Breakout

Nora and her friends are getting ready for summer break and working on an assignment to contribute to the Wolf Creek time capsule.  Nora, the budding reporter is excited.  She is documenting life in her town for the future.  Her best friend, Lizzie, isn't so excited.  She would rather make people laugh than do homework during the summer.

Wolf Creek is also home to a federal maximum security prison.  When two inmates escape, everyone's plans are put on hold, and anxiety is running high.  There are roadblocks and canceled plans as everything is put on hold waiting for the good guys to catch the bad guys.

Elidee isn't really sure who the good guys really are.  She just moved to Wolf Creek, two weeks before the end of the school year, and she's seen polic violence back home in New York.  She and her mom moved to Wolf Creek to be closer to her brother who is an inmate at the prison.  He's done bad things, but is he a bad guy?

There aren't many other black people in the town.  In fact there's only one other black kid in the middle school, and Eidee has a hard time fitting in.  Eventually, Nora and Lizzie win her over, but the more time they spend together, the more Nora starts to realize her friendly safe town isn't as friendly and safe as she thought it was.

Kate Messner's new novel is told using various formats to document the events of the story:  letters for the time capsule, text messages, news reports, etc.  This gives the story a sense of immediacy and keeps the pace moving.  Elidee loves poetry, and many of her entries are in the form of poems inspires by the work of others like Jacqueline Woodson and Lin-Manuel Miranda.  This is a great book for middle school because that is a time of questioning and becoming.  Readers will begin to analyze their own racial biases and develop compassion for those who are different in some way.  I like Elidee's sentiment at the end of the book that if you don't mean to welcome everyone, then you don't mean welcome at all.  Highly recommended.