BE THE CHANGE

Hunter, the teen spokesperson for a student-led anti-slavery organization, inspires readers to become activists.

Each chapter, named with a key word such as “community,” “leadership” or “compassion,” starts with an inspirational story or about one or more contemporary or historical figures, transitions into the author's take on the key word in question and ends with a set of discussion questions. Chapters are short, with plenty of white space, and relevant, visually appealing quotations and statistics are scattered throughout. The author's activism is rooted in his Christianity, and he uses a number of Bible verses and stories to make his points (as well as a couple of brief but possibly alienating references to abstinence as an example of “solid morals” and a historical figure “ministering to Jews”). The author gives a variety of anecdotes and statistics about what he calls modern-day slavery—a group of boys in Zambia being tricked into an exploitative choir; an elementary school-aged girl sold by her family into forced labor—but readers won't come away with a big-picture sense of global politics or the forces that make this sort of exploitation possible. Instead, the author asks readers to find issues about which they are passionate and ask God to guide them toward the next step.

Accessible, if slightly insubstantial.