145th Street: Short Stories

Meyers, Walter Dean. 145th Street: Short Stories. New York: Delacorte Press, 2000.

145th Street: Short Stories is a really charming, touching, and relatable series of ten short stories taking place on one block of 145th Street in Harlem. It is a fast and engaging read—I found myself not wanting to put the book down once I got going with stories. Each story interacts at least a little with the others through characters, events, or places, thought they are all certainly independent. Poverty, violence (gang and otherwise), romantic struggles, tragedy, and then some comic relief as well (including the opening story about a man throwing a full-out funeral for himself) make up the themes of the book, with an overall message that bad things and bad luck can be out of your control, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be good parts to life (friends, family, strokes of good luck, humor) as well to help it go down better. There are also several scenes in the book where one can see the tension between Black community members and a mostly White police force. Most of the characters in the novel are young, making them and the situations in which they find themselves to be relatable for middle or high schoolers, if not at least easier to understand (as with some of the gun violence and more serious episodes). Examples of the stories are a story about a high school-er that discovers he’s on a good luck streak, and his quest to use the streak to his advantage to ask the “finest chick in school” to the school dance; or the story of a police call gone awry, where as the (White) police officers search and shoot at what they think is a potential shooter in a building, they cause a tragedy for the mostly Black community, a community supposedly under the police’s protection; and finally, the book ends with a story about Peaches, a girl struggling with her mother remarrying after her father dies.

I would say that this book is definitely teachable, but due to some of the graphic and violent scenes, should be approached with caution in a middle school. The vocabulary and sentence structure, however, are definitely middle school level. It has a really healthy mix of humor and graceful sensitivity to tragic situations, and so if you have the right middle school classroom, it could definitely be an excellent part of a curriculum.