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Educating Alex
Have you ever known a really unusual kid and wondered how that child would ever find their place in society? Meet Alex True. Peculiar. Bright. Determined. Marches to the beat of a very different drummer. And undecided in so many ways. Experience the extraordinary journey as a misfit navigates love, life and growth in a judgmental world.
Research analyst Alex True sets out to assess property value for a Chicago venture capital firm, but instead is catapulted into the lives and struggles of a sixth-grade teacher, his students, and the community surrounding a neglected but high-performing inner city school – an accidental meeting that launches Alex on a life changing journey of love, self and school revitalization that pleads for the reader to consider risking it all to have it all.
Educating Alex is a tale of modern romance, community, and hope, following protagonist Alex True on a journey to bring life back to a school in need. The students and staff captivate Alex’s interest, especially Mark Tandem, whose passion to educate and nurture his sixth graders tugs Alex’s heart in an unfamiliar direction. Alex convinces A.J. Hoyt, founder of the venture capital firm, to invest in the students, and A.J. takes the opportunity to make the company’s investment one that will benefit young hearts and minds as well as make dollars and cents. Alex, Mark and A.J. join forces to fight the odds of poverty, crime and neglect to revitalize the surrounding community, and in turn find that the reward for embarking on such a mission of good will leads them to ultimate happiness.
Underlying this story is the unanswered question of whether Alex is male or female -- challenging the reader's own assumptions of gender as they experience and imagine Alex's journey.
Research analyst Alex True sets out to assess property value for a Chicago venture capital firm, but instead is catapulted into the lives and struggles of a sixth-grade teacher, his students, and the community surrounding a neglected but high-performing inner city school – an accidental meeting that launches Alex on a life changing journey of love, self and school revitalization that pleads for the reader to consider risking it all to have it all.
Educating Alex is a tale of modern romance, community, and hope, following protagonist Alex True on a journey to bring life back to a school in need. The students and staff captivate Alex’s interest, especially Mark Tandem, whose passion to educate and nurture his sixth graders tugs Alex’s heart in an unfamiliar direction. Alex convinces A.J. Hoyt, founder of the venture capital firm, to invest in the students, and A.J. takes the opportunity to make the company’s investment one that will benefit young hearts and minds as well as make dollars and cents. Alex, Mark and A.J. join forces to fight the odds of poverty, crime and neglect to revitalize the surrounding community, and in turn find that the reward for embarking on such a mission of good will leads them to ultimate happiness.
Underlying this story is the unanswered question of whether Alex is male or female -- challenging the reader's own assumptions of gender as they experience and imagine Alex's journey.
- GenresQueer
605 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2013
44 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 4, 2017
A Review: Educating Alex
By E. Isaacs
Katie Fox’s Educating Alex is a novel filled with vivid imaginations and experiences from the first person perspective of the main protagonist, Alex True, a free-spirited, tomboyish, recovering Ohio suburban woman with sympathy and empathy for beleaguered students at a Westside Chicago school, Dodson Street School, described as “a magnet school that accepts children from the south-west part of the city whose math and reading scores are above the ninetieth percentile.” Alex is a research analyst for a company in downtown Chicago called A.J Holt Technologies, and she is miffed with the feeling of being asocial misfit in her youth years. Her lifestyle was different, not living up to the social expectations of her community, and, here Alex says of her interest and desires before she came of age that they were “…so unconventional that I felt trapped unable to soar. Until I broke free of suburbia, I thought I might drown. This is my connection to the children and teachers at Dodson Street School. They are drowning in circumstances out of their control.” Many students from Dodson Street have had a rough background filled with violence, drugs, and poverty. Alex describes another problem that the school faced and it is one that is discriminatory: “…these children perform so well that their general standardized test scores don’t qualify them for the support and services that schools of lower performing students receive.” Alex does not just feel sorry for these students of Dodson Street and the unfortunate circumstances that they are in, but she actually enters into their shoes.
