I read Nuking Alaska today while giving a final exam — it’s quite good. Very upsetting, as you might imagine, being all about how the process of testing nuclear weapons in Alaska happened against the wishes of, and indifferent to the potential harms to, the inhabitants (both human and animal), facilitated by brazen lies and obfuscations by people in power. The book jumps around a bit chronicling all this mendacity, which gets a little confusing, but nonetheless, the general impression it leaves is very clear. It’s actually perfectly encapsulated by a moment when schoolchildren in Anchorage are assembled outside when the first test is supposed to take place — what makes the occasion so momentous is not what happens when the bombs are detonated, but rather, the profound disillusionment with adults that results, the grim epiphany that the grown-ups don’t actually know things the way you need them to. This would be a great book to give to a high school history class, though I guess it would probably make them even more disaffected…
Unretouchable, meanwhile, is a book about social media and beauty that is clearly aimed at a YA readership, but turns out to be a lot more nuanced and interesting than you’d expect. I read it in August and decided to add it to my syllabus, and it was a mixed success. The discussions ended up being pretty good — students raised all kinds of cool questions about whether the artwork was exactly suited to the book or totally contradicted its aims, and where the boundaries are between random digression and meaningful sideplot, and when mentioning that a character is trans comes across as gimmicky or tokenistic rather than being an organic part of the story (because the consensus was that it was NOT tokenistic here, and we wondered what made it work so well). Still, I don’t know that I’ll include it next time (I’d rather find something else that’s more actively joyous). However, I think it would be a great gift for the teenagers in your life!
Kasia Reads 