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Kent State

This is a text that could easily be incorporated into middle school or high school classroom curriculum. This is a text that could be adapted for a school theater program. This is a text that will stick with you for awhile. Kent State, by Deborah Wiles, is the telling of the four days of protesting from May 1st – 4th on the campus of the university. Various voices share their chronological recollection building up to the deadly shootings by Ohio National Guard troops. But it is the positioning of the text on the page that makes this worthy of its multiple starred reviews. The voices come to the reader in snippets of text, much like a discussion, and are arranged based on likely political affiliation. Student protester voices more left justified, to National Guard troops right justified on the page. There are other voices of citizens caught in the middle that are situated on the page somewhere between the two based on their content. The anger, the frustration, the anxiety, the outrage, the disbelief –it can all be captured by the use of these various voices. The book jacket says, this text show the “human truth” in this tragedy. This text should be in every middle and high school library for its lessons in history, in the craft of writing, and in the depiction of humans reacting crisis.