Welcome to READ's third issue of the 2009 school year, Coming of Age. This issue explores young people making tough decisions, changing their viewpoints, and growing up. Adolescence is full of choices and changes, and this issue delivers literature that speaks to that very tumultuous time. 
Our Center Stage read-aloud play is Robert Newton Peck's novel A Day No Pigs Would Die. This play tells author's true story of growing up on a farm in Vermont. In READ's adaptation, Robert Peck learns important lessons about family and responsibility.
Our fiction excerpt comes from popular young-adult author Richard Peck. His short story is entitled "I Go Along." Gene is a slacker student whose views on poetry (and girls) change after he takes a chance and decides to go on a field trip with the advanced class.
This issue also contains a special nonfiction feature about a boy who is forced to decide between living with a severely disfiguring birth defect or attempting a risky surgery that might help him achieve a degree of normalcy as he begins high school. The excerpt is from the Pulitzer Prize–winning series of articles by Tom Hallman Jr. titled "The Boy Behind the Mask," originally printed in The Oregonian. The READ staff found this story deeply compelling, and would like to share that the other parts in the "Boy Behind the Mask" newspater series are available online. The tory has also been expanded into a nonfiction book.
Our LSI comes from a poet named Jay Snodgrass. In the poem, "Algebra," the speaker ruminates on his adolescent fears of the apocalpyse as he grew up on an army base in post WWII Japan. This poem come sfrom Snodgrass's collection Monster Zero.
Our Writing feature follows the coming of age theme with interviews from two authors whose books address adolescent issues.
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