Mount Carmel Book Club will critique literature

    Mount Carmel Academy’s Book Club has been selected as one of 16 in the nation to participate in a program to review pending releases of young adult literature by major publishers.
     For the next two years, the Young Adult Library Services Association will send galleys of up to 250 titles per year for review to Mount Carmel as part of its YALSA Top Ten/YA Galley Project.
     “It’s a tremendous honor,” said library department chair Terri Rousey, who moderates the club with librarian Tracey Couret. “The credit really goes to the kids, though. A big part of our application was a series of reviews written by our students last year. YALSA was really impressed with their work.”
     MCA students Sami Morris, Nicole Bryer, Katherine Beyer, Evelynn Martinson and Erica Lassair – underclassmen at the time – reviewed five different books for the school’s application.
    Each of the students reviewed a different book using a template provided by YALSA. Asked to provide a two- or three-sentence summary of Kathryn Reiss’ “Dreadful Sorry” to make other teens want to read it, Morris, then a sophomore, wrote: “Dreadful Sorry is an exquisite book that takes readers along a winding path of suspense. The main narrator, 17-year-old Molly, is plagued with the same, recurring nightmare of drowning. As her life changes, Molly enters into a complex mystery, and she realizes that her dreams may not be her own – they belong to someone who lived a century before her.”
     Addressing the issue of whether she found anything about Veronica Roth’s “Insurgent” to be disappointing, a book she rated overall as “one of the best I’ve ever read.” Martinson wrote, “The only disappointment was Caleb. I didn’t want to hate him at all throughout the book, but that’s where the story was leading. Caleb was portrayed as a bad character in the end, and I couldn’t really imagine him being that ruthless.”
     Reviewing Suzanne Harper’s “The Juliet Club,” then-sophomore Bryer responded to the most compelling aspect of the book by praising Kate, the book’s protagonist. “I really like that the main character has a unique personality,” wrote Bryer. “She’s witty, argumentative, and really intelligent, so she can stand up to the other really big personalities in the book.”
     For Morris, now a junior, putting her thoughts to paper was a natural extension of a regular routine. “At least once a week, I’d be up in the library discussing the book I’d just finished with Ms. Rousey or Ms. Couret so, in a way, I was already reviewing books. I had just never done so in print.”
     Breyer, now a junior, echoed that sentiment. “I enjoyed the process, although I had no idea how big of a deal it was at the time. I’m really excited that we were selected.”
    Rousey is chomping at the bit to get rolling when the first galleys arrive early in 2013. She has 30 returning club members and hopes to enlist at least 10 new students.
     “Let’s say there’s a student who is an avid reader but is also a varsity athlete with a practice schedule that precludes her formal involvement in the Book Club,” Rousey said. “The great thing about the YALSA program is that it will allow us to recruit that student to help the school fulfill its overall reviewing obligation.”
     Rousey and Couret are passionate about creating a community of readers at Mount Carmel and are using data to track progress.
    “Checkouts of fiction are the surest evidence of reading for pleasure,” Rousey said. “And our checkouts in that category have increased by more than 10 percent in each of the last six years.”
     Book club members will continue to coordinate other activities including the popular “Book of the Month” club discussions that are open to all students and faculty, a banned books display and a poetry month celebration.
    Jay Combe is a teacher at Mount Carmel Academy in New Orleans.