One of the great pleasures of being a book review blogger is getting to know other bloggers, hearing what they’re reading, and sharing notes. I met Maggie Desmond-O’Brien two years ago when she reviewed Gringolandia, and we’ve stayed in touch ever since. Last year when I was putting together a panel for the ALAN workshop on teen book bloggers, I asked Maggie to join. She did, even though she appeared virtually because of health problems. [Read my interview with Maggie, which appeared on the Pirate Tree last month.]
Maggie is devoting her blog, Bibliophilia—Maggie’s Bookshelf, this month to her 2011 “best of” choices, and her first choice, “Best Small Press Book” was one I hadn’t encountered. Published as an e-book original by Florida-based indie Vagabondage Press, Outspoken, by James Vachowski, is a novella—one of those literary forms that’s hard to publish traditionally but that lends itself to e-book publication. On Maggie’s 
recommendation, I bought Outspoken for a dollar and fired up the iPhone.
The much-hyped book by a well-known author and from a major publisher, which I checked out from the local library, sat face-down on my desk attracting dust motes while I flipped my way through Outspoken. My husband peeked in, wondering why I was laughing like a maniac. “The same reason you laugh at The Daily Show,” I told him. “This book is so funny.” This will be the first e-book my husband reads. I promise.
The story takes place in Charleston, South Carolina today and is told through a series of letters. The first ones are outraged letters to the newspaper regarding a heinous act of vandalism on Black Friday, as merchants on posh King Street arrived at their stores only to find the locks glued shut. Along with calls for the arrest of the culprit and laments as to where the country is headed is a letter from the president of a local college fraternity denying responsibility for the prank.
The frat boys are not responsible. The rest of the letters come from the real culprit—a high school senior from the black part of town (Charleston remains a highly segregated city), Abraham L. Jenkins, a subversive genius whose hopes of going to Harvard may be dashed because he has failed P.E. two years in a row. His only hope is to enroll in Junior ROTC to make up the two missing credits. While young Jenkins evades the authorities for his Black Friday attack on materialism, he is also trying to survive in a militaristic culture that ends up teaching him much more about himself than he’d ever imagined. The letters also reveal Jenkins’s difficult circumstances—he lives with his elderly grandmother; his single mother is in prison—and how the support of his grandmother and others in his community have given him the strength to become his own person and to gain the grudging respect of those who have doubted or opposed him.
This novella for teen readers is funny, ironic, and, yes, heartwarming—a quick read that invites rereading and sharing.
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