Dear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories (review)

In vignettes that range from letters to retrospective memoirs to poems to fictionalized present-tense tellings in words or comics to impassioned admonitions, seventy children's and YA writers, most of them well known (Rachel Vail, R. L. Stine, Nancy Werlin, Mo Willems) share their collective wisdom on the subject of bullying. Most of the authors were themselves victims, but a range of perspectives is offered, including the stories of people who, to their shame and regret, either participated in bullying or stood idly by while someone else became a target. The attempt to focus on strong survivorhood sometimes undercuts the point by oddly suggesting people are better off for being bullied, but overall there is a forceful admonition that bullying must be stopped and that we all have a clear mandate to check our own bullying tendencies as well as to intervene when we witness acts of bullying. All emphasize the pain victims experience while the bullying is happening, up to and including some suicide attempts and successes, and a few accounts detail how the painful memories can linger into adulthood, even when the perpetrator has long forgotten the torture he or she inflicted. The message that emerges most forcefully is that there is life on the other side of bullying, and that holding out is worth it, no matter how bad things seem. This is a standout for curricular use, as the accounts are short, focused, and varied (though since they're drawn from the authors' own childhoods, they don't touch on cyberbullying); today's students can do the work of updating current bullying scenarios while these authors provide the much-needed long view for discussion.