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Title: interesting to struggling teen readers? puh-leeze!
Review: As a high school English teacher, I wanted to like this book. Sadly, as with many books that have an agenda, this one suffers from the story serving the message. My struggling readers do not relate at all to the main characters. They chose the book, and now they are begging to stop reading it-at chapter 8! Plus, there are paragraphs with 4 or 5 (or more) target words in them. That is way too many new words to be able to figure out what the words mean in context. (See others for the "looking up" problem.) Sorry, but I won't be offering it to other unsuspecting students on the pretext of its being an easy way to learn new vocabulary. I'd rather see someone be given permission to search more compelling pieces of literature that are or could be read in high school for SAT vocabulary and allow that researcher/writer to make up SAT workbooks that complement study of that novel.
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