MOLI VIEW™

"What books do you have for gay people?" asked the skinny teen with a piercing in his eyebrow and excellent posture. It wasn't until he asked that I realized he was not only okay with the other kids in the group calling him the female version of his Spanish nickname; it was his idea.

"Well, Chica," I said, finally catching on. "How about this?"

I handed him a copy of My Secret, the third book in a series compiled by Frank Warren from his PostSecret community art project. A business man in Maryland, Warren was prompted by a dream to send out a postcard in late 2003 asking strangers to mail him their secrets on postcards of their own. Since then he has received more than 180,000 postcards revealing secrets wry and heartrending. He posts each secret on a site that has been visited by more than 100 million people.

"Secrets, hmmm," Chica said, his eyes lighting up.

Meanwhile other teens in our Urban Book Club, a weekly reading and writing workshop that meets in a youth crisis center in Miami, were rifling through books like In Cahootz by urban lit star Quentin Carter, the abused child/foster kid-turned-good series by Dave Pelzer, and a whole pile of John Grisham thrillers. There were no takers on the latter, perhap because the young lady who requested them had been placed elsewhere.

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