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Nancy Keane's | Booktalks -- Quick and Simple | |
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Ogle, Rex. FREE LUNCH New York : Norton Young Readers, 2019. IL 5-8 ISBN: 978-1324003601. 2 booktalks |
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Booktalk #1 Rex Ogle's memoir of middle school is a story of growing up in poverty and trying to survive in a social environment where he feels the constant pressure of food insecurity and lack of stable housing. He spends a lot of time caring for his younger brother, trying to protect him from the violence in their broken, desperate family. Rex watches his parents bicker and abuse each other and him due to the unending stress of poverty. A constant point is his shame when - every day - he has to tell the lunch counter cashiers that he’s on the Free Lunch program. Ogle explains that he wrote his memoir because he doesn't remember seeing books like this when he was growing up, and he didn't know that other people were dealing with the same problems. Winner of the 2020 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award. (Vermont Middle Grade Book Award, 2021) Booktalk #2 Showing up for school with a black eye the first day of 6th grade is not the start of middle school that Rex Ogle planned. But that is what really happened to author Rex Ogle, and he writes about it in his memoir, Free Lunch. At this time in his life, Rex was like many 6th graders: he helped take care of his younger sibling, he loved reading and he hoped to make the football team. Behind the scenes, though, Rex had to deal with his family being evicted from their apartment, violence at home, and having to be in the free lunch program—a very public experience he found mortifying. And that black eye, given to him by his mom’s boyfriend, gets him labeled immediately as a troublemaker by his teachers who have no clue what Rex was dealing with at home. With so much that is unfair going on around him, Rex tells a story of being hungry, dealing with bullies, and poverty but also superhero comics, new friends, and hope. In writing this book, Rex Ogle says that his “…one true hope is that it helps someone know they are not alone…and it’s okay to be poor. It does not define you.”* Read this true school story and then look around your classrooms, knowing that there are untold stories like Rex Ogle’s, all around you. (Amber Peterson, International Community School Evergreen Teen Book Award, 2022) |
| SUBJECTS: Children -- United States -- Biography. Poor -- United States -- Biography. Middle schools -- United States. Ogle, Rex . |
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