Alicia
Eye-opening, eloquent, and GORGEOUS. Our history comes alive in this visual feast that shines its light on the glory, the horror, and everything in between. While aimed at a YA audience, this book is for everyone, and can be shared from young to old.
A beautiful, tender picture book exploring the concept of death gently and emotionally.
Sometimes a book feels like a gift. This lovely, fantastical story is the perfect cozy read for when you need a little more magic in your life! Great for teens, adults, really anyone with room in their heart for a bunch of wild, heartbreakingly endearing, magical children, and the possibility of love in the most surprising places. Humor, fantasy, romance, and transformation await!
A magnificent, dream-like journey through marriage, memory, war, loss, and love. This is Ishiguro at his lyrical best.
Black lives matter at every age, and Ghost Boys is a view into the movement for middle-grade readers. Ghost Boys tells the story of a young Black boy shot by a white police officer. His ghost returns, seeking answers and peace, and can be seen only by the daughter of his shooter. They are joined by the ghost of Emmett Till, and the three voices alternate to tell a story of history, racism, and hopefully, a way forward.
A beautiful portrait of a young man trying to find his place in a world that is simultaneously adversarial, breathtaking, heartbreaking, and hopeful.
Wondering. Becoming. Testing boundaries, blurring lines. Small-town girl Nima stumbles into a community that shows her a new way to be her truest self. Drag kings, pixie poets, and a divine queen fairy godmother help Nima begin to heal her wounded heart, find her voice, and open up to the possibility of real love. And fabulous outfits.
Anyone who has experienced and absorbed trauma of any kind should read this. Actually, EVERYONE should read this. This astonishing memoir in verse had me in tears from the eloquent, painful beauty and the huge, tiny, perfect lines that made me want to read them aloud to anyone who would listen.
In a vast sea of YA literature, there are some titles that make you sit up and pay close attention. This debut novel from Julia Drake is one of them. After a wild year of drinking, drugs, and sex, culminating in her brother Sam’s suicide attempt, 16-year-old Violet finds herself in the small Maine town founded by her mysterious, shipwreck-surviving ancestor. Trying to dim her charismatic light, Violet is intent on disappearing as best she can in an attempt to work through her roiling, guilt-ridden feelings about herself, her brother, and her family. Her disappearing act is thwarted by a group of friends who inadvertently help Violet find a way back to her passionate, creative self. Dealing with shades of grief, love, sexuality, mental illness, family, and forgiveness, Drake is unafraid of making her characters complicated and real, with staggering depth. This book is full of humor, longing, catharsis, and breath-catching moments that made me want to start over the moment I read the last page. It’s been quite a while since I read a book while walking around the house, bumping into things because I was so loath to put it down!
"A mighty portrait of poverty amid cruelty and optimism."―Kirkus (starred review)
Free Lunch is the story of Rex Ogle’s first semester in sixth grade. Rex and his baby brother often went hungry, wore secondhand clothes, and were short of school supplies, and Rex was on his school’s free lunch program. Grounded in the immediacy of physical hunger and the humiliation of having to announce it every day in the school lunch line, Rex’s is a compelling story of a more profound hunger―that of a child for his parents’ love and care. Compulsively readable, beautifully crafted, and authentically told with the voice and point of view of a 6th-grade kid, Free Lunch is a remarkable debut by a gifted storyteller.
A wildly imaginitive spin on a classic tale with a fierce heroine who will stop at nothing to smash the patriarchy, fight for equality, and live proudly as her true self.
An incredibly clever, beautifully written YA novel about first love, lost love, close friends, and complicated families, with a touch of time travel! Funny, heartbreaking, and honest, this is one of my FAVORITE new reads!
Elizabeth Acevedo gives her incredible, poetic voice to two young Dominican girls in this powerful story of loss, grief, and survival. Camino and Yahaira's alternating voices carry this story like waves, crashing and receding as their lives intertwine through their mutual loss.
The Chronicles of Narnia meets The Polar Express in this wonderful new middle-grade novel. Two clever, big-hearted kids and a magical train make for an incredible adventure filled with humor, whimsy, and an important message for us all.
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So much fun! Urban fantasy hits the bayou in a funny, irreverent tale full of compelling characters. Meet Everett "Squib" Moreau, a swamp kid with his heart in the right place, Regence Hooke, the baddest of bad guys, and Vern, the vodka-swilling, Flashdance t-shirt-wearing last dragon on earth, formerly known as Wyvern, Lord Highfire.
“Tales of gods and men akin to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman as penned by a kindred spirit of Douglas Adams.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The most fun you’ll have reading about a man who has been killed by both catapult and car accident.”—NPR
“This book made me laugh out loud. And then a page later, it made me sob. Reminiscent of Tom Robbins and Christopher Moore, Poore finds humor in the dark absurdities of life.”—Chicago Review of Books
What do you do in your teenage years when you realize what your parents taught you wasn’t enough? You must go out and find books and poetry and pop songs and bad heroes—and build yourself.
It’s 1990. Johanna Morrigan, fourteen, has shamed herself so badly on local TV that she decides that there’s no point in being Johanna anymore and reinvents herself as Dolly Wilde—fast-talking, hard-drinking Gothic hero and full-time Lady Sex Adventurer. She will save her poverty-stricken Bohemian family by becoming a writer—like Jo in Little Women, or the Bröntes—but without the dying young bit.
By sixteen, she’s smoking cigarettes, getting drunk and working for a music paper. She’s writing pornographic letters to rock-stars, having all the kinds of sex with all kinds of men, and eviscerating bands in reviews of 600 words or less.
But what happens when Johanna realizes she’s built Dolly with a fatal flaw? Is a box full of records, a wall full of posters, and a head full of paperbacks, enough to build a girl after all?
A Kirkus Review Best Book of 2017 * A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction * Winner of the British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year and overall Book of the Year * Waterstones Book of the Year * Costa Book Award Finalist
"A novel of almost insolent ambition—lush and fantastical, a wild Eden behind a garden gate...it's part ghost story and part natural history lesson, part romance and part feminist parable. I found it so transporting that 48 hours after completing it, I was still resentful to be back home." -New York Times
The Craft for a new generation! A dark, witchy, haunting read!
