‘The 57 Bus’–A book you should read

The book “The 57 Bus” by Dashka Slater narrated a true story with an agender boy, Sasha, and Richard, a black boy who lived in a poor environment in Oakland in 2013. It happened when Richard set fire on Sasha’s skirt and made a massive burn. The book explored Sasha’s life as an agender and the implicit bias and difficulties they faced. Meanwhile, living in the more dangerous and poorer environment where most murders happened was the only choice for this black boy, Richard. It explored justices, forgiveness, and discriminations and compatibility toward LGBTQ. One theme of this book is to accept and welcome to LGBTQ since they were facing discriminations from the society.

Three reasons you should read this book are 1) this book deep dived into some big problems hidden in the society like sexualism, classism, and racialism that happened in this realistic event. 2) the author narrated the story with flashbacks and described dramatically that attracted the readers keep reading and figure out. 3) in the last part of the book especially, the book gave lots of information for example, introducing Richard’s court process as facts that also provide us different knowledge.

Something I learnt from this unit is to focus on parts that didn’t understand well and reread to connect different parts together. It’s more useful than reading the crucial parts again because it’ll fill the blanks that I didn’t notice. Also, understanding the central ideas and themes is easier to figure out what does the author wanted to talk about.