Forest High

Short Stories

Fiction - Short Story/Novela
102 Pages
Reviewed on 02/13/2024
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    Book Review

Reviewed by C.R. Hurst for Readers' Favorite

In Forest High by Bob Boone, nine stories offer slice-of-life portraits of teachers with secret lives, checkered pasts, bad habits, fleeting romances, surprising depths, and questionable values. You know, like most of us. I thought the story called Coach was especially poignant, largely because of Bob Boone’s ability to see his characters in multi-faceted ways. In the story, Coach Miles Manning, a former history teacher at Forest High, lost his teaching position because he could not control his students, though “he was supposed to be a smart guy.” The school’s administrators reassigned him to the Physical Education department where he plays out his days as a subject of considerable ridicule by students, but the narrator of the story, one of these students, befriends him and soon gets a lesson in empathy first-hand.

In this collection of short stories by Bob Boone, the teachers are diverse; they come from a common point – Forest High – but are moving in different directions. Having been an educator for much of my life, I read Forest High with great interest. Bob Boone, himself a former teacher, writes what he knows, and he knows that teachers are human with the same foibles and virtues common to any profession. However, popular fiction often portrays them as little more than stereotypes. but the teachers from Forest High are real people too. In addition to bringing his characters to life, the author’s style also makes reading about them a pleasure. With his deceptively simple and fluid style, the author creates everyday men and women who I will certainly never forget.