By Alexis Stanley, Union High School, Roosevelt, Utah

Sheridan Alexander has spent most of her life in various foster homes. At her new foster home she makes two goals: first to graduate and second to exit the foster care system without getting into any more trouble. These two goals become nothing when she is assigned locker 527 and finds Ribbon Barber’s abandoned journal.

Locker 527 by L.T. Kodzo goes deep into the thoughts of a young girl who was literally bullied to death. Kodzo brings up a problem that many students, at some point in their lives have faced, bullying. The book shows three different kinds of bullying: cyber, physical and the spreading of crude rumors.

The book Locker 527 goes back and forth between Sheridan who has never met Ribbon but gets to know her and the pain that she went through by reading her journal, and Ashley Nobel, a girl who was once Ribbon’s best friend until junior high when she joined the group of Ribbon’s tormentors.

This book will help you to understand just how bad bullying really is. Reading the thoughts of a happy young girl that begin to change into the dark suicidal thoughts of a girl who is told every day that she is ugly and unimportant really brings out what can come from bullying to life.

Locker 527 isn’t just the somber story of girl who was bullied. In the end Ashley and Sheridan both do their job to tell Ribbon’s story to the world.
This book will have you rethink the way you live and how you treat others. Though it was not the best written book I have read, the story was very good, and it shared a great message.