Caught in the cross hairs of gang violence, seventeen-year old fashion designer, Maya, and her mother set off on a perilous journey from Guatemala City to the US-Mexico border.
Gangs
Your Corner Dark
Seventeen-year-old Frankie Green yearns to leave Jamaica and study in the United States, but when his father is shot he is forced to give up his scholarship and join his uncle Joe’s gang.
Bloody Seoul
Supremely loyal, 16-year-old Rocky expects to take over his father’s notorious gang, Three Star Pa, one day but after catching his father in a lie, discovers they are not as alike as he believed.
Becoming Beatriz
Set in New Jersey in 1984, Beatriz’s story is a timeless one of a teenager’s navigation of romance, her brother’s choices, and her own family’s difficult past. A companion novel to the much-lauded Like Vanessa.
Dealing in Dreams
Sixteen year old Nalah leads the fiercest all-girl crew in Mega City, but when she sets her sights on giving this life up for a prestigious home in Mega Towers, she must decide if she’s willing to do the unspeakable to get what she wants.
Iron River
When twelve-year-old Manny Maldonado and his friends find a hobo’s body near the train tracks that run through their tight-knit San Gabriel valley community, a police officer tries to pin the murder on them.
The Outside Circle
In this important graphic novel, two Aboriginal brothers — both gang members — surrounded by poverty and drug abuse, try to overcome centuries of historic trauma in very different ways to bring about positive change in their lives. Pete, a young Aboriginal man wrapped up in gang violence, lives with his younger brother, Joey, and his mother who is a heroin addict. After returning home one evening, Pete and his mother’s boyfriend, Dennis, get into a violent struggle, which sends Dennis to the morgue and Pete to jail. Initially maintaining his gang ties, a jail brawl forces Pete to realize the negative influence he has become on Joey and encourages him to begin a process of rehabilitation through a traditional Native healing circle.
Shredder
Finn “Crusher” Maguire has one simple task: to set up a meeting. But when that meeting is between the Guvnor and the Turk, two psychotic criminals vying for control of London’s underworld, Finn’s task proves to be anything but simple. As the city cracks under a blistering heatwave and the UK is rocked by a series of terrorist outrages, Crusher finds himself caught up in a gang war full of carnage, corruption and treachery.
Andreo’s Race
Just as sixteen-year-old Andreo, skilled in death-defying ironman events in wilderness regions, is about to compete in rugged Bolivia, he and his friend Raul (another Bolivian adoptee) begin to suspect that their adoptive parents have unwittingly acquired them illegally. Plotting to use the upcoming race to pursue the truth, they veer on an epic journey to locate Andreo’s birth parents, only to find themselves hazardously entangled with a gang of baby traffickers. Never suspecting that attempting to bring down the ring would endanger their very lives, the boys plunge ahead.
Gangs
Street gangs have exploded in popularity worldwide. Tattoos, baggy pants, tagging, gangsta style clothes — this unspoken threat is always just around the corner in most of the world’s major cities. In search of a sense of identity and belonging that their world has denied them, young people are pushed into gangs by a witch’s brew of violence, guns, drugs, racism, poverty, families under pressure, and ever-widening slums. Gangs exposes the roots of the problem, from the bidonvilles of France to the favelas of Brazil. It offers a startling analysis of the complicity of the adult world, as well as hard-hitting reforms that might just undermine the appeal of gang life. Most of all, it shows that we fail to understand gangs at our peril.