offer this book as a choice amongst other books by Latina authors for a book club rotation. This could also be part of a larger unit, but I think it is very important to be intentional about including all kinds of authors!

The complex identity of this character really added a lot to this novel for me. I am not the biggest fan of magical realism, but I think that the additional werewolf element of the story was a great way for the author to prompt readers to think beyond the main characters identity as an Argentinian woman. I like this book for middle school age and I think it could be really intriguing for them.

Something that I really like about this book is the combination of real and magical experiences. While I think Harry Potter is a great jumping point for a lot of young readers, this book does a great job of maintaining those elements of magical realism, while still keeping the story real and relevant to a current issue. I think that the magical realism is very interesting, but not overpowering to a younger audience.

I have barely started Lobizona, but something that i really like so far is the use of Spanish and English. We have read a few other novels that used English and a second language interchangeably, but this novel seems to do it much more seamlessly. The dialogue in this book feels very authentic to me, and at times, the main character references the use of Spanish, or “Spanglish“. I like the way that the author balances two languages.

Before reading this book I did not know a lot about the construction of the transcontinental railroad. There were almost 12,000 Chinese laborers who were contracted to come to the United States and work on the railroad. As Tam Ling Fan experienced, the Chinese laborers were forced to work in very dangerous conditions for very little pay, up against vicious racism. This book presented me with an entire chapter of American History I missed.

I think that this book would work very well for a high school or late middle school classroom. I like the idea of incorporating this into a unit about Asian culture or countries, or about industrialization in the United States. There is a lot of really good options as to how this book could be used because it covers so much.

One thing that I really liked about this book is the juxtaposition of challenges that the main character faced in China and the United States. In both places the main character is up against a strict patriarchal system, however those systems look very different from place to place. The magnitude with which she struggled in China with disease, family separation, government influence, make her struggles in the United States seem so unnecessary.

This is my second book for the choice reading and I have very much enjoyed it. Gold Mountain is about a girl in 1860's era China. She is part of a semi-progressive, wealthy family and her father is wrongfully imprisoned. She must travel to the United States to work for the Central Pacific Railroad Company, disguised as a boy under her deceased brothers contract, and make an attempt to earn enough money to get her father released from prison.

The relationship between Omar and Hassan is the part of this book that I enjoyed the most. Sibling relationships are very unique and I think that the author captured that perfectly. Omar's love and care for Hassan is a central theme in this book and I think that anyone with siblings would get a lot from this book. I love the idea of using this in a middle school classroom.

I love the illustrations in this book. They have a child-like softness to them and the illustrator was very intentional about color. I recently read another graphic novel and did not notice this, but in this one the mood of the page is indicated by the primary colors of the illustrations. If the characters are sad, the page is mostly blue, scared, orange or red. This may be all graphic novels, but I thought this was a cool touch that added a lot.

I think that something very special about this book is the range of trials that the characters are experiencing. This book tackles subjects such as homelessness, disability, being separated from family, and so much more. While I don't think that they're experience as a whole is relatable to every young reader, these characters overcome so much in this book that I do think that young readers could see themselves in some parts of these characters.

I have gotten to read two graphic novels over the last two weeks because of my choice reading and I am really glad that it worked out this way. Although each of these novels are very different, there is something very special about the way that graphic novels can explore scary topics extensively, but alongside the graphics I think that it can make these topics much easier to bear, especially for younger students. I really like this as a MS book.

I really like the idea of recommending this book to students. I think that it could be a great book club book for students who are interested in graphic novels. I also really like the elements of the pandemic that are discussed in this book. I know that for several more years there will be students who have had memorable experiences during the pandemic and this could be a very relatable book for many of them. This book feels current and conscious.

I am almost to the end of this novel and I am not totally sold on graphic novels for myself, but I completely understand the appeal. This is the first one I have ever read and my opinion of them is now different. I had a misconception that graphic novels could not possibly be as in depth or as well rounded as a full on chapter book, but Messy Roots is everything that a traditional book is and maybe more. The images did nothing but enhance my exp.

Messy Roots has a very interesting concept, and I did not know this when I first picked it up. The main character is Wuhanese, meaning that she is from Wuhan. This is where the Coronavirus is believed to have originated. The main character is not only navigating life as a Chinese-American, but also as an Asian person in an extremely conservative area in Texas, during the pandemic. The pandemic presents a secondary level of turmoil in the book.

For one of my chosen novels I have picked Messy Roots. I chose this book because it is a graphic novel and that is very outside of my comfort zone normally. I wanted to find something on the reading list that I felt represented a category of reader that I am not very in touch with. So far, I am enjoying the book. It is about Chinese-American girl who moves to Texas, but it seems to touch on several different issues additional to that.

Something else that I loved about this book was all of the different perspectives that we heard from. Because of the diversity of Slater's participants, this gave the book a very in depth and well rounded feel to me. I heard from a lot of different people who each had different perspectives on the situation and this did a lot for me in terms of being able to conceptualize this situation.

Something that I really liked about this book was how well the informational elements were disguised. I feel like I walked away from this book knowing way more than I did before, but at no point did I feel the chore of informational reading. It really was so captivating and the author did a wonderful job of employing the youth of these participants instead of trying to suppress it. Slater is the type of writer that can capitalize on any element.

I mentioned this in a reply, but I think that this book could potentially be a great book club book for a group of students. I love the way that the book is formatted and it felt like a very quick read for me because it was so engaging. There are several breaks for dialogue and other interruptions in the text that I think would be a good launch pad to facilitate group discussion.

