Coming of Age AUTHOR’S BOOKS HELP NAVIGATE HIGH SCHOOL YEARS By CAT HERINE GAUGH
H
igh school can seem so long ago, yet memories are still vivid. Favorite teachers. Dances. The first boyfriend or girlfriend. Cheering at football games. Forming lifelong friendships. But those years are also a time of struggle: Worrying about good grades. Thinking about college. Questioning what your parents taught you. Figuring out who you really are. “What happened in high school really shaped you,” said Marisa Matherne Reichardt, Coronado High
"Under Water" book cover for Malaysian edition, designed and published by Penerbit Haru. 24
CROWN CITY MAGAZINE
| MARCH 2020
School Class of 1989. “The classes you took, the movies you saw and the books you read. “Your experiences, good and bad, helped form the adult you became.” Reichardt didn’t love school, but liked to write. One day, her freshman English teacher Bobbie Booth told her, “You are a writer” and suggested Reichardt enroll in journalism classes next year. Reichardt did, and for the three years, she worked on the Islander school newspaper and the Beachcomber yearbook.
