The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives (2017)

Slater is a journalist and children’s book author. Choosing to cover this story meant Slater had to decide how to navigate the complex legal, moral, and social aspects of it, including gender, discrimination, racism, the notion of justice, and more. Her decisions about how to structure and present the text represents the complexity of this task; rather than choosing a straightforward narrative, she uses an episodic approach with a variety of types of text. The result is both complicated and simple, inviting the reader into the story and asking them to consider it, not as an isolated incident, but as part of the broader social narrative we all construct together.

Sasha is a junior at a progressive private high school in Oakland, California. Sasha is, by all accounts, an unusually smart and perceptive person, raised in a loving home by progressive, kind, and gentle parents. Sasha has a diagnosis of Asperger’s, which Slater only briefly mentions, and a fascination with language, among many other things. In middle school, Sasha chose that name to replace the one they were given at birth and announced their identification as agender and the preference for pronouns they/their/theirs.