There is a series that has stayed with me through the years, it came at a time when everything in my life was changing. 2002, the world was still healing after the events of the year before, and I just started middle school. While settling into my new role has middle school student, a friend of mine told me about a book series that surrounded the lives of inner city kids from a high school in California called Bluford.
At first I was skeptical about it, it wasn’t about fantasy, or boy wizards or sci-fi wars or horror like I was use to, instead it was about life. It was also the first series I read that had African – American characters who were the sole focus of the series. Animorphs did have multicultural characters, but Bluford was the first that concentrated solely on all African-American characters.
Published by Townsend Press and Co Distributed by Scholastics (because you know, Scholastics ruled our childhood), the series was about the life of Bluford students, their ups and their downs. It followed them as they encountered problems such as coming of age, Teen Pregnancy, Getting into Gangs, Drugs, Domestic Abuse, and Bullying as well as other motifs. It changed the books that I enjoyed, with Bluford, I grew from childish reading to young adult literature and went from there.
Now, 13 years later its still going with 20 books under the Bluford title.For the month of July I will go through all 20 books in the series. 5 books a week, for 4 weeks so keep reading as I take you on a trip to Bluford in this Books From My Youth Special.