Cool story about Iris, a deaf girl named after a whale. Iris has strong tech skills (she repairs antique radios for pocket money) but she’s main streamed in a school with no deaf students and feels frustration at being alone. Then she learns about a whale (Blue 55) who communicates in a different frequency from […]
I don’t often read novels in verse. They aren’t my thing, but Elizabeth Acevedo’s debut novel, “The Poet X,” is making think I have been missing out. Acevedo tells the story of Xiomara who feels ignored at home and school, but is also the target unwanted attention from both her classmates and mother. The boys […]
Wonderful companion novel to The Mad Wolf’s Daughter (2018), this book shares Drest’s story as she struggles with the dual challenges of deciding how to cope with the price on her head — and with her place in the family whom she rescued in the The Mad Wolf’s Daughter. In order to remove the threat […]
I listened to this charming story of a young man, unexpectedly pushed into being Emperor of the Ethuveraz, learning to govern while earning his own and others’ respect. Maia, the son of the late Emperor, an imperious and cruel man who is killed in an airship crash, along with the three sons he acknowledges, had […]
A lot of exciting titles are coming out this spring. We will new books from some of our favorite authors, additions to popular series, and some promising debuts. Here are few to keep on an eye and place your holds today! Internment by Samira Ahmed March 19 Set in a horrifying near-future United States, seventeen-year-old […]
Hilarious and sweet, this epistolary novel keeps the reader turning the pages. The premise is adorable: two 12 years old girls from opposite sides of the country are sent to the same summer camp by their single gay dads who are planning to woo each other on once in a lifetime trip to China. Bette […]
Dive into Chicago’s past with relevance to the racial issues still facing Chicago and other communities today with this nonfiction read. A Few Drops of Red, sets the stage of all of the different events that led up to the race riots; from immigrants from Europe and southern Blacks coming to Chicago, to the meat […]
Clemantine was a demanding, curious six year old living in Kigali when the Rwandan massacre started. She had no idea why the adults started whispering and people she knew began to disappear. Her parents sent Clemantine and her older sister to stay with their Grandmother, the first in a long line of peregrinations that in […]
Sharon Draper, the acclaimed author of the beloved, Out of my Mind (2012), returns with an enjoyable book that manages to provide a girls’ eye view of racial issues, from police profiling to skin color dynamics. Isabella’s mom is white and her dad is black and her parents are divorced and she’s traded back and forth once […]
YA Fiction The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas Thunderhead by Neal Shusterman Turtles All the Way Down by John Green I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sánchez The Hazel Wood: A Novel by Melissa Albert Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi Slider by Pete Hautman The Astonishing Color of […]
