Reviewed by Kelly Stewart

Mark Salzman begins True Notebooks with lists of reasons why he can’t visit L.A.’s Central Juvenile Hall, where he’s invited to teach a writing class: He gets nervous around teenagers. He’s angry about being a past crime victim. And he thinks he’s “unqualified to evaluate poems about AK-47s.”

But Salzman can’t make a juvenile delinquent character in his unfinished novel come alive, so he decides to take a chance on the teens at Central. True Notebooks is a moving account of his classroom experiences with a group of young men, most of whom are violent offenders. However, Salzman avoids turning the book into a trite teacher-motivates-student story. His students’ writing can be emotional portraits of their lives, but it’s just as likely to be about guns or female anatomy. And when Salzman attends the trial of one of his students, the narrative becomes both a lesson in the shortcomings of the criminal justice system and the complexities of human character.

One grey area in Salzman’s research is his stated lack of note-taking during his classes at Central; he recreated the dialogue from memory. But this doesn’t detract from the book’s poignancy. In the end, the students’ writing speaks for itself.