ridiculous/hilarious/terrible/cool: a year in an american high school [Hardcover]

Elisha Cooper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2008

Elisha Cooper spent a year hanging out at a Chicago high school— listening, watching, questioning, and sketching the students. He followed eight kids in particular, mostly seniors, through their entire year, and by telling their specific stories—of classes, extra-curriculars, friends, romances, and family—he gives us a more general picture of what it’s like to be a high school student today. Part documentary, part soap opera, part sketchbook, this is an eye-opening, thoroughly entertaining account—one that will appeal equally to readers who are looking forward to high school and those who are looking back.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Grade 9 Up-This book recounts the lives of eight students as they finish up their senior year at an alternative high school in Chicago. Readers see brief snippets of their lives, including their friendships and family dramas, struggles for passing grades, and the day-to-day things they do to stay on their individual college paths. While the book does cover the entire year and all of the standard events, it ends up trying to do too much and the result is a surface look at some forgettable types. The book is told from the third-person omniscient point of view, which is awkward, because instead of finding out about the teens, readers are either told things straight out or, even more annoyingly, the students have internal conversations with themselves. All of them fit some sort of label: the jock, the slacker, the class president, etc., although one of them, a Muslim, stands out as somewhat distinctive. Events like teen pregnancy feel glossed over as they are mentioned in passing. Because the book jumps around so much, with each individual receiving at most a paragraph before moving on to the next, it is difficult to get involved in any of these students' lives or to distinguish them from one another.—Jessie Spalding, Queen Creek Branch Library, AZ
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From Booklist

The tightly wound lives of high-school high achievers have had many chroniclers, such as Alexandra Robbins, who spent time at a prestigious Ivy League feeder school and turned her experiences into a nonfiction book for adults, The Overachievers (2006). In his second work of longer nonfiction (following Crawling, 2006, a parenting memoir for adults), Cooper aims his own documentary-style book about high school at an expert audience: students themselves. There are a couple of big differences here from adult treatments of the subject, many of which dwell on the stresses of getting into college. First, while Cooper’s subject is set in a big-deal Chicago magnet high school (where kids can take classes in Zulu and hip authors like Jonathan Safran Foer come to speak), the eight ethnically diverse students he profiles, most of whom are seniors, don’t seem like academic grinds. Sure, the anticipation about where they’ll end up (Harvard or Penn? Indiana for ballet or NYU for modern dance?) lends the book most of its forward drive. But the variety in the students’ ambitions and personalities helps Cooper’s treatment seem like an authentic cross section of student life, not a vehicle for a particular agenda—although some readers may find the teens scattered too purposefully across the ethnic map. (The inclusion of two starkly contrasting African American students, a Harvard aspirant and a pot dealer verging on flunking out, seems conspicuously pointed.) Also different from many adult titles is the author’s loose, lyrical approach. Best known as the illustrator of picture books such as A Good Night Walk (2006), Cooper turns out to be an extremely graceful wordsmith, with a strong visual sense (the school “sits in an athletic field like a block of butter on a green plate”) and a fluidity that matches the tiny, quick-fire sketches of students that dot the pages. Sewing together visits with the main subjects over the course of the academic year, Cooper’s anonymous, omniscient narrator drifts freely along intersecting narrative paths, including funny vignettes set in the school’s see-and-be-seen atrium, overheard conversations, and descriptions of the larger Chicago landscape. Far from the straightforward reportage that most readers expect of journalistic writing, the impressionistic quality of Cooper’s style lends the book an aura of fiction. For that reason, some readers may not realize they’re dealing with nonfiction until they reach the closing thank-you to the students for “letting Cooper ask questions about their lives even as they unfolded.” It’s clear that he was able to win the students’ trust to an impressive degree, but the erratic appearance of quoted material, along with numerous passages that presume knowledge of the students’ inner lives, leaves the relationship between the author’s research and the finished work a bit ambiguous. More information about how the book came to be would have been both interesting and valuable: Are the quotes verbatim or reconstructed from notes? Does the author himself consider this nonfiction or an interpretative creation? Teen readers accustomed to the finessed nonfiction narratives of reality television aren’t likely to be bothered by questions about authenticity; a larger trouble spot may be the unusually distanced tone of the narrative. In a novel, it’s easy for readers to forget that there’s someone scribbling behind the scenes. That’s not the case here. Cooper’s voice is distinctly present, hovering somewhere above the high-school fray, and its sometimes slyly knowing tone (“After all the talk surrounding prom . . . the most exciting part of prom was the talk”) may leave some YAs vaguely resenting the attempt of an observer to summarize their lives. Still, there are plenty of high-school students (especially the senioritis stricken) who will wholly identify with Cooper’s outsider-looking-in role, and even those who find his approach condescending will be sufficiently drawn by the individual stories to overlook the matter. But just because Cooper is writing for YAs doesn’t mean that nostalgic adults, especially those with kids facing their own high-school years, won’t be keenly interested in this, too; they’ll certainly find Cooper’s poignant, yet ultimately upbeat snapshots more welcoming than many existing exposés of America’s burned-out youth. Grades 7-12. --Jennifer Mattson

