Celebrate Teen Read Week Oct. 17-23

KickinLibrarian@evpl — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 16:50:00 GMT

**The Teen Read Week Contest will end Sunday, October 31 at 5pm. Make sure you vote on the Teens' Top Ten in Central's Teen Zone.**

Books with Beat @ EVPL! October 17-23. Stop by the Teen Zone at Central Library during Teen Read Week and check out our Books with Beat! Pick up books and other materials about poetry, music, and more or listen to an audiobook. You can help pick the 2010 Teens’ Top Ten by voting at the display located in the Teen Zone. If you vote, you will be entered to win a Visa giftcard! Stop by today and find a page turner that you can read or listen to, just for the fun of it!

"If you could do it all over again and change something, what would it be?"

myzticrhythmz@evpl — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:23:00 GMT

This is the big question for Jeremy Dance, aka Lil J, in Walter Dean Myers' Dope Sick. Lil J is a 17-year-old on the run, part of a drug deal gone wrong in which an undercover cop's been shot. He finds himself hiding out in an abandoned building in the company of Kelly, a weird vagrant with a television that can show Lil J's past, present, and maybe his future. It's Kelly who asks Lil J the question about what he would change in his life if he could, and much of the book covers Lil J revisiting his downward spiral: a painful home life, drugs, jail time, fathering a child.

This is a fascinating book where a kid from the streets is compelled to stop at a pivotal point in his life and consider that he may actually have options. He wasn't a bad student, has a gift for the rhythm of rap, and seems to care for his son and the child's mother.

Walter Dean Myers has taken a very contemporary, real-life situation and infused it with a bit of mysticism and fantasy. He also leaves the reader with some questions: Who was Kelly?A real, "spooky" guy? A ghost? A drug-induced hallucination? Will Lil J be able to turn his life around?

And by all means, stick around for the ending. It's not what you'd expect.

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Celebrate Teen Read Week Oct. 17-23

"If you could do it all over again and change something, what would it be?"