“A compelling drama with a firecracker protagonist that stuns with its strikingly beautiful writing.” — Kirkus, starred review

If you’re looking for a book that meets students exactly where they are — navigating identity, injustice, and the pressure to stay quiet — Jasminne Mendez’s YA debut The Story of My Anger deserves a place on your shelf and in your curriculum.

Yulieta Lopez is a Texas teen who is furious, and rightfully so. Her racist drama teacher refuses to cast Black students in lead roles. Her school board is threatening teachers over “controversial” books. And Yuli is expected to keep her head down until she can escape to college. But when silence becomes impossible, Yuli and her friends launch a guerilla theatre club — and Yuli finally steps into the role she was always meant to play.

Written in verse by the Pura Belpré Honor Award-winning author of Aniana del Mar Jumps In, this novel is both a love letter to finding your voice and a sharp, timely examination of racism, book banning, and what it costs young people, especially young women of color, to be seen.

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Tips for Secondary Teachers

This novel-in-verse is a natural fit for English, theatre, and social studies classrooms, but its themes stretch across disciplines. Don’t feel limited to teaching it in isolation — it opens doors to rich cross-curricular conversation.

Use the book’s structure as a craft lesson. Verse novels can feel unfamiliar to students who haven’t encountered them before. Spend time early on exploring how Mendez uses white space, line breaks, and rhythm to convey emotion. Ask students to identify a passage where the form itself does as much work as the words.

Yuli’s story is deeply tied to current events around book banning and censorship legislation. This makes it an excellent anchor text for media literacy discussions. Bring in news articles, school board meeting transcripts, or student op-eds, and ask students to examine who gets to decide what stories are taught. This includes the question of who bears the cost when those decisions are made along racial lines.

The guerilla theatre club Yuli and her friends create is a powerful model for student agency. Consider building a creative action project into your unit where students identify an issue in their school or community and design a creative response. These could include a performance, a zine, or a spoken word piece. This honors the spirit of the book while giving students a meaningful outlet.

Yuli’s Afro-Latina, Dominican American identity is central to her experience, and it’s still underrepresented in YA literature. Make space in your classroom for students to reflect on whose stories they’ve seen in the books they’ve been assigned throughout their schooling , and whose have been missing. This can be a powerful journaling or Socratic seminar prompt.

Finally, be prepared for this book to hit close to home for some students. Yuli’s struggle to be seen by teachers who don’t understand her is not fictional for many kids in your classroom. Approach this text with care, and make sure students know their own anger. Note feelings about injustice, at being overlooked. They are valid, and your classroom is a space where those feelings are welcome.

Jasminne Mendez is a Dominican-American poet, playwright, and author whose work consistently centers voices that deserve far more space on school bookshelves. The Story of My Anger is a stunning YA debut, and secondary students are lucky to have it.