Donalin Bell

This book is fantastic. As a relatively recent former K-12 student who was not always on her "best behavior", I felt seen in a way that brought me to tears at times. The way that Shalaby crafts these four narratives of these children is immaculate and she points out the ills in public education by elucidating the lives of students often kept in the shadows or perceived as the outliers. This book does very well to begin an extremely necessary conversation on how we assess children as bad without looking at the systems into which we are trying to make them fit. Read it once then read it again!