A guide offers advice for high school students confronting graduation.

Pyrch draws on her two decades of experience as a teacher to pull together a collection of inspirational insights and tips for students graduating from high school and facing the outside world. “You don’t need to graduate from high school or college to know this: the world can hit you pretty hard at times,” she writes to her target audience of teens. And some of the questions that arise can follow people throughout their lives, morphing according to circumstances. “Even when you grow up and you choose,” the author asserts, “the question still applies: What do you want to be?” She touches on some everyday worries of high school students—feeling ugly, not making a team, enduring their parents’ divorce, failing classes, falling in and out of love—and weaves stories of her many pupils into the text in order to illustrate some of these dilemmas. She likewise works in reminiscences of her own experiences as a high school teacher, humanizing the profession for readers (instructors get bored, she confesses, and they often feel off their game). In all these tales and throughout the lucid, upbeat narrative, she strikes the pitch-perfect note of a caring, knowing teacher, someone who has gained a valuable perspective that her students aren’t yet old enough to possess. “The culprit is just youth, plain and simple,” Pyrch explains. “In fact, most of you will be shocked to discover the outcome of a situation you had no intention of creating. ”Your stories matter, she reassures her readers. These tales, “made up of moments where you pushed yourself to do something you thought you couldn’t do,” are what people will remember most vividly from high school.

A clearly worded, powerfully optimistic look at what high school students will face after graduation. - KIRKUS REVIEWS