This article discusses one teacher's efforts to give their students a mentor text for a persuasive, research-based writing project. The author's shift from assigning predominantly fiction to focusing more on nonfiction came as a result of their efforts to help their students move from students' current writing style -- that of a five-paragraph model -- into something more appropriate for college writing and beyond. The author assigned students a major, year-long writing project with many "checkpoints" in which students turned in five-page sections of their projects. The reality of the book, compared to the fiction the class had been reading, made the book compelling. The authors' students cared because the people they read about really existed. The author and students kept reading and discussing reactions to the trauma the book discussed, but the author realized that while their students gained quite a bit from being exposed to good writing, they could gain even more if the class spent additional time examining how the [book] author shaped such a powerful text. As the year wrapped up and the students began to turn in their final projects, the author saw a drastic difference between the writing students produced at the beginning of the year and the completed projects they were turning in at the end of the year. While the author still had comments to make about passages needing more explanation and a few still struggled with formatting, the content of the papers showed a commitment to self-expression and audience awareness that told the author the work the class had done throughout the year had moved them forward as independent writers.