EXIT TICKETS: A NOVEL

Exit Tickets by Kenneth Chanko offers a raw, multi-perspective portrait of a tumultuous year at P.S. 961, a District 75 special education school on Manhattan's Upper East Side during 2007-2008. The story of Martin “Mr. J” Jordanowski, a first-year white teacher from Indiana who joins NYC's Teaching Fellows program following his sister Cassie's overdose death. His well-intentioned but boundary-crossing relationship with Kandra, a vulnerable 15-year-old student processing maternal loss and family instability, spirals when she writes a disturbing essay imagining inappropriate encounters between them. This triggers an administrative investigation, resulting in Mr. J being removed from his classroom. Meanwhile, interconnected storylines unfold: veteran teacher Shirley Holmes navigates her strained relationship with her daughter, Coretta, paraprofessional Big Henry seeks reconciliation with his son, Elijah; and students Shay and Russell struggle with trauma and identity. By year's end, will Mr. J return despite being cleared, and will the other characters find their foothold in a world where the ground keeps shifting?

Kenneth Chanko masterfully renders his characters with psychological underpinnings, exploring their flawed humanity, their brokenness, and how the environment shapes them. One of those stories with characters that are not only authentic but that reflect a world that is just too familiar and real. The author writes with unusual cleverness about systemic failures in urban special education, the blurred lines between mentorship and exploitation, intergenerational trauma, and the redemptive power of writing. The setting is finely drawn, and the imagery of details such as the school's windowless “bunker-like” classrooms, fluorescent-lit cafeterias where paraprofessional Big Henry maintains order, and the school's wealthy Upper East Side location, along with its students bused from Bronx projects and Lower East Side shelters, is stunningly captured. Like The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, Exit Tickets celebrates writing as a form of salvation for marginalized youth while, like Hold Still by Nina LaCour, it explores the ripple effects of grief. Chanko avoids easy resolutions, delivering instead a compassionate, unsentimental portrait of educators and students traversing a broken world. You’ll enjoy the colorful characters, the crisp writing that delivers clear POV’s, and the relentless drama. I felt as if I was drawn into the world of the movie Take the Lead as I followed the characters of this page-turning tale.