Lion Lights: My Invention That Made Peace With Lions

Richard Turere’s own story: Richard grew up in Kenya as a Maasai boy, herding his family’s cattle, which represented their wealth and livelihood. Richard’s challenge was to protect their cattle from the lions who prowled the night just outside the barrier of acacia branches that surrounded the farm’s boma, or stockade. Though not well-educated, 12-year-old Richard loved tinkering with electronics. Using salvaged components, spending $10, he surrounded the boma with blinking lights, and the system works; it keeps lions away. His invention, Lion Lights, is now used in Africa, Asia, and South America to protect farm animals from predators.

Martina Has Too Many Tías

A retelling of the Caribbean folktale La cucaracha Martina where Martina, in an effort to escape her noisy tías, slips away to a warm familiar island where she can play in peace and quiet–but is she home at last?

Indivisible

This timely, moving debut novel follows a teen’s efforts to keep his family together as his parents face deportation. Mateo Garcia and his younger sister, Sophie, have been taught to fear one word for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico has started to fade. Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and they’re hard workers and good neighbors. When Mateo returns from school one day to find that his parents have been taken by ICE, he realizes that his family’s worst nightmare has become a reality. With his parents’ fate and his own future hanging in the balance, Mateo must figure out who he is and what he is capable of, even as he’s forced to question what it means to be an American. Daniel Aleman’s Indivisible is a remarkable story–both powerful in its explorations of immigration in America and deeply intimate in its portrait of a teen boy driven by his fierce, protective love for his parents and his sister.

Barefoot Dreams Of Petra Luna

“Based on a true story, the tale of one girl’s perilous journey to cross the U.S. border and lead her family to safety during the Mexican Revolution”–

Ander And Santi Were Here: A Novel

Nonbinary teen Ander is ready to leave their family’s taquería and focus on their art, but when Santi, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, begins to work at the restaurant, the two teens spark a romance made complicated by immigration police.

Once I Was You

“”There is no such thing as an illegal human being or an illegal immigrant.” Maria Hinojosa is an Emmy award-winning journalist and was the first Latina to found a national independent non-profit newsroom in the United States. But before all that, she was a girl with big hair and even bigger dreams. Born in Mexico and raised in the vibrant neighborhood of Hyde Park, Chicago, Maria was always looking for ways to better understand the world around her-and where she fit into it. Here, she combines stories from her life, beginning with her family’s indelible experience of immigration all the way through the first time she heard her own voice on national radio, with truths about the United States’ long and complicated relationship with immigrants. Funny, frank, and wise, Maria’s story is one you will want to read again and again, and her voice will inspire you to find your own”–

It Wasn’t Me!

Mouse learns about the dangers of jumping to conclusions when he and Ferret prematurely accuse Raven of stealing Ferret’s raspberries.

Out Of Darkness

Naomi Vargas is Mexican American. Wash Fuller is Black. These teens know the town’s divisive racism better than anyone. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. And the consequences can be explosive. Naomi and Wash dare to defy the rules, and the New London school explosion serves as a ticking time bomb in the background. Can their love survive both prejudice and tragedy?