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“Our cousins have done this program,” Sophie whispers. “Best kept secret. Zero supervision.” And just like that, Ever Wong’s summer takes an unexpected turn. Gone is Chien Tan, the strict educational program in Taiwan that Ever was expecting. In its place, she finds Loveboat: a summer-long free-for-all where adults turn a blind eye, romances unfold, snake-blood sake flows abundantly, and the nightlife runs nonstop. For fans of Jenny Han, this one is nothing short of fun.

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When Sunny Dae--self-proclaimed total nerd--meets Cirrus Soh, he can't believe how cool and confident she is. So when Cirrus mistakes Sunny's older brother Gray's bedroom--with its electric guitars and rock posters--for Sunny's own, he sort of, kind of, accidentally winds up telling her he's the front man of a rock band.

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Jocelyn, a high school junior, is determined to modernize the Chinese restaurant owned by her family, in an attempt to save it from going under. William, a young Nigerian-American, takes a summer job at the restaurant, and works closely with Jocelyn to revive the establishment. Dealing with mental health issues, the immigrant experience, and trying to fit in, Jocelyn and William share a surprising amount of common ground. As their bond grows is this just friendship, or perhaps leading to something more? 

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A fun rom-com about pursuing one’s dreams and going against convention. Skye wants to become a famous K-Pop star despite being told that she’s not skinny enough to dance and perform. But Skye knows she’s got talent and is determined to enter an international televised competition to prove it to the world. Celebrating body positivity and girl power, I’ll Be the One is about perseverance and belief in one’s self. 

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After the Rain is a graphic novel adaptation of Nnedi Okorafor’s short story “On the Road.” The drama takes place in a small Nigerian town during a violent and unexpected storm. A Nigerian-American woman named Chioma answers a knock at her door and is horrified to see a boy with a severe head wound standing at her doorstep. He reaches for her, and his touch burns like fire. Something is very wrong. Haunted and hunted, Chioma must embrace her heritage in order to survive.

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Five years after a suspicious fire killed his mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother's ghost has begun to visit him each evening. The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that Laila Z's past is intimately tied to his mother's-and his grandmother's--in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z's story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his community that he never knew. 

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In this memoir, Johnson, a Black gay man, describes growing up in New Jersey amongst a tight-knit, loving, supportive middle-class family, but he hid his sexual identity from them and his friends. This book is very personal and honest as Johnson describes his struggle to come out and embrace his true identity. Trigger warning: this book contains descriptions of sexual abuse.

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With gritty and heartbreaking honesty, Mahogany L. Browne delivers a novel-in-verse about broken promises, fast rumors, and when growing up means growing apart from your best friend.

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Maverick, a 17 year old high school senior, struggles with the balance of being a member of the King Lord’s gang, a father, a son and more. This book examines the importance of living up to your role in a gang through family generations and how that may interfere with wanting a better life for your kid at a young age; Thomas explores this through the perspective of a teenage father, who went from “having it all” to becoming selfless and more mature.  - Taylor Thomas '23

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No Man of Woman Born is a collection of seven fantasy stories in which transgender and nonbinary characters subvert and fulfill gendered prophecies. These prophecies recognize and acknowledge each character's gender, even when others do not. Trigger warnings and neopronoun pronunciation guides are provided for each story. Plus, dragons.

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Overweight sixteen-year-old Charlie yearned for her first kiss while her perfect best friend, Amelia, fell in love, so when she finally starts dating and learns the boy asked Amelia out first, she is devastated. So is she his second choice or what? Does he even really see her? Because it's time people did.

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Written by a spectator and participant in the Athens, Georgia music scene this book provides a look into the history of the alternative music mecca beginning in the late 1970s. Hale walks us through how the bohemian scene defined indie written as a collection of impressive research and reflections.

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When Ada leaves home for her freshman year at a Historically Black College, it’s the first time she’s ever been so far from her family—and the first time that she’s been able to make her own choices and to seek her place in this new world.  But with thousands of miles between them, and the freedom to finally be herself, Ada must reckon with the weight of her past and long-suppressed desires as college life messily unfolds.  With complex relationship dynamics and heavy-hitting issues, including addiction and rape, this book will leave readers deeply affected.

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Tracing his ancestry through six generations back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen-year-old youth who held the key to his family’s deep and distant past.  In this Pulitzer-Prize winning feat of research and imagination based off of the author's family history, Haley tells the story of Kunta Kinte, who is torn from his homeland and sold into slavery in the United States where he and his descendants live through major historic events.  In the four decades since its original publication, this story has lost none of its power to enthrall and provoke.

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Los Angeles, 1992.  Ashley Bennett is one of very few black students attending her private high school, and the lone Black girl in her group of friends.  It’s the end of senior year and they’re living the charmed life, spending more time at the beach than in the classroom.  On TV, the trial of four of the police officers who brutally beat Rodney King plays incessantly.   When the verdict is revealed and riots start to close in on Ashley and her family, Ashley finds herself caught between worlds and suddenly, she’s not just one of the girls. She’s one of the Black kids.

