VSBA1920 - Middle School

Amina, a Pakistani American Muslim, has entered middle school. She is happy hanging with her friend Soojin, a Korean American, but things have started changing, especially when Soojin starts hanging out with popular Emily. When Soojin says she might change her name to something more American, Amina starts to wonder if she will have to change to fit in, too. However, when her local mosque is vandalized, Amina realizes that it is better to be herself....

Blaming herself when the cousin she dragged onto a roller coaster falls into a coma, Nora struggles with unendurable guilt and tries to help when her cousin awakens with challenging disabilities.

Twelve-year-old María Luisa O'Neill-Morales (who really prefers to be called Malú) reluctantly moves with her Mexican-American mother to Chicago and starts seventh grade with a bang--violating the dress code with her punk rock aesthetic and spurning the middle school's most popular girl in favor of starting a band with a group of like-minded weirdos.

Rose Lee Carter, a thirteen-year-old African-American girl, dreams of life beyond the Mississippi cotton fields during the summer of 1955, but when Emmett Till is murdered and his killers are unjustly acquitted, Rose is torn between seeking her destiny outside of Mississippi or staying and being a part of an important movement.

Priyanka Das, an Indian girl living in America, has always wondered why her mother abandoned her home in India years ago, taking Priyanka with her, and still refuses to tell Pri anything about India or her father. One day, Pri finds one of her mother's pashminas in a forgotten suitcase, and, putting it on, finds herself transported to a place that very much resembles India--however, it may be another world altogether, and there is danger.

Author Shannon Hale writes about her experiences trying to make and be a friend from kindergarten through fifth grade and how difficult it was for her.

Twelve-year-old Harper Raine suspects her house is haunted. And when her four-year-old brother begins acting strangely, she gets a strange sense of dâejáa vu and realizes she must unlock certain memories to understand and stop the dangerous sensations in the house.

"Twelve-year-old Ada is a Chimera, one of a number of children born with human and animal DNA thanks to a genetic experiment gone wrong. When she is shipped off to a quarantined school for other kids like herself, she senses that the facility is keeping a secret, which, if discovered, could upend everything the world knows about how Chimeras came into being"--

Warcross--an online video game phenomenon--is a way of life for millions of players around the globe. For impoverished teenage hacker Emika Chen, working as a bounty hunter to track down players who place illegal bets on the game, it's her only means of survival. However, when she tries to hack the opening game of the International Warcross Championships just to make some quick cash, she accidentally glitches herself into the game. Becoming an overnight...