I was ambling around the bookstore, looking at catchy titles and scanning the back of books to decide if I actually wanted to read the book. The first thing that caught my attention was the title, True Notebooks, displayed in fun colors. I pulled it off the shelf expecting a girly novel, with notebooks from teenage or thirty-something women. The story was opposite of anything that I could have expected. True Notebooks, written by Mark Salzman, is based on his own real-life experiences. The story starts out with Salzman narrating and the readers follow as we learn that he is a writer. We then see him when his friend, another writer, asks him to come a watch a writing class he was teaching. The class was unlike any other, though, because it was for young people who were in juvenile detention centers. The reader follows Mark as he begins the class, with misconceptions and preconceived notions. Pretty soon Mark admits to the surprising talent of the young men and by the end of the class he is already starting another writing class of his own.
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