The 57 Bus

Overview

Dashka Slater's The 57 Bus reconstructs a real incident on an Oakland public bus line, where the daily commute of two teenagers intersected for only a few minutes each afternoon. Sasha, who attended a small private school and identified as agender, wore skirts as part of exploring that identity. Richard, a public school student from a different part of the city, was riding the same route home when he set fire to the skirt Sasha was wearing, an impulsive act that left Sasha with severe burns.

What follows is not a courtroom drama in the traditional sense but a patient unspooling of two lives, two neighborhoods, and one act whose consequences neither teenager could fully anticipate. Slater traces the aftermath as the case draws media scrutiny and Richard is charged as an adult, facing the possibility of a hate crime enhancement and a lengthy prison sentence.

Written for young adult readers but reported with the rigor of longform journalism, the book resists easy villains. It asks what accountability should look like when the person who caused harm is himself a teenager, and when the harm itself grew out of confusion, not clear malice.

A Book Built on Proximity and Distance

The premise of The 57 Bus rests on a geographic irony: Sasha and Richard lived only a few miles apart in Oakland, one of the most demographically varied cities in the United States, yet their day-to-day realities were shaped by starkly different circumstances of race, class, and schooling. Slater uses the bus route itself as a structural device, a shared space that briefly erases the distance between two otherwise separate worlds before violence reasserts it.

The book also functions as an exploration of gender identity beyond the binary, since Sasha's agender identity and the specific act of wearing a skirt are central to what happened. Slater treats this dimension with care, situating it within a broader inquiry into how identity, perception, and misunderstanding can collide with devastating speed.

Because the story is drawn from court records, interviews, and news coverage rather than invention, it has been read alongside restorative justice conversations about how the juvenile and adult criminal systems handle harm caused by minors, and about whether punitive responses serve either teenager well.

Why The 57 Bus Has Been Challenged

Objections to The 57 Bus, which has drawn 7 state-level and 16 district-level challenges tracked in this catalog, center largely on its treatment of gender identity. Sasha's agender identity is presented matter-of-factly and without editorial judgment, and some challengers have objected to a young adult book normalizing or introducing students to concepts of gender beyond the binary.

A second recurring concern involves the book's frank depiction of a violent, real-world hate crime, including the injury itself and the legal proceedings that followed, which some reviewers have deemed too intense or mature for the intended readership. Others have questioned whether the book's sympathetic framing of Richard, an offender who caused serious harm, is appropriate for a young audience, seeing it as complicating rather than reinforcing a clear sense of right and wrong.

Taken together, the challenges reflect broader disputes over how young adult nonfiction should handle both LGBTQ+ identity and morally ambiguous accounts of real crimes, rather than any single, isolated passage.