Book Review: Hot Issues, Cool Choices: Facing Bullies, Peer Pressure, Popularity, and Put-Downs | By: Committee for Children by Sandra McLeod Humphrey Reading Level: Grades 4-7 “Sometimes my friends just stand there and watch. And sometimes they join in and pick on me, too.” Emerson Elementary is a fictitious school filled with students who are trying to navigate the complicated social scene of the tween years. Each chapter of Hot Issues, Cool Choices features a boy or girl who presents a typical but troubling problem: Tara doesn’t want to sign the petition some of the girls are sending around, saying they won’t have anything to do with a new girl, but she’s worried about how they’ll react if she doesn’t. Nick would like to volunteer at an animal shelter, but not if Louisa and Connor are doing it, too—he’ll “end up on the ‘loser’ list just like them.” And Nathan is so tired of being bullied for being short that he’s succumbed to peer pressure and started picking on a boy who is even smaller than him, even though he feels bad about it. At the end of each chapter the protagonist asks the reader what he or she should do, and author Sandra Humphrey poses several additional questions to allow readers to delve deeper into the situations: “What do you think Madison should do? Why? How do you feel about Jenna? How do you feel about Madison? Do you think Jenna knows how Madison and her friends feel about her? Why or why not?” Humphrey also includes a “Trading Places” question to get into the other person’s shoes: “If you were Jenna, how would you feel if no one chooses you to be their partner?” Social-Emotional Lessons in Hot Issues, Cool Choices Every child in this book is playing some kind of role in these bullying scenarios, and sometimes more than one role. In the afterword Humphrey discusses the “Bullying Circle,” a concept developed by pioneer of bullying research Dan Olweus. According to Olweus, in bullying situations everyone plays a role, from the person doing the bullying to the bystanders (active or passive) to the person being bullied. In his model of the Bullying Circle bystanders can choose to play various roles: active involvement in the bullying, being a supportive audience for the person doing the active bullying, pretending to be a disengaged onlooker (“it’s none of my business”), or becoming a defender of those who are being bullied. Through vignettes, Hot Issues, Cool Choices presents the full range of these roles, showing readers how each player's role can change when he or she takes steps on that spectrum: from disengaged onlooker to active defender, for example. Or, conversely, from disengaged onlooker to supportive audience, if the child decides to laugh and cheer on the bullying. Through discussion, readers have the power to determine where the book characters' placement should be on the Bullying Circle. Classroom Activity Teachers may want to elaborate on the built-in questions to move beyond the obvious answers that children may give (for example, Madison shouldn’t treat Jenna so badly) and get into just how tricky it is to deal with the complexity of each situation. They can also discuss with their students the different levels of involvement a bystander can have. Is one approach worse than the other? Is it better to stand by and pretend you don’t notice than to laugh and cheer on the person picking on another? Or are they equally harmful? Teachers should pay special attention to the challenge of knowing exactly how to stand up to one’s friends.