'89 Walls: Politics get Personal

Hey, you! Yes -- YOU! You NEED to read '89 Walls by Katie Pierson!

Seth spends his minimum wage on groceries and fakes happiness to distract his mom from the MS they both know will kill her.

Quinn’s finishing high school on top. But that cynical, liberal guy in her social studies class makes her doubt her old assumptions. Challenging the rules now would antagonize her conservative dad and make her a hypocrite.

Seth and Quinn’s passionate new romance takes them both by surprise, but it’s 1989 and politics suddenly get personal.

• This is a satisfying teen romance novel, set entirely in 1989.
• This is a starting place for teens to ask questions about their own world, their parents, their politics.
• This is a starting place for teens to ask questions about abortion, apartheid, states rights, gun control, welfare, AIDS, foreign policy.
• Actually, let's not limit these questions to teens. This is a starting place for adults, too.
• This is a reason to think, notice, ask, question, begin to find ways to make a difference.
• And did I mention how it's also a satisfying teen romance story?

This story couldn't have happened any other time. All of the politics and issues didn't pull me out of the story, they kept pulling me back into 1989. This setting is as important to the story as the romance.

I hope kids who read this book go ask questions about how the world got from 1989 to 2015. Because looking at the world 25 years ago makes some things now seem more clear and more terrible. The one thing I didn't do (and don't want to do) is to fast forward Seth and Quinn and imagine these characters as 42 years olds living in 2015. No matter how their relationship turns out, I know that in 2015 there is too much heartbreak in this world they care about. I wouldn't wish that on their fictional-selves any more than I would wish it on our real-selves.