The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives (2017)

Slater’s writing style and close third-person reporting means she often reports on how people felt or what they thought without quoting them directly. This can make the book feel like fiction at times, as Slater describes events in technicolor detail. The effect is to make the story readable and compelling, but it also allows the author to influence the reader’s understanding of people and events in a way traditional nonfiction might not.

Further, as Slater uses non-traditional narrative forms, including source material, text/instant message conversations, and poetry, the book feels less like a report and more like a constructed narrative, with Slater deliberately shaping the way the characters are presented and perceived. Yet this effect is undermined by some of the non-traditional texts, especially those presented without interpretation or commentary. Instant messages between some of Sasha’s friends, as in one in which two teenagers seesaw between discussing their fears for their friend and then their biology homework (148), are left to the reader to interpret.

By not revealing her motive for including this exchange, Slater gives the reader the agency to make that determination. Similarly, when Slater chooses to present Debbie’s experience agitating to be able to wear pants as a poem (53), it is up to the reader to decide why and decide what function a poem serves that a traditional narrative could not.

Ricocheting between narrative forms, sometimes leaning in close to feelings and emotions, and sometimes retreating to directly presenting bureaucratic text, Slater is reflecting the uncertainty and complexity of the story itself and reminding the reader that they are participants in the story, and they must also make meaning from it. 

The question of who decides what justice is and how that justice is meted out resonates throughout this book. Slater is oblique in her approach, using several narrative methods to invite the reader to consider how race—and how Richard and Sasha’s races in particular—impact the way this story plays out. She invokes other cases that have similarities or parallels and notes how differently they play out, as in the example involving San Jose State University students (202), where racial roles were reversed, and the white perpetrators got off comparatively lightly.

The circumstances of what happened at San Jose State University are not, of course, exactly the same as what happened on the 57 bus, which is part of the problem: it’s difficult to know where to draw the lines and how to know when things are the same or similar and when they are different. Each crime, each interaction between people that results in intervention by the government, is different, yet the criminal justice system is not set up to treat each case differently, at least not according to a standard.

As Slater shows, there are people involved at every step of the way, and people are human, and humans make mistakes. Richard is offered a plea deal that is suddenly, and without explanation, withdrawn. Judges are given latitude in sentencing which can be —but isn’t always—influenced by victim impact statements. Restorative justice has been proven to reduce recidivism but is not (yet) a part of the mainstream criminal justice system. Studies have shown that prison breeds criminals and yet that system lives on. Similarly, as attitudes toward juvenile justice have changed over time, what was previously considered enlightened thinking has become a sign of weakness, and more youth are serving time or being charged as adults than a hundred years ago.

Slater’s goal is not to solve the problems of the criminal justice system, but to illustrate them within the context of a particular community and a particular crime. She wants her readers to consider these as they are and then consider them in the larger social, cultural, economic, and political contexts.

In Slater’s telling, what happened on the 57 bus could be a question of nature versus nurture. Who Richard might have been and how Sasha might have dressed if they had grown up in each other’s circumstances: these questions are impossible to answer, but the stark economic divide within Oakland and other places around the country and the world require us to consider them.

Sasha and Richard live in close enough proximity that they ride the same bus, but they board and disembark from very different worlds. Slater must navigate painting pictures of these worlds in such a way that she is true and honest about them but does not perpetrate stereotypes about race or privilege. Richard comes from a single-parent home in a low-income neighborhood and attends the local public high school; Sasha’s parents support their pronoun choices and decisions to wear skirts to their progressive private high school. Richard matriculates to prison, while Sasha goes to MIT: these are facts, but they cannot necessarily be explained by the sentences that proceed them.

In Slater’s analysis, social and economic factors are best handled with a light touch, and her use of non-traditional texts within her reporting invite the reader to consider the entire story in a more layered, nuanced, complicated way. This might make it harder for one to envision solutions, but perhaps it’s also easier to fully grasp the problem: our lives overlap too much for us to draw any hard lines between them.