Although he seems to be a child of privilege, 16-year-old Alex Riley has lost his way. Friendless at school and constantly fighting with his single mother, a rising star in Albany politics, Alex hears from his therapist (a man of…
Category: Out of the Mainstream: Gender, Ethnicity, and Disability
Pale
Jed and his friends hate the Pales, people who at the moment after death have been given something called the Lazarus Serum. The potion keeps them animated, but like vampires and zombies, they are no longer technically living. They have…
Guest Blogger Kirstin Cronn-Mills, author of Beautiful Music for Ugly Children
Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, a YA novel with a transgendered protagonist, is being published this October by Flux. (You can read my review here.) I asked the author, Kirstin Cronn-Mills, to guest blog about some of the issues the…
The Many Facets of Bullying: A Review of Cornered
Last December I reviewed A.S. King’s excellent young adult novel Everybody Sees the Ants for my local newspaper and interviewed the author on the novel’s central theme of bullying. Since then, several more books have come out on the subject,…
No Name Baby by Nancy Bo Flood
No-Name Baby by Nancy Bo Flood Published by Namelos, 2011. Warning: This review contains some spoilers. Of all the tough subjects tackled by authors we have reviewed on The Pirate Tree, our own Nancy Bo Flood’s newest novel,…
Beautiful Music for Ugly Children
I came to transgender awareness a bit late in life. I always wondered if the real issues surrounding gender identification were basically a problem with societal standards for what it meant to be a man or what it meant to…
Focus on the Disability Experience: A Review of Wonder
This weekend I’m headed to Montpelier, Vermont for my final residency and graduation from the Vermont College of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults. One of my MFA requirements is to deliver a lecture on an…
The Upstanders Award Goes to Ghetto Cowboy!
This past weekend, the Fifth Annual Horace Mann Upstanders Book Award was given to G. (Greg) Neri for his middle grade novel Ghetto Cowboy. The ceremony took place at the Wildwood Elementary School in Los Angeles, and along with Neri…
Undun-a novel set to music
The Roots are one of the most creative and socially conscious hip-hop bands today. Every album they release is a work of art, both musically and with lyrics that balance a social message with artistry. With the release of their…
Ellen Levine: A Tribute
Last summer I reviewed the young adult novel In Trouble by Ellen Levine, about two teenage girls in the 1950s who find themselves pregnant and make different decisions about whether to undergo what was then an illegal and dangerous abortion.…