Material appropriate for young adults
Sharlot Citra is whisked from Los Angeles to her mother’s native Indonesia, where she finds herself fake dating the son of one of the wealthiest families in Indonesia, and she is surprised when she actually starts to fall in love with the boy, the country, and the big family she never knew before.
Two lost souls cut off from their heritage find solace in each other in this remix of the gothic novel Wuthering Heights.
A great evil has come to the kingdom of Dàxi. The Banished Prince has returned to seize power, his rise to the dragon throne aided by the mass poisonings that have kept the people bound in fear and distrust.
Seri, Borderland teen and new assistant to Eshai Unbroken, local commander of the Valiants, may be the only person who can bridge the divide between the People who build their dwellings in the spreading trees and the “beasts” who roam the forest floors.
In Potosí, a silver mining city in the new Spanish viceroyalty of Peru, two teen vigilantes set out to expose corruption and deliver justice after Kiki’s brother is murdered and the prostitute he loved disappears. Includes author’s note.
Three runaway teenagers are chased in a road trip from the Texan frontera to New England, by a drug cartel planning to unleash chaos unto the country. Seventeen year old Turi escapes from his abusive family by reading. He hopes to actually escape by saving up from his work at a chicken farm near Ysleta, Texas. He believes the beautiful setting of his favorite book, Connecticut, will be the perfect home for him. So Turi sets off on the road with Arnulfo-an undocumented teenager he met at the farm, and Molly-a lonely girl looking to build a better life. The boys start their trip by hitching a ride with an elderly man, but they leave him behind and steal his truck when they begin to suspect he’s in the middle of an illicit operation, and hiding a dangerous secret. Unfortunately for the three runaways, the secret is hidden in the truck and results in a drug cartel chasing them down, the release of a virus, and the total breakdown of society around them.
Sarai uses verse to navigate the strain of family traumas and the systemic pressures of toxic masculinity and housing insecurity in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn, questioning the society around her, her Boricua identity, and the life she lives.
Set during the height of the Russian Revolution and told in alternating voices, sixteen-year-old Evgenia–a peasant and proud member of the Bolshevik party–agrees to help a seventeen-year-old bourgeois girl traverse the war-torn countryside in search of safety, but Anna is harboring a secret that could cost them their lives. Includes historical note and author’s note.
Chronicling the story of the last Africans brought illegally to America in 1860, African Town is a powerful and stunning novel-in-verse.
In 1860, long after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved laborers, 110 men, women and children from Benin and Nigeria were captured and brought to Mobile, Alabama aboard a ship called Clotilda. Their journey includes the savage Middle Passage and being hidden in the swamplands along the Alabama River before being secretly parceled out to various plantations, where they made desperate attempts to maintain both their culture and also fit into the place of captivity to which they’d been delivered. At the end of the Civil War, the survivors created a community for themselves they called African Town, which still exists to this day. Told in 14 distinct voices, including that of the ship that brought them to the American shores and the founder of African Town, this powerfully affecting historical novel-in-verse recreates a pivotal moment in US and world history, the impacts of which we still feel today.
Five refugees recount their courageous journeys to America and the unimaginable struggles that led them to flee their homelands in a powerful work from the author of Beyond Magenta and We Are Here to Stay.