Trail of Broken Wings

This blog was started because when I was in the middle school classroom, I filled my room with thousands of books. I tried to do a book talk at least every week and then I had YaYa. YaYa was a girl who devoured books. Who was almost desperate in the need for me to give her a new one. She always read books that took place somewhere else, whether it was in the future, the past or in a faraway land. She never went for the teen realism books like Speak. I started this blog to try and get more books into my memory. To be able to pull books when I came across students like YaYa. 

But middle school is a tricky thing. Students come to us in all states of maturity. Like all students, they come to us with large differences in their experiences, their upbringing. I have never found a book that fits all students. It is why I am against a common reading of a novel unless I have other content and skills I am trying to achieve with the book. I never think that one story will unite them all.

This book is definitely not for tweens. It is not even a young adult book, but someone needs to hear this story and be immersed in it. This story is full of family secrets and lies. It is about the lives of adult daughters and their mother who have come together because their father (and husband) is now in a coma. Even in his silence he is a major character in their lives and his effect spans generations, even to the only grandchild, 15 year-old Gia. YaYa would not have read this. And it would not be my place to suggest it. But someone needs to read this.