Good morning all. Welcome to session two of our book groups. This week, we’re looking at the following pages: Laymon 63-116 / Diaz 63-142 / Talusan 83-149. Overall, the writers are maturing, becoming young adults and going through the rites of passage:

• taking on adult responsibilities like making money and caring for others
• embracing opportunities like going to college or otherwise expanding their minds
• feeling attraction for others and experiencing the pressure to have sex
• leaving home, or watching home around them change
• dealing with adult feelings, ranging from disappointment to jealousy
• rebelling in a variety of ways and encountering the consequences of those rebellion

These are just a few of the ideas bouncing around in the posts you’ve posted for today. By 8:30am I saw blogs from Zeinab and Jasmin (Fairest), from Angel, Leslie, Maria, and Hamza (just in at the wire) (Ordinary Girls), and from Jose, Elijah, and Nayely (Heavy). If your post is up but I didn’t see it, I’ll circle back to it during our freewrite time.

For starters, I’d like anyone who’s not listed above to spend 10-15 minutes freewriting about one of the above rites of passage. Where in the text does the author go through one of the above kinds of experiences? What are the details around it? What is the language they use to describe it? What are the options available to them? What choices do they make? What do they think of it, looking backwards with the benefit of time?