Bifocal

This is a great book for younger readers. It will be interesting to see how much it registers with today's youth.

I thought that this would be an interesting book to read since it is the same story told from the viewpoint of two different teenagers with their parts written by two different award-winning authors. The two narrators are Jay, an all-American white football player, and Haroon, an Afghani-American kid who is on the school's knowledge quiz team. Without even reading a summary of the book, it's easy to figure out that the book is going to be a story about racial prejudices that will end with some sort of understanding between two culturally and religiously different people.The dialog between the characters was very convincing. It took me back to my high school years when what people did and said are so important but often so petty. The cafeteria and school yard are full of various cliques of people who isolate themselves from others that are different from them. Specifically, in this novel, the place in the schoolyard where the Muslim students hang out is called "Brown Town". There's, of course, the jock who thinks he's so cool making up degrading names and jokes for people in the other groups. And, of course, there are the kids that go along with him because they don't feel like they have a choice.There were some interesting, adventurous parts in this novel like when the football players all run up to the roof during a lockdown and when they run around town decorating people's lawns and houses with toilet paper, eggs, and vegetables. However, there were also some parts of the book that fell short of my expectations. For example, there was an episode that happened in class with a character named Hadi who seemed to come out of nowhere and supposedly did something that the teacher was going to contact the police about. Unfortunately, even though I read the preceding pages multiple times, I wasn't clear about what happened. We also never learn what becomes of the terrorist who is picked up by the police at the beginning of the story beyond the fact that he went to jail. His character just sort of disappears halfway through the story. Also, Haroon himself is a weaker character than I would have liked to have seen in this book. It would have been nice to have learned more about his culture in order for young American readers to have a better understanding of a culture that they often misunderstand. In the end, as easily predicted, Jay and Haroon become friends, but there's really no connection between them before that would bond them together. The resolution of the book is very weak. Nearly everything is resolved almost magically as the story ends and the story just sort of fizzles out.Despite its weaknesses, I think this would be a good book to make students think about the personal side of learning to understand people from other cultures. It's a good source for making students think about what they say and do to others who are different than them. Unfortunately, the teens that should read this book and learn from it are probably not the teens who are going to pick it up to read it unless a teacher forces it upon the entire class.

The problem with many novels about controversial issues is that they end up preaching, using characters as protest signs instead of real dimensional people. This is especially true in young adult novels.BIFOCAL certainly doesn't suffer from that. If it preaches, it preaches against racism and intolerance, and it doesn't absolve any group from guilt. One of the high school jocks, Steve, jokes, "How can I be a racist? I'm black." (Are you listening, Al Sharpton?) The true racist characters are dealt with in a satisfying way.The plot centers around an Islamic student being arrested at school and the ripple effect it has on the community and high school. One of the football players, Jay (who comes off as a typical guy but never, ever a dumb jock), finds his destiny being intertwined with the quiet, shy Haroon, a "Reach For The Top" competitor whose athletic sister constantly pushes him to be better, in everything. When anti-Muslim incidents mount at school, which as Jay points out is already divided by social class, race and interests (his sociological detailing of the cafeteria social structure reminds one of the cafeteria scene in "Disturbing Behavior"), both Haroon and Jay must confront disturbing realities about their world. Who says high school isn't real life? Not the authors, whose backgrounds in education are evident in their understanding of children, as well as parents and teachers (the adults never come off as idiots, but human beings with their own thoughts and reactions to the events).BIFOCAL tries to address the War on Terror in a balanced way, pointing out the downside of vigilance against Muslims as well as the "pain and emptiness," as one teacher puts it, of the Islamofascist message. Although a Sunday sermon on answering evil with good (echoing the late, great Pope John Paul II) and Haroon's musings ("Does terrorizing others really make our own terror go away?"), as well as the high school football coach using military language talking to the team, seem to indicate that the authors want us all to be more tolerant and peaceful as a society (we want that too), they never sound like a strident ideologue soundbyte. The book is called BIFOCAL for a reason.As compelling as Haroon and Jay are, I was delighted with the supporting charatcers--Steve, Haroon's friend Julian, even the arrogant football captain Kevin, and especially Haroon's twin sister Zana, who blows to bits the stereotypes of Muslim women (Haroon's mother helps in this--there's a wonderful mother-daughter conflict). I highly recommend this book for teens and adults.