Touching Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelsen

So I have decided to take a break from fantasy and romance novels for a while. My brain seems to have absorbed too much of that lately that I find I no longer really enjoy what I read. It all blurs together. So to get myself out of this anti-reading block, I want to move into more school literature and even historical books. There are so many books out there that I missed out on in highschool that I would like to read them.

So the first one was Touching Spirit Bear. My husband read this with his 7th or 8th grade English class and really enjoyed it. Pretty much you follow a young, troubled, 15-year-old on the road to jail. After beating a kid up senseless, causing mental and physical trauma, Cole is in a detention center getting ready to go to trial as an adult. An officer takes special interest in him and gets him to apply for Native American Circle Justice, where he is banished on year on a secluded island in Alaska. Within the first couple days Cole is mauled by a bear and almost dies, almost losing his chance to not go to jail. Luckily he has had a change of heart and is allowed to go back to the island to face his own fears and learn how to help the kid he beat up.

This is definately a good book for students to read since they have an opportunity to understand others who are in similar situations as well as those who are victims of these people. You see how anger, mistrust, and others, especially family, can affect someone. I found it frustrating at first to see how dumb and selfish Cole could be. The first day he's on the island, he burns the shelter built for him and all his provisions because he is angry at everyone. Come on, you have to last a year and you burn everything that is given to you. It was then sad to see after Cole is mauled that they do not trust him and immediately want to send him to jail with no second opportunity. It is hard to trust someone who has manipulated the system and lied for so long. Kind of like the boy who cried wolf story. We could see the Cole had changed and this time really wanted redemption, but no one else could see that. There is so much mistrust and even anger, and prejudice in everything that goes on. There are a few people in the cirlce that do not know Cole, but represent the community and they immediately start off by saying he needs to go to jail in order to protect society and their own children. Fear causes a lot of damage.