Big City Cool: Short Stories about Urban Youth

Big City Cool: Short Stories about Urban Youth Edited by M. Jerry and Helen S. Weiss Short Stories ISBN 0-89255-278-6 Persea Books, 2002, 192 pp. $8.95

This collection provides 14 reader-friendly stories that address not only concerns about being cool, but many serious issues with which adolescents grapple. The book includes stories by award winning authors including Walter Dean Myers, Amy Tan, John H. Ritter, and Judith Ortiz Cofer. Michael Rosovsky's "Freezer Burn" is about a boy and his father as they come to grips with their mother's and wife's death from ovarian cancer. Sharon Dennis Wyeth recalls her own experiences with racial stereotyping as a mixed race child when she writes about her family's attempt to buy real estate in "'White' Real Estate." Amy Tan contributes an excerpt from The Joy Luck Club that portrays the pressure to succeed that is placed on children of immigrants. Joseph Geha places his story within the context of the September 11th tragedies. In John H. Ritter's "Old School/Fu Char School," a boy risks his reputation to befriend a strange girl, and plays his trumpet to save her life.

Like classic short stories, the ones in this contemporary collection quickly engage the reader. Like the other short story collections by M. Jerry and Helen Weiss, From Our Experience to Another, and Lost and Found, they provide fine literature for independent or classroom reading.

Lisa Winkler

South Orange, New Jersey

Copyright Assembly on Literature for Adolescents -- National Council of Teachers of English Fall 2002
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved