Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself.
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Readers will laugh and cry with thirteen-year-old Vanessa Martin as she tries to be like Vanessa Williams, the first black Miss America.
In this semi-autobiographical novel set in 1983, Vanessa Martin’s real-life reality of living with family in public housing in Newark, New Jersey, is a far cry from the glamorous Miss America stage. She struggles with thoughts of a mother she barely remembers, a grandfather dealing with addiction, and her own battle with self-confidence. But when a new teacher coordinates a beauty pageant and convinces Vanessa to enter, Vanessa’s view of the world begins to change.
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian meets Jane the Virgin in this poignant but often laugh-out-loud funny contemporary YA about losing a sister and finding yourself amid the pressures, expectations, and stereotypes of growing up in a Mexican American home.
Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents’ house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga’s role.Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family.
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From the show’s creators comes the groundbreaking novel inspired by the hit Broadway show Dear Evan Hansen.
Dear Evan Hansen,
Today’s going to be an amazing day and here’s why…
When a letter that was never meant to be seen by anyone draws high school senior Evan Hansen into a family’s grief over the loss of their son, he is given the chance of a lifetime: to belong. He just has to stick to a lie he never meant to tell, that the notoriously troubled Connor Murphy was his secret best friend.
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Rusty’s grandfather has just died. And Anton, Ruben, and the minister’s son all have it in for him. But with his grandfather’s broken pocket-watch, two cans of paint, and a little help from his friends, Rusty can do anything! Just as long as nobody’s parents find out.
The first book in a highly popular, award-winning middle-grade series from Norway, Brown has been sold into twenty-seven languages and is illustrated by the now-familiar and beloved Øyvind Torseter. A fun, satisfying read accompanied by excellent visual storytelling.
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Winner 2018 Sheehan YA Book Prize
As seventeen-year-old Linnea celebrates the first anniversary of her heart transplant, she can’t escape the feeling that the wires have been crossed. After a series of unsettling dreams, inked messages mysteriously appear on her body, and she starts to wonder if this new heart belongs to her at all.
Across town, Maxine braces for a heartbreaking anniversary: her sister Harper’s death. Between raising her brothers and parenting her grief-stricken mother, Max is unable to ignore her guilty crush on Harper’s old flame or shake her lingering suspicion that her sister’s drowning wasn’t really an accident.
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