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"In the summer of 1995, ten-year-old Joan, her mother, and her younger sister flee her father's violence to the only place they have left: her mother's ancestral home in Memphis. Half a century ago, Joan's grandfather built this majestic house for her grandmother--only to be lynched, days after becoming the first Black detective in Memphis, by his all-white police squad. This wasn't the first time violence altered the course of Joan's family's trajectory,...
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"When two wealthy white landowners are found dead, the whole country immediately thinks it must be Jerome Washington, the hired help, who killed them. He was standing over the bodies when the police responded to an anonymous call and the only one on the property at the time of death. As far as the state is concerned, it's an open and shut case. Jack Lee, born and raised in Freeman County, knows that every man deserves a solid defense and agrees to...
3) Fast pitch
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5th Grade Reading
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Summer Olympics: Sports Fiction for Kids
Middle School Project Lit Titles
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Summer Olympics: Sports Fiction for Kids
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"Shenice Lockwood dreams of leading the Fulton Firebirds to the U12 softball regional championship. But Shenice's focus gets shaken when her great-uncle Jack reveals that a career-ending-and family-name-ruining-crime may have been a setup. It's up to Shenice to discover the truth about her family's past--and fast--before secrets take the Firebirds out of the game forever."--
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Javari, a Black boy from Bushwick, Brooklyn, finds life at STEM camp in a little Appalachian town in West Virginia shockingly different--except for run-ins with the police, which are still racist. Learning about all sorts science, tech, engineering, and math things at camp also comes with learning about racism, hidden agendas, and what rich people will do to get ahead--but when he meets and befriends Cricket, a local boy and budding activist, as well...
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A lot is up in the air in Naomi Henry's life: her spot as a varsity cheer flier, her classmates' reaction to the debut of her natural hair, and her crush on the guy who's always been like a brother to her. With so much uncertainty, she feels lucky to have a best friend like Kylie to keep her grounded. After all, they're practically sisters--Naomi's mom took care of Kylie and her twin brother for years. But then a video of Kylie calling the cops on...
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2022 Teen Services Staff Picks
Black History Month: New YA
High School Battle of the Books - 2022-23
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Black History Month: New YA
High School Battle of the Books - 2022-23
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When Springville residents--at least the ones still alive--are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have the same explanation . . . Maddy did it. An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she's dealt with it because she has more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She...
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"Distant lovers. Shady friends. Racist strangers. Estranged parents. Insufferable bosses. Who says your twenties are fun? Julian Strickland is seemingly the lone Black man in the hipster dreamland of Portland, Oregon. To his friends, he's the coolest member of the scene: the soulful drummer from Chicago in an indie rock band that's just about to break through. But to himself, he's a sheltered Christian homeschool kid who used to write book reports...
10) Invisible son
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2023 YA Contemporary Fiction
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VSBA 2024-2025 -- High School Nominees
High School Project Lit Titles
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VSBA 2024-2025 -- High School Nominees
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Life can change in an instant. When you're wrongfully accused of a crime. When a virus shuts everything down. When the girl you love moves on. Andre Jackson is determined to reclaim his identity. But returning from juvie doesn't feel like coming home. His Portland, Oregon, neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying, and COVID-19 shuts down school before he can return. And Andre's suspicions about his arrest for a crime he didn't commit even taint his friendships....
11) Another country
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"First there is a battlefield, a pressure-cooker, a time-bomb: the destructive potential that exists in racial bigotry, in color prejudice and in the tensions and sensitivities which such attitudes encourage. Woven into this pattern of violence, there is a theme that is gentle, wistful and poetic: this is Baldwin's apologia for homosexual love."
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Sahara, a queer, half-Nigerian college sophomore who feels like an all-around failure, finds hope, answers, and unexpected redemption when she sets out to find the truth about The Unfortunates--the unlucky subset of Black undergrads who have been mysteriously disappearing.
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A deeply reported examination of the systemic racism inside the American financial services industry exposes practices designed to maintain the racial wealth gap, and draws on data, history, legal scholarship, and personal stories to provide a look at what it means to bank while Black.
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"In the midst of civil unrest in the summer of 2020 following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, one of the great literary voices of our time, Elizabeth Alexander, wrote a moving reflection on the psyche of young Black America, turning a mother's eye to her sons' generation. Originally published in the New Yorker, the essay brilliantly and lovingly observed the lives and attitudes of young people who even as children could...
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"Peniel Joseph offers a powerful new interpretation of recent American history. The summer of 2020, he argues, marked the climax of nothing less than a Third Reconstruction: a new period of intense struggle to secure citizenship and dignity for Black Americans, just as momentous as the movements that sought to transform America after the US Civil War and during the civil rights era. America's first and second Reconstructions failed to achieve their...
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In late May in 2020, while discussing the murder of George Floyd on CNN, Bakari Sellers spoke from the heart sharing devastating insight that touched millions around the world: "It's just so much pain. You get so tired. We have black children. I have a 15-year-old daughter. I mean, what do I tell her? I'm raising a son. I have no idea what to tell him. It's just--it's hard being black in this country when your life is not valued and people are worried...
17) Belle Greene
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"New York in the 1900s. A young girl fascinated by rare books defies all odds and becomes the director of one of the country's most prestigious private libraries, property of the magnate J. P. Morgan, among the city's richest men. But flamboyant, brilliant, beautifil, Belle Da Costa Green is hiding a secret." --page [4] of cover
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"This picture book biography in verse tells the story of Mary Hamilton, an African American woman and Civil Rights activist, who was found to be in contempt of court when she would not respond to questions from an Alabama judge who used only her first name, while calling white people "Mr.," "Mrs.," or "Miss." The NAACP took her case, which appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, which ruled in Mary Hamilton's favor." --
20) Dreamer
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"Akim Aliu -- also known as "Dreamer" -- is a Ukrainian-Nigerian-Canadian professional hockey player whose career took him all around the world and who experienced systemic racism at every turn. Dreamer tells Akim's incredible story, from being the only Black child in his Ukrainian community, to his family struggling to make ends meet while living in Toronto, to confronting the racist violence he often experienced both on and off the ice. This is...