This is how Fox’s Alex True chooses to respond to the injustice that she sees. She had a creative business idea which she intensely promoted until she gets the support of her boss at A.J Holt Technologies where she works as a research analyst in the company, to dispense with an old shoe factory and start a firm called IDEA, Innovative Design for Educational Advancement. The goal of the newfangled company is the remodeling old furniture, school desks, and chairs for proper ergonomic use in the classroom environment. This start-up firm of A.J Holt Technologies invests (indirectly) in the lives of Dodson Street students by having in the company’s employ many parents and relatives of those children attending the school. Alex wants to make a difference in the lives of the students and the community in particular. To accomplish her goals, she believes she needs to find someone to build a rapport with at the school, someone who wants to effectuate the changes and the kind of impart that she has in mind. She subtly examines staff at the school until she finds this one guy. Voila! Alex meets with, and falls for, a dedicated and passionate teacher at Dodson Street School, Mark Tandem, who grew up in the neighborhood and is more than familiar with its many problems. Mark also happens to own an old shoe factory which he had inherited from his grandfather. Educating Alex is about 364 pages and there are many events that transpired through many of its chapters such as Alex’s gender identity struggles (she also is socially ambivalent about it), Alex’s encounters while walking and driving in a west side neighborhood, the flirtations and romance that ensued between Alex and Mark, Mark’s dark secret about the old shoe factory, Alex’s witness of a getaway van and hit-and-run driver. IDEA kicks off, and, in her enthusiastic journey with the firm, Alex experiences assault firsthand, she is accosted by some goons on the west side of Chicago, marries Mark, finds her company’s colleagues approval and appreciation for providing them an outlet and business extension of A.J Holt Technologies, and lives something of a quixotic life with Mark and his adopted son, Jamal, whose mother was tragically killed in an accident on her birthday.
The mushrooming tension throughout the book seems to be Alex’s identity struggles and her desire to make sense out of them, make people see a reality concerning unequal education, poverty, and violence in the city of Chicago, and the few good men and women doing something to bring about change. Alex found hope and love in Mark, a caring teacher, passionate in every minute detail in his desire to relieve students coming from the throes of violence, poverty, and tragedy, issues that were dear to Alex and which she had found resonating with her own youthful experience. This may well be where Fox gets into a quagmire, trying to show that Alex can connect to a community and a group of students that have long had a taste of penury and misfortune because Alex had lived as a social outlier of another sort. On the one hand, there is Alex’s inner struggle, and on the other hand, there are other people’s struggles. In the book it is not apparent how Fox accomplishes the syllogism that resolved her inner conflicts and that of the students of Dodson Street. The rift is still there and has been broadened accidentally by Fox. Alex knows about it but the students do not yet know. Nonetheless, IDEA, Alex’s business brainchild in the west side of Chicago in spite of its upheavals is praiseworthy. It was not up until Alex’s adult years that she finds a man with a similar desire to help lift up these students’ burden, and together they change things for the better. Jamal, one of Mark’s students at Dodson’s Street School lost his mother to a hit-and-run driver. He finds comfort and security in a man who took him under his bosom, gradually becoming the best thing that ever happened to Jamal as a father he never really had.
Doris-the-GPS-guide could not function without imputed information from Alex, just like a ship in the high seas sailing unmoored is at the risk of entering treacherous weather conditions without redirections from its captain. The amalgam of Alex and Doris worked. Alex gets the glory. But it strains believability to color the problem of schools with socially plagued minority students as one of primitive technologies and learning materials, i.e. the lack of iPads, Smartboards, latest scientific equipment. These are all too simple inferences about their educational needs. While all these are sufficient to advance the students learning, they are not necessities. The real needs of these students, the matters of the heart, love and family are given a peripheral treatment by Fox. IDEA, for all its promise, cannot birth responsible fathers and mothers. Jobs may provide a temporal distraction for youths not to engage in violence or join up with gangsters, but finding older adult mentors with the moral rectitude to lead these youths still is a crisis in Chicago today.
