The 57 Bus cover

The 57 Bus

by Dashka Slater

True story: a nonbinary teen, a Black teen, Oakland

For you if

you think accountability is more complicated than punishment

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

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Secondhand & sustainable

$19 MSRP · Hardcover
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The true story of an agender teenager set on fire on a school bus in Oakland, and the Black teenager who did it. A book about race, gender, justice, and what it means to be accountable.

Banned & challenged

Find out what they were so afraid of.

Get a copy and decide for yourself.

The true story of a nonbinary teen set on fire on a school bus in Oakland, and the Black teenager who did it. A book about race, gender, justice, and what accountability actually looks like — challenged for "LGBTQ+ content" and language. The real threat: a book that refuses easy villains and asks readers to hold complexity.

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Roll Red Roll poster

Roll Red Roll(2018)

dir. Nancy Schwartzman

A phone in every hand. A hand over every mouth.

In 2012, members of the beloved Steubenville, Ohio high school football team raped a sixteen-year-old girl at a pre-season party. Schwartzman rebuilds the night and its aftermath from the teens' own texts, tweets, and videos, from police interview footage, and from the work of crime blogger Alexandria Goddard and Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Rachel Dissell. Then she follows a town as it closes ranks around its football heroes.

Why it’s here: The crime is only half of what this film is about. The rest is the audience: the kids, parents, and coaches who watched, filmed, laughed, or looked away. It's punk in Goddard, a Steubenville native who keeps posting the evidence while her own town sues her for it. It's pedagogical because it shows how complicity gets built out of small, ordinary choices, and what it costs to refuse them. Heavy watch. Preview it before you share it with a teen.

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