Finished The Killing Sea in a couple of hours last night. I don't know if it was a good idea to schedule one YA novel a day - just because they're YA doesn't mean there isn't meat to them; the substance of Richard Lewis' novel on the '04 tsunami was downright gritty. I felt tired reading it. I didn't love the book - constant action and not enough internal reflection from the two protags - but it was something I'd like to share with my kids.
YA novels provoke reaction, deserve reflection, and most warrant a thorough review before I share them with my students. This one I put forth with reservation, only because I can see this bunch insightfully discussing Ruslan and Sarah's journey - and Sarah's instantaneous transformation from Supreme Biyatch daughter on vacation in Indonesia to steadfast, intrepid and loving sister with one goal on her mind: the survival of her family - but I can also see them utterly dissolving at the mention of brief nudity, and I don't know how they would react to pages and pages of death and mud-caked corpses. So it's not a read-together but it goes on the classroom shelf - I never keep literature from them or them from literature. We'll see what they discover and what they make of it.
A shortie on YA crossovers. I never thought that about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, did you?
A shortie on YA crossovers. I never thought that about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, did you?
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