Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
The Worst Years of Your Life
Edited by Mark Jude Poirer
Simon & Schuster, 383 pages, $15 paper
Julie Orringer’s wonderful story “Note to Sixth-Grade Self” is sufficient reason to buy this collection of stories with middle-school protagonists — but the other 19 will also grab even the must sullen, disaffected teenager. With humor, generosity and insight, it is possible — if one looks hard enough, as editor Mark Jude Poirer writes in the introduction — to find “beauty in ugliness.”
