The Long Game by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Long Game by Jennifer Lynn Barnes is a mystery story featuring privileged high school students – think of it perhaps as an upper class Veronica Mars meets West Wing. Although this title could technically be read as a stand-alone, there are enough references to previous events that I would recommend reading Barnes’ The Fixer first, The Long Game next, and then keeping a lookout for others in this exciting series.  Don’t take just my word for it, though; check out the positive comments from students on GoodReads and elsewhere.

In The Long Game, main character Tess promises to help win a student council election for classmate, Emilia.  Tess and her friends, Asher, Vivvie and Henry, are forced to deal with compromising pictures, a murder, and kidnapping by a fanatical group. Meanwhile, adults are coping with an attempted assassination event and resulting national security concerns. There is plenty of teenage angst and some gratuitous violence in this fast-paced story for students who like political intrigue and thrillers.

Barnes is also the author of The Naturals (start to another series) which was chosen by a student reading panel as a nominee for this year’s Abraham Lincoln High School Book Award list in Illinois.

Witness to the Revolution by Clara Bingham

Witness to the Revolution by Clara Bingham is full of first person accounts and primary source material about the school year from August 1969 to September 1970.  As Bingham explains, "the core of this book comes from 100 interviews I conducted between 2012 and 2015 with members of the Vietnam antiwar movement …. [Witness to the Revolution is the result of] editing tens of thousands of pages of transcripts and shaping them into a tightly woven chronological narrative." 

Bingham, a former Newsweek White House Correspondent, includes chapters on a variety of relevant topics like the Draft, Madison (WI), Ellsberg, My Lai and Kent State.  Her interviews include easily recognizable names (e.g., Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Julius Lester), less known student activists and local police officers. I have been working with Modern America Social Studies classes on projects about key events in the sixties and early seventies so I was familiar with actions leading up to and occurring during this time, but I still found the stories in Witness to the Revolution to be fascinating. They added a personal note and details of which I was often unaware.  

By definition the majority of interviews were conducted with people on one side of the debate about Vietnam. Bingham acknowledges that Witness to the Revolution “is a selective history” covering a snapshot and would likely agree on the importance for our students of weighing and balancing perspectives since she “leaves readers to draw their own conclusions.” I know that our students will find this text to be a valuable source of information about civil disobedience, the people involved and the times themselves.  Witness to the Revolution received a starred review from Kirkus and we will have it on our shelves next fall.