Some Girls Are, by Courtney Summers

Emotional, provocative, intense. Every kid should read this book. I cried nearly the whole way through as I relived my own feelings of being bullied in school. But what I experienced at the hands if the "mean girls" was nothing like the hardships that Summers describes in Some Girls Are. I cringe when I think about my formative years and worry about having to console my own child from similar mistreatment.  Kids can be cruel. My mother used to say that. It was meant to comfort, but never really was able to take the sting away. I think every single person can still call up, with vivid accuracy, the intense feelings of humiliation and pain that they experienced at the hands of a bully. There are few other experiences in life that provide such a common denominator between such vastly different people as being bullied does. Summers demonstrates so well what happens when the bully becomes the bullied and how tangled the web of bullying actually is. No one seems to walk away unscathed and there really is no winner, everyone is a victim of sorts. Read this book. Get your kids to read this book. In today's world, a world where kids are bringing guns to school to shoot other kids, where kids are commuting suicide because they cannot escape from the torment of other kids, and where every single kid knows the pain of feeling like they don't fit in, we must take steps to convince this generation of kids to stop the bullying.  Summers has done a phenomenal job of portraying what it is like to be a kid facing these circumstances. I cannot think of one negative thing to say about this book other than the fact that it shames us all that this fictional story is being played out daily in schools across the country.