Focus. Click. Wind

A 17-year-old uses her camera as a tool for political activism during the Vietnam War. Billie Taylor is a white New York City high school student who is inspired by the work of the photojournalists she admires. She's dating Columbia University freshman Dan Geller, her high school's golden boy. Things come to a head when they attend an anti-war protest at Columbia that turns violent. Billie's single mother, shaken both by the chaos of the nation and Billie's father's desertion of the family, gets a job in Toronto, feeling that Canada is a safer option. Billie resents having to move and makes plans to return to New York. But when her mother begins housing draft evaders, this political engagement leads Billie to connect with a group of radical Americans working against the war through whom she finds unexpected opportunities to fight back. The story is slow to get started, meandering through Billie's traumatic childhood memories, Billie and Dan's relationship, and Billie's job waitressing at a strip club before she is presented with graphic, disturbing evidence of the horrors being perpetrated by the U.S. military in Vietnam and the chance to participate in the resistance. Readers may benefit from Lewis' depiction of the day-to-day realities of young Americans and Canadians during the Vietnam War as well as explorations of the importance of protest and considerations of violence perpetrated in the name of a greater good. Valuable historical content weighed down by a slow-moving plot. (source notes, author's note) (Historical fiction. 14-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Slow motion becomes freeze frame. A man in a plaid shirt, blood streaming down his face, is on his knees holding a sobbing woman. Another man frowns as he tucks what's left of a torn shirt into his pants....  A filing cabinet spills a river of paper. Cigarette butts and paper plates are mashed into the carpet. Photos from a war zone. Quietly she focuses, clicks and winds. Exhaustion seeps through her pores. Three days in the trenches of democracy has used up her store of bravery. She wants to go home. She wants to put the skin of her old life back on and get into bed.  But first she needs to get down the heavy marble stairs. She needs to stand under the bright lights and colorful murals in the subway at 116th. She needs to sit quietly, invisibly, in the urine-drenched subway car until she can slide into the elevator at 181st and let it deliver her to the murky surface of Washington Heights. And then she needs to sneak back into the apartment without getting caught. Excerpted from Focus. Click. Wind by Amanda West Lewis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.