VVMBookBlog

Our school district participates in a book preview program where publishers send our district copies of the newest books they have published. We pick out titles that would be good for our school, read them and then write up a review giving our opinion of the book and how our students would like it. Some teachers have done some reviews and we have also asked some students from time to time.

One of these preview books was Bang! by Sharon Flake, but it was a tough book with some tough issues to read about. Mann and his family live in an area of town with lots of random, and not so random, shootings–killings, and his family is affected directly by this situation when his younger brother, Jason, is shot and killed while playing on their front porch.

Mann has enough problems dealing with Jason’s death and his own guilt about whether he could have saved him. But then Mann has to deal with his father’s reaction to the shooting. His father says he won’t lose another son and reacts by deciding that he needs to toughen Mann up to the problems of the street–teach him to be a man! But the way Mann’s father does this is almost too much to take! He wants to go back to his African roots where young boys would be sent out into the wilderness to learn how to survive. The problem is that Mann’s “wilderness” are the dangerous streets of his city and the challenges to his survival are huge.

I can’t say I enjoyed reading this book but I had to stick with it to see how it ended. I do prefer another book by this author, The Skin I’m In, but if you want to see how some middle school age people have to live every day, try Bang!, now in our media center.