Patina (Track #2)by Jason Reynolds
What I like about Jason Reynolds is his ability to take kids who have been through bad situations and show what it's like in their normal lives--normal, that is, for kids with a secret history they don't like to talk about. I bet kids can really relate to these books. They'll see themselves--maybe they don't have a daddy in prison because he chased his wife and son throught the streets with a gun, maybe they don't have a mother with both legs amputated on account of the sugar--she don't like to say diabetes because it has "die" in it. Can you blame her?
There's a lot of street dialect in here, but I have no trouble understanding it. Maybe that's the difference between a person writing the way people actually talk instead of writing in a made-up, try-to-be-clever home-boy speak, like certain other authors I've tried to read recently.
The only bad thing about listening books with well-done dialect is that I start speaking like them. Remember my experiences with Brit-speak? Now I'm going to start saying things like, "he just trash-talking" or "getting up at the butt-crack of dawn."
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