"This is the way reading should be taught. I wish my daughter's teachers had read this book when she was still in school. I hope all teachers will read it now, and follow its advice.”
—Louis Sachar,
Newbery Medal-winning author of Holes
"For twenty years middle-schoolers in rural Maine have voluntarily devoured (and understood) an average of 40 books a year. If you're thinking that's impossible, Nancie Atwell's book will change your mind—and attitudes—forever.”
—Jim Trelease,
author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, 6th ed.
"The Reading Zone takes the ground-breaking work of In the Middle and raises the stakes. Atwell’s passion for kids, books, and reading shines through on every page of this remarkable book.”
—Teri Lesesne,
author of Making the Match:
The Right Book for the Right Reader at the Right Time
and Naked Reading!
Professor, Sam Houston University
"If students in Nancie Atwell's reading zone are "joyfully literate," then readers of her book will become delirious with joy as they are immersed into a classroom of serious readers. Atwell and her students demonstrate how the act of reading itself transcends the national rhetoric about scientific reading instruction.”
—ReLeah Cossett Lent,
author of Engaging Adolescent Learners
"The Reading Zone is a compelling, sensible, passionate argument for teaching reading by putting books, not prescriptive programs broken into subsets of isolated skills, into all students' hands. Kids comprehend, connect, and extend ideas when they are given books that interest them and make sense to them. Kids reading books sounds so simple, yet it takes thoughtful, smart teachers to know their students, to know books, and to build on literary experiences well enough to bring them all together for meaningful reading to happen. This book makes us smarter teachers, and smart teachers make kids into readers for life.”
—Linda Rief,
author of Vision and Voice: Extending the Literacy Spectrum
and Seeking Diversity: Language Arts with Adolescents
Middle School Teacher, Oyster River Middle School,
Durham, NH