Review: You Can Change the World by Margaret Rooke

Rating: 2/5
Source: ARC from Netgalley for review
Pages: 240


Summary

A collection of vignettes, each a few pages long, from about 50 teenagers to inspire fellow teenagers to take action in the world, get through adverse experiences or turn their lives around. 

The Good

There was a variety of stories, and some of them were indeed inspiring, like the girl who got Tesco to agree to stop selling eggs from caged hens or the guy into fashion design who makes clothes for the homeless. 

It wasn't just famous people. There were a lot of people I know or know of from the teen activism/science fair circuit but there was only one of them here. Whether that was because the author couldn't get a piece from them or chose not to talk to them, I don't know. It would've been interesting to hear from, for example, Greta Thunberg and Jamie Margolin. However, it was good to give these lesser-known activists some publicity. And the fact that these teens seem relatively normal, not at the exalted heights of Greta Thunberg or Malala Yousafzai, might make it easier for reading teenagers to relate and feel inspired.

I noticed there were loads of autistic people included, which makes me wonder whether we're drawn to activism or whether the author is drawn to us! 

The Bad

My main issue is that this book was false advertising. It's called 'YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD' but only a small section of it is about campaigns to address issues in the world, while the rest are to do with things like coping with a parent's death or bullying. Those are good things and deserve recognition, and perhaps the author means to express the idea that change on a small scale changes the world too, but that did not get across. 

Something that really annoyed me was the insults towards non-teenagers. So many of the contributors to the book said teens are more flexible, creative, etc than non-teenagers. It really annoyed me because the way it was written made me feel ancient when I'm only twenty! I'm one year done with being a teen but they made it sound like I'm basically dead! That said, it did have some fair points like that teens have a unique ability to make change through social media and in school because of the way teens socialise, and that teens are impulsive and more likely to take risks, which is often bad but can be necessary to make changes.

Then there's a general issue with any sort of book like this, which is: how do they decide what's 'good'? Presumably they want to encourage teens to change the world for the good, but that's a very ill-defined concept. For example, I think all the teens here used non-violent (and not even mildly disruptive of business at all) means, but I think violently liberating a concentration camp would be considered good. And if a cause is mainstream enough to be celebrated in a mainstream book, maybe it doesn't need to be fought for. For example, years ago when being gay was widely considered immoral, smaller, fringe gay activist groups agitated for rights while the mainstream wouldn't support them. So maybe the people who really need our help are the people we aren't hearing from yet. 

Personally I had some problems with what was celebrated in this book and didn't agree with everything the contributors were saying. Someone was talking about how we should understand other cultures, like how their African friend wasn't comfortable with a couple sitting together. There was also a guy who was 7 feet tall at ~15 and after playing basketball for a bit got scouted for a team - what is the moral there? Be born with immense genetic privilege? (It's probably to make the most of the talents you're given, and the guy seems nice - it just reminded me how much of success in sports and other elite fields is due to innate genetic talents). And someone trying to help disabled students in their school by getting everyone to wear sunglasses for a day to 'understand what it feels like to have autism' (???).

The ARC was also formatted terribly. Obviously, the whole point of an Advanced Readers Copy is that it isn't finished, so you're not supposed to comment on exact quotes or formatting, but this was done to a far lower standard than any of the many ARCs I've read before - lots of 'insert ending here' or 'insert illustration here' and pictures in the middle of sentences. 

Recommendations

What I hoped for from this book was a collection of stories with different methods of changing the world, but it only gave me a couple, like petitions and fundraising. The book even says at the end that it has a list of tips for changing the world, but they're not very useful.

The book is probably good for inspiring young teenagers to make something of themselves, but doesn't live up to the promise of the title.