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 12 and up
  
• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Dial (March 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803731698
• ISBN-13: 978-0803731691
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,529,784 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Elisha Cooper is the award-winning author of "Beach," which won the 2006 Society of Illustrators Gold Medal. Other picture books include "A Good Night Walk," "Magic Thinks Big," and "Dance!," a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of the Year. His adult books include the memoir "Crawling: A Father's First Year." Elisha Cooper lives with his family in New York City.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fabulous/interesting/relevant/poignant, August 7, 2008

By 

Daphne Uviller (Manhattan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ridiculous/hilarious/terrible/cool: a year in an american high school (Hardcover)

I was riveted by this carte-blanche-access account of real teens in a real school. "American Teen" has nothing on Cooper! I highly recommend this alternately heartbreaking and hopeful story.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Courtesy of Teens Read Too, August 6, 2008

By 

TeensReadToo "Eat. Drink. Read. Be Merrier." (All Over the US & Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ridiculous/hilarious/terrible/cool: a year in an american high school (Hardcover)

Walking through the hallways of Walton Payton High School are a very selectively diverse group of students. Like its location, the students are all from different worlds but come together in one place. Out of the entire school, eight students stand out the most, in more ways than one.

First there is Anais, the dancer. Dancing is obviously her life, spending every day going to dance practice, hoping that one day she will be able to attend Julliard.

Then there is Daniel, the school's class president who is all business when it comes to academics and his future, not one to stand by stereotypes that people have against him because of his race.

Next is Emily, the girl's soccer captain since she was a junior. She doesn't fool around on or off the field.

Maya is the actress, always in every school play. Her acting is the only way she can shake off her little spasms and her OCD-ish routines.

Diana is very proper and polite. And also very smart, although she never shows it. Never talking in class, even though she knows the answers, she keeps to herself, having only one true friend since the other one left.

Aisha is the new girl, transferring from her last school located in Florida. She knows that this is only for a year, since her parents move all the time, so why make friends?

Zef is odd, and he knows it and isn't ashamed of it. Loving the sound of his own music and talking to himself, for some reason students are intrigued and are drawn to him.

And last but not least is Anthony. His comfort zone is located in only one place in the school, the cafeteria.

Some know what they want to accomplish this year, like becoming the best leader the school has ever seen or taking their time to achieve levels that they have never seen before, while others aren't so sure what their outcome will be. One thing they do have in common is college. Whether or not its for them or not and whether or not they will get into the college they so desperately need to escape to.

Inserted details of what goes on during school hours, from who sits where to the appropriate acknowledgements to old friends, gives this non-fiction account an extra sense of reality, which coincides with the lives of eight very different teens. Captivating and unique, Elisha Cooper manages to write a true account that can tell a story so raw and so real.

Reviewed by: Randstostipher "tallnlankyrn" Nguyen

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fast times, May 27, 2008

By 

M. S. Lee - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ridiculous/hilarious/terrible/cool: a year in an american high school (Hardcover)

It's hard for adults to imagine having to survive high school again, and maybe it's hard for high schoolers to imagine what anything beyond might hold, so this book has difficult territory to cover from the outset. How can the author make fresh what we've all been through and often hoped to forget? Fortunately, Cooper's patient observations and painterly eye let us slip in unseen into the chaos. With a point of view that is clearly honest, sometimes stern, and deliciously wry, he manages to pace us through a place that seems to spin at the speed of teen. It's hard not to think of the ordinary as heroes, and therefore vice versa, and it makes this story a wild success. Definitely for your must-read list!