The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater - OPTIONAL

Slater, Dashka The 57 Bus, 305 pages, NON-FICTION Farrar Straus Giroux (Macmillan), 2017. $18.

Language: R (11 swears 12 ‘f’); Mature Content: PG; Violence: PG-13 (details of physical assault)

HS - OPTIONAL 

AUDIENCE APPEAL: HIGH

Sasha and Richard go to different high schools in Sacramento, but one day, as they were both riding home on the 57 Bus, 16-year-old Richard was messing around with his friends who may have goaded him into setting fire to sleeping Sasha’s skirt.  Born male, Sasha identifies as agender (doesn’t identify as any gender), during questioning Richard tells the police he is homophobic which immediately turns the assault into a hate crime.  Sasha is badly burned and spends a long time in the hospital, but Richard may be tried as an adult, and spend years in adult prison.

This narrative non-fiction tells the background of both Richard and Sasha, their family and friends, the day of the attack and the consequences of the assault - of both the victim and the perpetrator. There is a lot of information educating the reader about the court system, the language and terms of gender, sexuality and romance, social justice, restorative justice, and juvenile vs. adult prison.  This book reads like a novel, but is very informative as well.  Includes a timeline of Gender Neutrality milestones, and some statistics of Juvenile Incarceration.

Lisa Librarian