Following on from Friday’s post, here are 4 posters for Grade 8 / 13 year olds – the G8 protagonists poster, our G8 core collection selection, the same for Year 9 at Tanglin Trust School (thanks Katie Day) and Oberoi International School’s OIS Reads! Middle Grade poster (thanks Sarah Ducharme).
By Nadine Bailey – middle school teacher librarian, currently living and working in Dubai, formerly in Beijing China, Singapore and a bunch of other cities around the world. Passionate about our students seeing themselves and their worlds in literature and developing curiosity and a passion for reading and learning.
The views, opinions, and thoughts expressed in this blog post are solely my own and do not reflect the positions, policies, or opinions of any current or former employer. Any references or examples provided are intended for informational purposes only and should not be construed as endorsements or official statements from any organization I have been associated with.
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 
I absolutely loved Nowhere Better Than Here, by Sarah Guillory. If you don’t mind, Nadine, I’m adding my comments on it:
How are we preparing the kids of today for the sea level rise they will experience in the future? That’s what this book is fantastic for: by immersing middle grade readers in an environment where people are experiencing sea level rise right now.
Usually a young adult book is all about a young person growing up and leaving home. Not this one. It’s all about home leaving her. Over the last twenty years, the state of Louisiana in the United States has lost over 20,000 square miles of land because the land has tumbled into the sea (equivalent to the size of the State of Delaware or Rhode Island). All of this is happening while rarely ‘making the paper.’ Therefore it is apt that this book is the young adult title that the state of Louisiana has chosen to represent itself at the National Book Festival.
I can’t remember the last time I read a book with a working class rural teenage protagonist, but Jillian is perfect as a character for this story. She doesn’t have so many prospects and she knows it. She’s visited all of four states by age 13, and she knows other kids have much bigger horizons or dreams. She has chosen to embed herself deeply into the multi-generational small town that makes up her bayou-oriented community. As she says, ‘nobody wears a tie in Boutain.’
I thought this book displayed beautifully a teenager’s appreciation for the social web that she is a part of and what a loss it would be to give up that community of people who share the same traditions, stories, and experiences. Truly, Jillian is an ‘old soul.’ Because her working class father never comes through for her, the abandonment she feels as her home disappears is a compoundment of loss that already feels way too real. You know there are kids out there experiencing this stuff!
There are two othe books for adults that deal with sea rise that I know of. One, is a Pulitzer Prize finalist called The Rising: Dispatches From the New American Shore, by Elizabeth Rush. The other one is rumored to have scared the bejesus out of Stephen King himself. It’s called The Deluge, by Stephen Markley.
The middle grade novel, Nowhere Better Than Here, by Sarah Guillory is not a terrifying read. But it will expand the imagination of any reader about what sea rise is like currently and what it will be like coming for others in the future. I read it as a grown-up and recommend it to everyone middle grade on up.
Why not prepare our young people for this reality of coastal erosion and sea level rise? Carbon continues to increase in our atmosphere, and the speed with which it is increasing is actually accelerating, proving that sea level rise will all be taking place globally before you know it.
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