Previous
Oakland, California
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The 57 Bus, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender and Sexuality
Adolescent Crime vs. Adult Crime
Binary Thought and Inclusive Language
Discrimination and Social Justice
Accountability, Redemption, and Forgiveness
Summary
Analysis
Next, Slater adapts a list from Sasha’s Tumblr page, a social media website that allows users to post short-form blogs. The list is structed like a poem with several stanzas, or verses, and the spacing between the lines of each verse creates a cascading effect down the page.
Slater’s book is infused with poems and other forms of creative writing, and this nontraditional approach to nonfiction writing, in addition to drawing increased attention to Sasha, mirrors Sasha’s own nontraditional life and nonbinary identity.
Themes
The list identifies Sasha’s favorite vegetable (bok choy) and favorite animals (cats and cuttlefish), but it also identifies Sasha’s deeper qualities, like being a good navigator and creator of “potential puns.” Sasha finds gender, wealth inequality, and education “important,” and thinks any place with a “nice subway” is a good vacation destination. “Thinking of things to get me?” Sasha asks. A “transit map shower curtain” or “a dress swirled with the image of a nebula” will do just fine.
Sasha’s talent for creating puns is evidence of their love of language, and the transit map shower curtain they want for their birthday reflects their love of buses. This poetic list is a glimpse of Sasha’s true identity, and it proves that there is more to Sasha than their nonbinary gender. Sasha’s mention of a nebula, which is an interstellar cloud made of dust and random gases that eventually will become a star, serves as a foil to the organized interconnectedness of the transit map, further implying that Sasha, and their interests, do not fit either/or categories.
Themes