To build on my last post, I do think that some responsibility needs to be assumed for making newcomers to social media aware of this information. I would love to do a unit one day on some of the things she touched on in this book. She made me very aware of the power that social media (and the internet in general) holds over us, and I think that there is a lot of value in the idea that we do have the ability to at least educate ourselves on it.

I really enjoyed reading chapter four of this book, which was all about social media. Not only did I learn a lot of things I did not know about brain chemistry, algorithms, etc. but it also prompted me to think about how social media outlets have become and extremely controlling presence in the last several years. I think this chapter alone would be a great addition to any middle/ high school classroom. This information is extremely relevant.

I am very fond of the idea of using this book as a part of a larger research unit/ project. Obviously the general idea of the entire book is very valuable to impressionable young people, but I also think that implementing some of the ideas in this book on the heels of reading it would be a great way to reinforce the risk of misinformation and disinformation. I wish I had been introduced to something like this in middle/ early high school.

So far I am really liking this book. I have seen several people mention this already, but I think it could be a good introduction to non-fiction writing for a student who has not previously enjoyed non-fiction. The writing is very compelling, and the anecdotal elements provide a good break from the informational aspect of the book. This is somewhat how I got into non-fiction with a similar book and it really opened my eyes to how enjoyable it is.

Overall this has been one of my favorite books that we have read so far in this course. There are so many different factors at play in this novel that i think make it a really powerful read for young people. I can see this book being really great as a book club book or on a list of choice reading for high school age. It is relevant and relatable while still maintaining the ability to captivate, as if it were fantasy.

Something else that I really like about this book is how it jumped through time. I usually find that type of writing unnecessarily confusing, but the author wrote the the changes in time really well. I also liked how she would sometimes do timelines at the end of chapter. From a practical standpoint that could be really helpful for inexperienced/ not confident readers as well.

Because the author did such a great job pulling readers into the 50's, I think that this book would be a really easy sell to a high school student. There are so many relevant and relatable experiences discussed, but there is also a separate draw which is that the book is set in a very different time, when navigating the characters personal struggles looked slightly different than it would today.

I really liked this book and one of the things that I found most interesting about it was the exploration of social issues that we struggle with today, in a completely different time period. I think for a lot of people it is hard to contextualize these kinds of issue beyond when our parents or grandparents were born, but this book was able to really put into perspective what it was like to navigate the 50's as LGBTQ+, Asian American, etc.

This book did a great job of striking a balance between fantasy and reality. It was captivating enough to capture the pleasure of a fantasy book, while still making the characters and their experiences relatable. The author does a great job of using fairytales and it allows her to cast a very wide net in terms of potential audience. I think this would be a great book to put in the hands of a lot of different students.

I would be slightly intimidated to teach this novel based on some of the content . I think that I would want to use an introductory text/ short story/ poems in order to approach some of these subjects in the text and feel comfortable facilitating those conversations with my specific class, but I think that this novel also opens doors to those conversations really well (fairytales, format).

This book did a great job of discussing sensitive subjects in a sensitive way. I think that the writing style was also really helpful in this way as well. Although I think that the issues in this book are targeted more so at the high school age group, because of the writing style I think that this could work really well for middle schoolers too.

I really liked the way that this book was written. It was in a more poetic format and the dialogue was in italics. It made this book feel like a really easy read and I think that it would be great for a student who is not that interested in reading. Like the last book we read, I think that this book not being in traditional novel format might be a good way to sell it to a student who is not super into reading.

I thought this book was an excellent compilation of short stories and I think that it would be a great tool for a middle school classroom. I also think that it would be a great resource to pull short stories from for any age. There were several essays in the book that I think could also be used in a high school classroom room, or even read aloud in an elementary setting. This book has the potential to be a great classroom resource!

“Main Street“ was another essay that did a great job tackling sensitive subjects. It seemed that because the main character was trying to work through a lot of grief after losing her mother, she found peace in a friend who was struggling as the only African American family in the town in New Hampshire that they lived in. The author does a great job of capturing their feelings of isolation.

I really enjoyed “The Beans and Rice Chronicles of Isaiah Dunn“. It is common in these essays for the authors to address difficult topics such as sexism, racism, classism, and this story deals with alcoholism in a very sensitive and considerate way. This essay really jumped out at me because alcoholism is recognized and considered through the eyes of a child, who does not fully understand it, but still is forced to navigate his mothers illness.

I have read the first two stories in the book so far and have really enjoyed them. The way that the book is formatted is very appealing to me because I think it could work really well for a student who may not have the attention span, or the interest in a more traditionally formatted novel. I also like that the first two essays have been equally captivating, but also very different in certain ways.

I read an interview from Feb. 2024 with Javier Zamora that said he has never been reunited with Patricia, Carla, and Chino, but that he has also turned down many opportunities to search for them. He doesn't want to force them to relive their trauma and they might remember their stories very differently. I thought that this was very interesting because I was curious if he was ever reunited with them.

I find Javier's relationship with his grandfather to be particularly interesting. He is much closer to his Grandmother and aunts, but his grandfather seems to have stepped into a new role after Javier's parents left him. He stopped drinking, and although he does not often come across as especially kind, it is evident that he loves Javier when they have to separate.

I find it interesting how sheltered Javier describes his life as before he leaves on his trip to the U.S. It seems like the author is making an attempt to emphasize how important it is that he is separated from his parents. While life in El Salvador was not perfect, it appears that Javier was doing okay there. It seems like the author is making a statement on how difficult it is for children to be separated from their parents, specifically.

So far I am really enjoying this memoir. An important detail of the writing style in this book is that the author throws in Spanish punctuation and words sometimes in the novel. I think that this is a reminder that Javier speaks only in Spanish in the beginning parts of the novel.