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Part of what is hard about being a teenager is that it seems like you're alone with your feelings and that no one else has ever worried about, hoped for, or dreaded the same things in the same, painful way. Struggling teens (and parents who can't get their kids to talk to them) will take comfort in these first-person stories from young people. Mary Motley Kalergis (Mother: A Collective Portr... More

Part of what is hard about being a teenager is that it seems like you're alone with your feelings and that no one else has ever worried about, hoped for, or dreaded the same things in the same, painful way. Struggling teens (and parents who can't get their kids to talk to them) will take comfort in these first-person stories from young people. Mary Motley Kalergis (Mother: A Collective Portrait and With This Ring: A Portrait of Marriage) photographed and interviewed 51 young Americans representing a wide spectrum of interests and experiences for this enlightening book. They include a farmer's son and a recent immigrant from Mexico, kids from small towns and the daughter of famous parents. There are poets, baton twirlers, football stars, and skateboarders. Yet, presented by Kalgeris' sympathetic lens and pen, these seemingly dissimilar subjects reveal that there is, perhaps, a universal mood to the years between childhood and maturity: heartbreaking earnestness. Given the opportunity, even the most rebellious of the book's subjects admits he lies awake worrying at night, because he is "getting a little bit scared" about the future. "I want to be as fearlessly honest as I can while I'm alive," another of the interviewees declares.

This book would make a terrific tool for opening communication between adults and young people. As playwright and actor Sam Shepard says in his foreword: "This generation of kids may simply be more honest and courageous than the one I belonged to during my adolescence." Surely this is reason enough to find out what they're thinking. --Maria Dolan

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