Picked this up as an ARC, as something to consider for the 8th grade summer reading We Want Something About Bullying requirement.

No.

I'm not saying it was bad--like any anthology, it had its ups and downs. Some stories are fantasy-based, others are realistic--and props for the realistic ones actually addressing teens considering suicide, and I think that's where my sticking point is--I respect the choice but it's not something I'm going to hand to an 8th-grader when they'll be reading without much guidance. (I say this because this year's rising 8th graders are last year's rising seventh graders, who took the wildly wrong message from James Preller's amazingly realistic Bystander.)

An additional purchase at best, in part because not many teens read anthologies anyway (which is a shame). (but not a shame when it comes to this one.) ( )

This is a great collection of stories. Stories that are raw, dealing with bullying every, single day. And stories where people have had enough and are finally standing up for themselves.

Let me begin by saying that I had a love/hate thing with this book. One minutes I'd be angry or sad due to an bullying story and when I got in to the defiance story I was all like," HELL YEAH!" LOL! This is a great book filled with awesome stories to give you that emotional roller coaster. Even though the stories were short, you were able to get each character, watch them stand up and face their bully and of course others, taking it every day.

My fave defiance story is Nemsis which is the first story and well its about defiance. I really love the chance at getting revenge for bullying.

If you want stories that really make you see things differently, check this book out. It awesome and powerful. Each story different from the next, you are never left bored. Cornered is a great anthology that gets down to the heart of the matter. ( )

Cornered reminds readers that being bullied can happen to young people for various reasons, regardless of sexual orientation. While the young girl in Trevor screenwriter James Lecesne’s “Still Not Dead” is lesbian, most of the teens in these stories are not gay, although sometimes, as in Elizabeth Miles’ “Defense Mechanism,” they face accusations of being gay or lesbian. The stories more often deal with class-based taunting; the victims “don’t fit in” because they don’t have the right clothes or hair or live in wrong neighborhood. The anthology also lets us know that the bullied can be filled with a desire for revenge (Kristen Miller’s “Nemesis”), or how sometimes the bully is being forced into violence by peers (Jaime Adoff’s excellent “The Truest Story There Is”). Most of the stories are first person narratives from the point of view of the bullied; in “Like Kicking A Fence,” however, Kate Ellison effectively and disturbingly takes us inside the mind of an aggressor, exposing the inner torments and uncertainties that lead a child to an horrible act of violence.
In all the stories families are for the most part distant, missing, broken or clueless as to what is happening to their children. Even the kids with apparently “good parents” in Cornered invariably feel isolated and alone. Adults often seem complicit to the taunting and harassment going on in the lives of these young people, and school administrators are no help at all. “How Auto-Tune Saved My Life” by Brendan Halpin exposes a teacher who bullies his students. Not all of the stories fit the anthology’s theme of bullying or defiance. In those stories where kids do fight back, they often use such 21st century tools as social networking or cell phone cameras to get back at their tormentors. A few, like “We Should Get Jerseys ‘Cause We Make a Good Team” by Lish McBride, also feature elements from the genres of Speculative Fiction or Fantasy. Overall, Cornered: 15 Stories of Bullying and Defiance gives readers an intensely personal and unsettling look at the problem, and will hopefully move them to do more than just say, “It Gets Better,” and join in the battle against it. ( )