Twelve-year-old Jin Yi records "interesting moments and details" in her memory notebook while watching customers shop in her Korean American family's Harlem bodega: "[P]eople will tell you their stories in the way that they move, how their faces look, how they speak." Observing turns to...
Sixteen years ago, a pregnant woman walking the hospital halls found a lottery ticket on the floor. The ticket proved quite the winner, enabling the new mother – and her three co-parents – to "buy a big house to fill with lots more kids, and...
Twelve-year-old Reena's outburst during a family conversation about parental careers, geography, and the future "ten years from now" catapults the family from a city of monuments, subways, and museums and lands them in rural Maine. Her expectations of her new home include lobsters, blueberries, beaches,...
*STARRED REVIEW Guy Lockard has assumed the mantle of narrator-of-choice for Jason Reynolds’s fiction: Ghost (2016 National Book Award finalist) is Lockard's third Reynolds title, following As Brave as You and Rashad's chapters in All American Boys. Here, as seventh grader Castle "Ghost" Crenshaw, Lockard performs...
*STARRED REVIEW The latest from Newbery Medal-winning author Richard Peck takes on important and timely topics – marriage, sexuality, manhood, nontraditional families –and alchemizes them into an affecting story full of warmth, acceptance, and understanding. Sixth grader Archer Magill narrates what he calls "A Tale of...
The Avalon Family Residence might sound nice, but it's not: "peeling paint, cockroaches…our tiny room." Dèja, her parents, and her two younger siblings are homeless, currently staying in a Brooklyn shelter. Her father can't work, and her exhausted mother is menially employed. As Dèja starts fifth...
Japan's latest tsunami warnings were just recently lifted, saving countless citizens from another Fukushima disaster-like tragedy which killed over 20,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless in March 2011. Amidst the apocalyptic aftermath, human goodness prevailed. Five years ago, a single poem managed to reach millions...
Just after turning 8, Yasmin Kader set a goal "to read one book every day. Every single day, forever." She's already up to more than 400, thanks to after-school detours to Book Uncle's Lending Library, a street-corner pop-up made of planks piled high with books....
*STARRED REVIEW Jason Reynolds makes his middle-grade debut with a multigenerational story featuring two Brooklyn brothers sent to stay temporarily with grandparents in rural Virginia. While their parents take some time to salvage their fraying relationship, 11-year-old Genie and his almost 14-year-old brother, Ernie, are expected...
Some time, somewhere, Little Town and Old Country are separated by borders and bombs. If Little Town is said to be filthy, broke, and run by ragtag criminals, Old Country is conformist, rich, and militaristic. Almost 15, cautious Little Towner Charlie Law stays relatively safe...
*STARRED REVIEW Beyoncé, J.K. Rowling, and Albert Einstein are examples of introverts who harnessed their "quiet power" to become iconic successes. Here Susan Cain offers an entertaining, illuminating adaptation of her adult bestseller, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, to help younger readers...
As today’s most prominent transgender teen, Jennings stepped into the national spotlight in 2007 at the age of 6 in a televised interview with Barbara Walters. In the almost-decade since, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) – psychology/psychiatry’s bible for identifying mental disorders...
When 11-year-old Azalea Morgan and her mother arrive in Paris Junction, Arkansas, in August 1952, her mother barely lasts a few minutes in her gossipy, small-town childhood home before she turns the car around, leaving her daughter behind to help her injured grandmother with her...
*STARRED REVIEW Samuel, almost 13, and his younger brother Joshua are orphans but born free and growing up educated. During the Civil War’s final year, Samuel takes the blame for mischief that he’s convinced that Joshua committed, and finds himself betrayed by the priest who has...
Benny’s father endures long-lasting effects when he suffers a brain aneurysm. Benny’s life was already tough: his brother George, who has autism, requires special attention; Benny’s best friend moved away, and making new friends hasn’t been easy. Now with his father’s recovery uncertain, the whole...
At 4, Mawi Asgedom fled the civil war cleaving Eritrea and Ethiopia, spending three years in a Sudanese refugee camp. In 1983, assisted by World Relief, the family settled in a Chicago suburb. Their new life wasn't easy: Asgedom's father, once a respected community leader and...
