Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass

For my Belpre award winning book I read "Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass". by Meg Medina. The book focuses on school bullying on an extreme level. The main character Piddy Sanchez moves to a new school where a girl named Yaqui Delgado immediately targets her and begins bullying her violently. Piddy is frequently beaten and hurt by Yaqui and her friends. Piddy eventually becomes scared to even leave her house or go to school because of Yaqui and fells isolated and alone with no one to reach out to as she and her mother are not on good terms as her mother will not talk to her about her father who left them and causes Piddy to resent her for that. Piddy eventually reaches out to her childhood friend/love interest Joey about what's happening. She also reaches out to her coworker Lila at the salon where she works. Joey offers his own knowledge of abuse as his father is violent towards his mother and Lila offers her advice as she faced a similar situation as a child. Joey asks Piddy to run away with him as he flees his abusive household but she refuses and instead decides to take Lila's advice and stand up to Yaqui and not let her win. After she takes numerous beatings and suffers through all of the terror that Yaqui inflicts on her someone at school eventually reports Yaqui to the principal and when video evidence of one of the violent incidents is shown the school administration Yaqui is expelled and Piddy decides to transfer schools and finally finds acceptance. I think this book is great because it is very real and doesn't shy away from or sugar coat anything. The book really gives a good example of how bad bullying can get if it goes unnoticed or isn't stopped. I definitely thought this book was well written and stayed interesting throughout. I would definitely recommend this book to any reader as I think this issue is something that people should be aware of and this book does a very good job of portraying it.