The Freedom Writers Diary by The Freedom Writers with Erin Gruwell

This book is basically a compiled diary of the journal entries of 150 inner city students over the course of 4 years of inner city high school english class with their teacher, Erin Gruwell. The entries talk about the lives of these teenagers, such as dealing with drive by shootings, drugs, gangs, abusive parents, and the list goes on. The entries also help tell the story of how they grew over the 4 years and the different events and accomplishments they made, both group and individual.

Overall it tells a story of learning tolerance in a very intolerant culture. It does a pretty good job of this. It's very choppy though, since the whole thing is journal entries by many different students. You don't get a very smooth telling of the current events that happen through the book. But it is amazing to read how this one teacher was able to motivate so much change in so many students.

This was our book club book for this month, but I was only able to finish half of the book before the meeting. There were only two others who had actually finished the book, and one who had read about 5 pages. No one else had read it. So our discussion about the book itself was rather brief, however it did lead into many other interesting topics. We discussed education, writing, family issues, and much more. As for the book though, no one was very impressed by it, although they generally thought it could have been a lot better (i.e. it had a good premise) if it had been written or organized differently.