By day, Kiera is one of three Black girls at her private high school as well as an honor roll student on the path to a HBCU, a historically Black college or university. However, Kiera has a massive secret. By night, Kiera is Emerald, the developer of SLAY, an online role-playing game created to be a safe space to express and celebrate Black culture. But when a teenager is murdered in real life over a dispute in the game, SLAY is revealed to the world and immediately targeted as exclusionary and racist.
Piecing Me Together by Renèe Watson is a realistic fiction novel about the main character Jade and her story of friendship and longings. Jade is interested in art as she makes pieces out of anything she can find, like fabrics, and creates it into a masterpiece. She doesn’t live in the best part of town but is invited to come to a private school through tuition. She looks forward to their Study Abroad program which she hopes to get into.
Free Lunch is an autobiography by Rex Ogle, following him through the 6th grade being a kid from an under-privileged, abuse home in a wealthy school district. He's living with his half baby brother, his stepdad, and his mother. His mom puts him on the free lunch program at school and he's confused, but above all, embarrassed.
The House on Mango Street is a realistic fiction novel that sets the plot through a bunch of small memories characters have. The main character, Esperanza, feels alone and like she doesn't belong to the new house she moves to on Mango Street. She becomes friends with her neighbors, Rachel and her little sister, and kids at her school. The book explains growing up, shown through someone's own life, and all the things that come with maturity and responsibility.
The year is 1957, and Spain has something to hide. Under fascist dictator General Franco’s tyrannical rule the only option is silence, and defiance comes with a hefty price —imprisonment, death, or worse. Meanwhile, 18-year-old Daniel Matheson, the rather spoiled son of a wealthy oil tycoon, journeys to Madrid with his parents, who are brokering a deal with Franco.
Rafe Khatchadorian is a 6th grader at Hills Village Prison-I mean Middle School. Rafe loathes school and has enough problems to deal with at home including a stepdad that acts like a bear. Luckily, he has the perfect plan to have the best school year possible. Rafe and Leo, his imaginary friend, devise a plan to break every rule in the book. Can Rafe overcome a school bully, a teacher called the dragon lady, a strict principal, a school bully, a bust soda business, pass his classes, and can Rafe get Jeanne Galleta to like him while trying to have the best school year ever?
After 15-year-old Leigh Chen Sanders finds that her mother has committed suicide, her world is turned upside down. However, after seeing a huge red bird with her mother’s voice, Leigh is positive that her mother’s spirit is still in this world. Grief-stricken, she decides to travel to Taiwan with her father in hopes of solving the puzzle of her mother’s past and finding the elusive bird. While there, Leigh meets her maternal grandparents for the first time and walks down a twisted, complex path of untold stories and unshared memories.
Rebel is the fourth science fiction novel in Marie Lu's Legend series. It takes place a decade after Champion and illustrates Daniel and Eden Wings’ new lives in the supposed-utopia of Antarctica. Daniel learns to navigate his relationship with his now-grown brother as Eden tries to escape from his older brother's shadow. The two brothers must take on the notorious criminal Dominic Hann while challenging their government's beliefs and facing their pasts.
“Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping.” - Lucy Gray Baird
Suzanne Collins bring us another installment of the Hunger Games. This time she takes us back in time to the Tenth Annual Hunger Games (64 years prior to The Hunger Games trilogy, before Coriolanus Snow was President).
Mark Dunn’s realistic fiction novel narrates the life of Ella Minnow Pea through letters as she tries to survive on her dystopian-like island run by a tyrannical council. Ella lives on the fictional island of Nollop, named after Nevin Nollop, the author of the sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” A statue of Nollop with his famous sentence engraved on tiles resides in the town. When tiles, each bearing one letter begin to fall, the heads of the island; the Council, takes it as a sign from Nollop’s ghost to eliminate all use of the fallen letters.
