Tag Archives: Identity

This Is Not Your Typical Coming-of-Age Book

In exploring This Is Not the Jess Show by Anna Carey, I’m going to do something I normally don’t do. I’m going to start with a very brief summary. I’m playing with the structure of the blog a bit, and I really think this post lends itself to lists. So you’ll see a lot of them this week.

Summary: 

It’s 1998, and Jess is a junior in high school. She’s dealing with normal high school things: 

  • A crush on her best friend, Tyler
  • An unwanted date to the Spring Formal
  • Trying to get out of the house even though she’s grounded
Posted in Coming of Age | Tagged as: , , , , , ,

Just Call Out My Name

September 1 marks the start of my 25th year teaching middle school. In two different districts and three different middle schools, highly qualified ceritification, standards, benchmarking, and state testing, one thing has been constant: work family. Each school I’ve been in has focused on creating a work family. Sometimes, the family is more dysfunctional than others, but through it all, we’re there supporting each other. We celebrate the good times, we mourn losses, we hold each other up.

Posted in Coming of Age | Tagged as: , , , , ,

Preparing faces

“Sometimes people think they know you. They know a few facts about you, and they piece you together in a way that makes sense to them. And if you don’t know yourself very well, you might even believe that they are right.”
This Song Will Save Your Life, Leila Sales

Full disclosure: I haven’t read This Song Will Save Your Life. I was merely looking for a quote about YA books, and of course, google gave me quotes from YA books, and a blog post from Barnes and Noble titled “12 YA Quotes that Perfectly Express the Teen Condition.” Now, I don’t know if the quotes do or not. It’s been a really long time since I was a teen. And while the biology of adolescence hasn’t changed, adolescent life today seems far more complicated than it was in the 80s.

Posted in Coming of Age, Mystery/Thriller | Tagged as: , , , , , ,
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