Fox, no doubt, is a wordsmith—she uses words carefully in the novel to describe the setting, her characters and their struggles. Alex’s non-descript character, if it was meant to be so by Fox, seems undetectable at the initial chapter phase of the book, but Alex’s character and gender becomes more lucid as her infatuations with Mark and her internal monologue about her passions and experiences (mostly encounters and conversations with persons who are curious about her) spill out in several pages of the book. The mere fact that Fox strives hard to make Alex gender neutral should awaken the unassuming reader from his sleep: what does Alex want to conceal from persons with whom she has an encounters? Well, her unsettled past that daunts her, the lacuna she hopes to fill in her journey towards finding a purpose. Alex saw a need at a school in Chicago and sought to effectuate change through partnership with a teacher well-spoken of. She found her life’s calling with Mark and Dodson Street School, but her education isn’t over.
By E. Isaacs
Katie Fox’s Educating Alex is a novel filled with vivid imaginations and experiences from the first person perspective of the main protagonist, Alex True, a free-spirited, tomboyish, recovering Ohio suburban woman with sympathy and empathy for beleaguered students at a Westside Chicago school, Dodson Street School, described as “a magnet school that accepts children from the south-west part of the city whose math and reading scores are above the ninetieth percentile.” Alex is a research analyst for a company in downtown Chicago called A.J Holt Technologies, and she is miffed with the feeling of being asocial misfit in her youth years. Her lifestyle was different, not living up to the social expectations of her community, and, here Alex says of her interest and desires before she came of age that they were “…so unconventional that I felt trapped unable to soar. Until I broke free of suburbia, I thought I might drown. This is my connection to the children and teachers at Dodson Street School. They are drowning in circumstances out of their control.” Many students from Dodson Street have had a rough background filled with violence, drugs, and poverty. Alex describes another problem that the school faced and it is one that is discriminatory: “…these children perform so well that their general standardized test scores don’t qualify them for the support and services that schools of lower performing students receive.” Alex does not just feel sorry for these students of Dodson Street and the unfortunate circumstances that they are in, but she actually enters into their shoes.
This is how Fox’s Alex True chooses to respond to the injustice that she sees. She had a creative business idea which she intensely promoted until she gets the support of her boss at A.J Holt Technologies where she works as a research analyst in the company, to dispense with an old shoe factory and start a firm called IDEA, Innovative Design for Educational Advancement. The goal of the newfangled company is the remodeling old furniture, school desks, and chairs for proper ergonomic use in the classroom environment. This start-up firm of A.J Holt Technologies invests (indirectly) in the lives of Dodson Street students by having in the company’s employ many parents and relatives of those children attending the school. Alex wants to make a difference in the lives of the students and the community in particular. To accomplish her goals, she believes she needs to find someone to build a rapport with at the school, someone who wants to effectuate the changes and the kind of impart that she has in mind. She subtly examines staff at the school until she finds this one guy. Voila! Alex meets with, and falls for, a dedicated and passionate teacher at Dodson Street School, Mark Tandem, who grew up in the neighborhood and is more than familiar with its many problems. Mark also happens to own an old shoe factory which he had inherited from his grandfather. Educating Alex is about 364 pages and there are many events that transpired through many of its chapters such as Alex’s gender identity struggles (she also is socially ambivalent about it), Alex’s encounters while walking and driving in a west side neighborhood, the flirtations and romance that ensued between Alex and Mark, Mark’s dark secret about the old shoe factory, Alex’s witness of a getaway van and hit-and-run driver. IDEA kicks off, and, in her enthusiastic journey with the firm, Alex experiences assault firsthand, she is accosted by some goons on the west side of Chicago, marries Mark, finds her company’s colleagues approval and appreciation for providing them an outlet and business extension of A.J Holt Technologies, and lives something of a quixotic life with Mark and his adopted son, Jamal, whose mother was tragically killed in an accident on her birthday.
