LitPick Review
In Count Me In, there is a girl named Karina. Her Grandpa comes to live with them and decides to work as a tutor for Karina´s school. He ends up tutoring a boy named Chris who treated Karina badly in earlier years, but Chris and Karina both realize that the other may not be so bad after all and they begin to become friends. Then, when they are walking home with Karina´s grandpa one day, her grandpa is attacked because he and Karina are not white. Karina´s grandpa is put in the hospital, and a lot of people are really supportive. While they get some hate, they are overwhelmingly shown a lot of love and support.
Opinion:
I enjoyed this book. It has an important message about racism and how it hurts people. For example, the main characters are attacked because they are not white, and it really shows in the book how that is not okay. The characters receive a lot of support, which is great and shows how many good people who care about others there are in the world. But they also get some hate and negative feedback, which shows that just because there are good, kind people in the world, there are also people who think they are better than someone else because of their skin color. This book was a really good and honest view of that, and the author is someone who has probably experienced that kind of hate. There was also a theme of forgiveness under all of that. The boy Karina´s grandpa tutors, Chris, had been a bully to her a year or two ago, but he feels really bad and apologizes, and while at first Karina wants to hate him, she ends up forgiving him and they become friends. Overall, I think this is a really good book with important themes, and I would definitely recommend it.