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Gifty is six years into a doctorate in neuroscience at Stanford where she’s studying the neural circuits of reward-seeking behavior in mice and attempting to alter the pathways leading to addiction and depression. Fueled by the need to understand the ills that have plagued her Ghanian immigrant family, she determinedly puts her faith in science.  Still, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the pull of the evangelical church in which she was raised.  Readers will be deeply moved by this story of faith, science, grief, and love.

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In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial event proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world. Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city, to arrive at Tova for the solstice, commandeered by disgraced Teek captain Xiala, carrying one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio, is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.

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Sophie is young and queer and into feminist theory. She decides to study abroad, choosing Paris for no firm reason beyond liking French comics. Feeling a bit lonely and out of place, she's desperate for community and a sense of belonging. She stumbles into what/who she's looking for when she meets Zena. An anarchist student-activist committed to veganism and shoplifting, Zena offers Sophie a whole new political ideology that feels electric.

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Why has American politics fallen into such a state of horrible dysfunction? Tomasky explores this question and provides a detailed account of the deep roots of political polarization in America, including a fourteen-point agenda for how to fix it. A timely exploration of how to protect our democracy.

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This book is about one of the world famous paintings that went missing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. A young upcoming artist Claire Roth finds out there's much more to the crime that meets the eye, which leads her into a massive puzzle that somehow she got mixed up in. 

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This story involves a young man who travels with his parents to Madrid in around 1957, which was under Francisco Franco’s rule. While there, he meets a young maid who works at the hotel, and is immediately intrigued by her--little does he know that everything is a lot more complicated than he could have imagined.

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Set over the course of one day, Aminah Mae Safi's This Is All Your Fault is a snarky, voice-driven YA novel that follows three young women determined to save their indie bookstore. With a multi-racial cast, this story captures enemies-turned-lovers, big friendships, growing up, and has been compared to a popular 90s movie. Can you guess which one?

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This nonfiction history makes the case that--from its inception and continuing through to present day--the United States has developed a rigid racial caste system with African-Americans at the bottom and European-Americans at the top. The author compares the US system with that of India and the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany. 

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Four Native American men from the Blackfeet Nation, who were childhood friends, find themselves in a desperate struggle for their lives against an entity that wants to exact revenge upon them for what they did during an elk hunt ten years earlier.

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Imagine an America very similar to our own. It's got homework, best friends, and ice cream. There are some differences. This America has been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not. Some of these forces are charmingly everyday, like the ability to make an orb of light appear or travel across the world through rings of fungi. But other forces are less charming and should never see the light of day. This is Elatsoe's world.

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This historical nonfiction book is well-researched and packed with details regarding the investigations into how dozens of wealthy citizens of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were murdered during the early 1900s. The book also describes how the Federal Bureau of Investigation was launched at that same time, and the agency’s role in the investigation of the Osage killings. 

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Drawing on history, politics and her personal experiences as a naturalized citizen, the author illustrates how partial acceptance into American society based on such factors as race, faith and perceived assimilation creates a caste system in which some citizens are embraced as more fully “American” than others.   In this essay collection, she explores the rights, liberties and protections that are traditionally associated with U.S. citizenship, but which are not granted equitably to all. 

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For two teenagers on election day, the political becomes personal. Marva Sheridan, who has spent the last few months knocking on doors to get out the vote, jumps into action when she sees a young man turned away at the polls on voting day. A story at the intersection of youth activism and relationships, it deftly explores serious topics while also remaining playful and intimate.

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In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism in this short story collection that won a Shirley Jackson Award and was a National Book Award Finalist.

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Half Salvordorian and half Guatemalan, 15 year old Liliana has to adjust to attending a new, almost all white high school in suburban Westburg. Trying to fit in, she disguises her LatinX Boston life, becoming Lili and learning to be more white, while all the time worried about her father’s prolonged absence. Where is he and why hasn’t he come back? This is a witty coming of age novel about class, race, identity and immigration. 

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Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights.

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Born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and an American father, the author of this graphic travelogue spent her early years in Japan and relocated to the United States in 2003. The summer before she turned sixteen, she returned to Tokyo on a solo trip to get reacquainted with her birthplace. Through illustrations, photos, and musings, Inzer documented her journey.

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A century after the Martian war of independence, a group of kids are sent to Earth as delegates from Mars, but when they return home, they are caught between the two worlds, unable to reconcile the beauty and culture of Mars with their experiences on Earth in this spellbinding novel from Hugo Award–winning author Hao Jingfang.

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From Stonewall and Lambda Award-winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time. The cover proudly depicts the protagonist bearing top surgery scars. Groundbreaking.

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