The mushrooming tension throughout the book seems to be Alex’s identity struggles and her desire to make sense out of them, make people see a reality concerning unequal education, poverty, and violence in the city of Chicago, and the few good men and women doing something to bring about change. Alex found hope and love in Mark, a caring teacher, passionate in every minute detail in his desire to relieve students coming from the throes of violence, poverty, and tragedy, issues that were dear to Alex and which she had found resonating with her own youthful experience. This may well be where Fox gets into a quagmire, trying to show that Alex can connect to a community and a group of students that have long had a taste of penury and misfortune because Alex had lived as a social outlier of another sort. On the one hand, there is Alex’s inner struggle, and on the other hand, there are other people’s struggles. In the book it is not apparent how Fox accomplishes the syllogism that resolved her inner conflicts and that of the students of Dodson Street. The rift is still there and has been broadened accidentally by Fox. Alex knows about it but the students do not yet know. Nonetheless, IDEA, Alex’s business brainchild in the west side of Chicago in spite of its upheavals is praiseworthy. It was not up until Alex’s adult years that she finds a man with a similar desire to help lift up these students’ burden, and together they change things for the better. Jamal, one of Mark’s students at Dodson’s Street School lost his mother to a hit-and-run driver. He finds comfort and security in a man who took him under his bosom, gradually becoming the best thing that ever happened to Jamal as a father he never really had.
Doris-the-GPS-guide could not function without imputed information from Alex, just like a ship in the high seas sailing unmoored is at the risk of entering treacherous weather conditions without redirections from its captain. The amalgam of Alex and Doris worked. Alex gets the glory. But it strains believability to color the problem of schools with socially plagued minority students as one of primitive technologies and learning materials, i.e. the lack of iPads, Smartboards, latest scientific equipment. These are all too simple inferences about their educational needs. While all these are sufficient to advance the students learning, they are not necessities. The real needs of these students, the matters of the heart, love and family are given a peripheral treatment by Fox. IDEA, for all its promise, cannot birth responsible fathers and mothers. Jobs may provide a temporal distraction for youths not to engage in violence or join up with gangsters, but finding older adult mentors with the moral rectitude to lead these youths still is a crisis in Chicago today.
Fox, no doubt, is a wordsmith—she uses words carefully in the novel to describe the setting, her characters and their struggles. Alex’s non-descript character, if it was meant to be so by Fox, seems undetectable at the initial chapter phase of the book, but Alex’s character and gender becomes more lucid as her infatuations with Mark and her internal monologue about her passions and experiences (mostly encounters and conversations with persons who are curious about her) spill out in several pages of the book. The mere fact that Fox strives hard to make Alex gender neutral should awaken the unassuming reader from his sleep: what does Alex want to conceal from persons with whom she has an encounters? Well, her unsettled past that daunts her, the lacuna she hopes to fill in her journey towards finding a purpose. Alex saw a need at a school in Chicago and sought to effectuate change through partnership with a teacher well-spoken of. She found her life’s calling with Mark and Dodson Street School, but her education isn’t over.
July 6, 2013
I'm honored to be among the first reviewers of this new book by my teaching colleague, Katie Fox. I liked several aspects of the story, especially the main character's passion to make a difference in the lives of the kids at Dodson Street School. Don't we all wish we could cast off the burdens of security and stability to make a lasting difference in the world? I liked Katie's book and admire her immensely for the effort and perseverance it took to write. I look forward to her next book!
July 3, 2013
This story made me think about the amazing things that could happen for children and education if corporate America jumped on board. If only... I enjoyed reading about these characters and the story that enveloped them. Intriguing Alex drew me in from the opening lines and made me want to keep reading.
September 15, 2013
Very interesting book about the power of education, accepting people who are different than you and an idea about how to really help people. I enjoyed this first book from this author.
April 23, 2013
Being the author of Educating Alex makes writing a review of it a bit challenging. I will say that there are some very current themes that cause the reader to question and wonder about society and the effects that judgement can have on those judging and being judged. It is filled with descriptive imagery and sensory stimulation in an attempt to help the reader feel, smell, taste and hear the world going on around Alex. The characters in the story are unique and lively. They each carry their own message about how we often allow society to treat us and those around us. It was a lot of work to put this book together but I am glad that it is out there to stir up conversation. Have fun reading Educating Alex and I can't wait to hear what you think!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews