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Starr Carter lives in the black ghetto of Garden Heights but goes to private Williamson High School in a very white suburb. Her being is split between the be-careful-to-show the right Williamson Starr and the slangy ghetto Starr. Her life implodes when her best friend Khalil is shot by a cop.
Interested in changing the world? Get to know these indomitable girls in third world countries. Learn about their cultures. Marvel at how they overcome child marriages, sometimes with the help of a brother. Be awed by their desire for equality, for their will to be educated. Enjoy the many full color photographs that accompany each of the girls’ stories. Become an activist.
Henry, a young boy with an active imagination, draws a chalk dragon on his closet door; when the dragon comes to life and wreaks havoc at his school, Henry has to join forces with his best friend – and get past their disagreements – to get things back to normal.
Set in the 1921 Tulsa race riots we follow 17 year old Will who is part Osage Indian and part white, alternating with 17 year old Rowan Chase who is the privileged daughter of a white father and black attorney mother in contemporary Tulsa. Rowan solves the mystery of a 1921 murder that begins in the “back house” of her spiffy home. The reader sees racism of today as well as that of 1921.
Adam is the perfect senior, with friends, a big heart and ADHD. Julian is a whipped puppy, sensitive and broken. It seems like Julian doesn’t stand a chance, but with a friend like Adam, so much is possible.
Daniel is already in love with Natasha. Against her will, Natasha is falling for Daniel. He’s the poet. She’s the scientist. Yeah yeah, opposites attract—such a cliché, right? But in Nicola Yoon’s hands it new. Fall in love with Daniel and Natasha.
This is the story of love and loss of two girls in medieval France. Dolssa has been declared a heretic by a Catholic friar, who is determined she will die by burning. Botille is a tavern keeper living with her sisters and trying to live on the right side of the law. They meet at a dark riverside. Their story is a thriller by the author of the award winning All the Truth That’s In Me.
Written by US Congressman, John Lewis, of Georgia and his staff member and comic oficionado Andrew Aydin, this is the John Lewis’s coming of age story during the time of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Illustrator Nate Powell helps flesh out Dr. Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, and the hope and scorn of an era.
He’s running as fast as he can—away from school, away from his thoughts, away from himself. But maybe he can set that running to some good. Coach thinks he could. Jason Reynolds writes another winner, about growing up African American. Reynolds knows this world so well.
Be a doctor. Be a lawyer. Be an engineer. The voices of her father and other well-meaning advisors are so loud in Özge’s head she can’t hear her own voice. But what does Özge want? Samanaci, growing up on the Aegean coast in Turkey, shows readers a view of the challenges of another culture in this whimsically-drawn graphic novel memoir.
Buffalo Bill Cody gave us the Wild Wild West as we perceive it today. Was he a liar? A philanthropist? A friend of Native Americans? An exploiter of Native Americans? "Presenting Buffalo Bill" is a wonderful exploration of a complex historical figure.
Jacqueline Woodson has written another masterpiece, this time for adults–but it could be put in the hands of younger readers. Four young girls are fast friends in Brooklyn. As they grow from nine to young teens and then to older teens, their relationships with each other change.
