Sure he’d had the occasional misfire here and there (his YA never really hit the heights and his Mr. Author Christopher Paul Curtis was at the top of his game. Not easily, but when it happens then maybe a lot of other things in her life will start to change as well.īefore we go any further today I would like us to consider the case of The Mighty Miss Malone. Someone who doesn’t need help (are you sure?). Patina, however, can’t afford to synchronize with anyone in her life. Now the trick to any team is to synchronize yourself with the people around you. At least there’s track, though, right? Only now Patina has lost a race and, stranger still, she and her fellow runners are going to be forming relay teams. She lives with her aunt and uncle, helps take care of her younger sister, and attends this hoity toity school that may be good for her future but is death on her friendships. Her dad died when she was pretty young, and her mom nearly died of diabetes after that. The thing is, Patina’s already lost a lot of things in her life. If you knew Patina, this would probably be the first thing you knew about her. Even when they’ve given you absolutely no reason to do so. A companion novel to Ghost, Reynolds’s latest takes a long hard look at what it sometimes takes to trust the people around you.
But having finished the latest Jason Reynolds title in the Track series called Patina, if I could go back in time and hand my younger self one book that fell squarely outside her comfort zone, I’d probably hand her this. When I was a 9-12 year old I went out of my way to avoid works of realistic fiction that could potentially depress me. I often wonder what would have happened if I’d encountered this challenge as a child.
You can read about a character that doesn’t look like your, a topic you don’t know much about, and/or a format you don’t usually pick up. Our current National Ambassador of Young People’s Literature, Gene Luen Yang, put this far more eloquently when he urged people to partake in the Reading Without Walls Challenge.
You cannot be a children’s librarian or an adult children’s book reviewer if you do not constantly remind yourself that you have to read outside your comfort zone on a regular basis.
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