Invisible Son

 

From the Publisher:

Life can change in an instant.
When you’re wrongfully accused of a crime.
When a virus shuts everything down.
When the girl you love moves on.

Andre Jackson is determined to reclaim his identity. But returning from juvie doesn’t feel like coming home. His Portland, Oregon, neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying, and COVID-19 shuts down school before he can return. And Andre’s suspicions about his arrest for a crime he didn’t commit even taint his friendships. It’s as if his whole life has been erased.

The one thing Andre is counting on is his relationship with the Whitaker kids—especially his longtime crush, Sierra. But Sierra’s brother Eric is missing, and the facts don’t add up as their adoptive parents fight to keep up the act that their racially diverse family is picture-perfect. If Andre can find Eric, he just might uncover the truth about his own arrest. But in a world where power is held by a few and Andre is nearly invisible, searching for the truth is a dangerous game.

My Thoughts:

In March 2020, when the moon tilted and society and education as we knew it shut down like large stadium lights, what burned brightest in the darkness was what Ladson-Billings, (2021) identifies as residual effects of the four pandemics: the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic of systemic racism, the economic crisis, and the climate crisis. These four pandemics just made obvious those deep disparities in our own community and in our systems of education. Previously, as a social justice educator, I firmly believed that education would save us. What these pandemics clearly showed through our leaders who made decisions based on misinformation and arrogant privilege was that education did not have the power to save us. I was so used to working within a dirty fish tank that I did not realize that the water was dirty. 

Reading Kim Johnsonʻs novel is like being put back in the midst of the oncoming pandemic from the point of view of an African American teen wrongly accused of a crime, and put on house arrest just as the world, and Oregon, starts to shut down. From his perspective, we also see the BLM movement as it unfolded in Portland with the Proud Boy stirring up trouble in a peaceful demonstration.  In hindsight, those of us that lived through these times and watched it unfolded daily from our television sets, can see this from a more personal perspective than our own. In addition, if we are reading this, we have survived, All of us know of family and friends who did not make it to this point.  I have been to a COVID wedding viz Zoom. I know some of my students went through trauma during this time, moved into shelters to get away from abuse, even got ill along with family members and lost family members. I too lost a family member to COVID. I have participated in a virtual graduation, a drive by graduation, a "family bubble" graduation. I have taught on Zoom, observed my student teachers teaching to black screens via Zoom, sat with my preschool aged grandson during Zoom class, taught behind a line in a social distance classroom with a mask while the rest of the students were on Zoom (here or there hybrid). This book does not talk about all of these, but that is what this book brought back for me. 

It is interesting that for our middle grade students, this is already historical fiction when for the adults this feels like yesterday. 

Similar to Johnsonʻs This is My America where there are many smaller storylines and social injustice subplots happening, this too is complex and undefinable in just one or two words or hashtags. This is a story about Andreʻs experience, but it is also a budding love story between Andre and the girl next door, Sierra. In addition, this is a mystery around what happened to Eric, Sierra's brother and the one who may have framed Andre.  It is a "from the ground" view of the Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, Oregon. It is a story about the power of social media to warn and rally. It is a story about a family dealing with the racial side of the COVID 19 virus and its consequence on small business owners, essential workers and the black, Hispanic (and Indigenous) families who have paid a higher price in this pandemic.  It is about Andre trying to find justice for himself. 

When the Black Lives Matter movement was happening in Portland, my youngest son was graduating from Reed College and his girlfriend was working at the Doc Marten in Portland. They are both asian and native Hawaiian. They both are about six feet and fair.  She told us that she quit because one of the white "protestors" came in, saw her name tag (she has a Hawaiian name), and said what are you? What kind of name is that? This kind of arrogant privilege of blatantly searching for otherness was more than she wanted to deal with in a multiple pandemic environment. Reading this book helped me to understand her experience better even if it was a little different. Perhaps an Asian YA author will tackle the China virus backlash from a YA point of view

Suggestions for Curriculum and Classroom Use:

Thematic currents:

• Racism
• Sexual harassment
• Child Abuse
• Violence
• Stereotyping
• Illness, Death
• Trauma

Activity:

Anticipation Guide: never start a book by starting to read the book or even worse, having students read the book on their own in a cold reading. You want students to think about key concepts before they read in order to provide a tangible purpose for reading, and perhaps a way to bring their own experiences into the transaction of reading and meaning making. How it works:

1. Create a few (3-5) short questions or statements related to the text, using true/false, yes/no, or agree/disagree formats. The best questions pose big, open-ended issues, rather than previewing micro-details from the text. 

2. Questions posed should not have a single correct answer. Instead try to activate prior knowledge, beliefs, and ideas. If you have time, they can discuss their answers with a partner before you call the class back to make some consensus predictions or bring up a core disagreement amongst the pairs. At the end of the book, they can go back to their original anticipation guide responses. 

3. Example questions: School administrators and police target students that are colored and poor. (Agree/disagree); Many white Americans have power and privilege to operate above the law; The COVID 19 pandemic made Americaʻs inequality worse. 

Audio-assisted Re-Reading: The audio book of this novel, narrated by Kim Johnson (the author), and Guy Lockard is expertly done and will help students to build fluency skills and prosody from these narrators. If this book is very difficult for struggling readers, even with assistance, they can be given the audio book. However, for others, the audiobook can be a way to enhance their understanding and build meaning making by reading a chapter the first time (in whatever way you want to do it, but please, not popcorn or round robin reading that is not stopped by think aloud from an expert reader like the teacher) and then having students "re read" with the audiobook. You can ask leveled questions that go beyond mere comprehension to motive, characterization, tone, etc.

Publication Information:

Author: Kim Johnson

Publisher: Ember (May 14, 2024)

Paperback: 432 pages

ISBN-13: 978-0593482131 

Grade level: 9-12