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Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters...
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Celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Newbery and Coretta Scott King Honoree about an unforgettable family on a road-trip during one of the most important times in the civil rights movement. When the Watson family--ten-year-old Kenny, Momma, Dad, little sister Joetta, and brother Byron--sets out on a trip south to visit Grandma in Birmingham, Alabama, they don't realize that they're heading toward one of the darkest moments in America's history. The...
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Twelve-year-old Donte is the darker-skinned brother of Trey, which in his racist, mostly-white school has earned him the nickname Black Brother. When the captain of the school fencing team successfully frames him for something he didn't do, Donte is arrested and suspended from school. Joining a local youth center, Donte meets former Olympic fencer Arden Jones and begins training to defeat his school bully and find courage to confront the racist system...
5) Fast pitch
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5th Grade Reading
Middle School Battle of the Books 2021-2022
Sports Fiction for Kids
VSBA 2022 -- Intermediate Nominees
Middle School Battle of the Books 2021-2022
Sports Fiction for Kids
VSBA 2022 -- Intermediate Nominees
Description
"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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"Otto and Sheed Alston are local sleuths in their zany Virginia town, masters of unraveling mischief using their unmatched powers of deduction. As summer winds down and the first day of school looms, the boys are craving just a little more time for fun, eve as they bicker over what kind of fun they want to have. That is, until a mysterious man named Mr. Flux appears with a camera that literally freezes time. Now, with the help of some very strange...
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Ryan, a cheerful fourth-grader from Portland, Oregon, tries to look on the bright side of every difficulty life throws at her, including having a name that's typically a boy's name. When her father loses his job, they have to move to a smaller house and sell their second car. Ryan is sometimes sad, especially when she botches a well-practiced speech, but with her family and friends supporting her, she finds ways to make sunshine in her life.
Author
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"For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him--most urgently, why he, and other black people he knew, seemed to live in fear ... In [this book], Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth...
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In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as...
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Adventure Books for Kids
Fantasy Books for Kids
Imagination Summer Vacation
VSBA 2022 -- Intermediate Nominees
Fantasy Books for Kids
Imagination Summer Vacation
VSBA 2022 -- Intermediate Nominees
Description
Thirteen-year-old Amari, a poor Black girl from the projects, gets an invitation from her missing brother to join the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs and join in the fight against an evil magician.
12) Class act
Author
Description
"Eighth grader Drew Ellis recognizes that he is't afforded the same opportunities, no matter how hard he works, that his privileged classmates at the Riverdale Academy Day School take for granted, and to make matters worse, Drew begins to feel as if his good friend Liam might be one of those privileged kids and is finding it hard not to withdraw, even as their mutual friend Jordan tries to keep their group of friends together."--Provided by publisher....
13) Rebound
Author
Description
In the summer of 1988, twelve-year-old Chuck Bell is sent to stay with his grandparents, where he discovers jazz and basketball and learns more about his family's past.
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Black History Month: Historical Fiction
Historically Fictional
Juneteenth for All Ages
Women's History Month: Historical Fiction
Historically Fictional
Juneteenth for All Ages
Women's History Month: Historical Fiction
Description
"Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the Empire. Her sister, Esi, will be imprisoned beneath...
15) Peter's chair
Author
Description
When Peter discovers his blue furniture is being painted pink for a new baby sister, he rescues the last unpainted item, a chair, and runs away.
16) The crossover
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Formats
Description
Fourteen-year-old twin basketball stars Josh and Jordan wrestle with highs and lows on and off the court as their father ignores his declining health.
17) Ghost boys
Author
Description
Twelve-year-old Jerome is shot by a police officer who mistakes his toy gun for a real threat. As a ghost, he observes the devastation that's been unleashed on his family and community in the wake of what they see as an unjust and brutal killing.
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"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...
19) The Guardians
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In a small Florida town, a young lawyer is shot to death. A young black man, a former client, named Quincy Miller is charged and convicted. For 22 years, Miller maintains his innocence from inside prison. Finally, Guardian Ministries takes on Miller's case, but the Episcopal minister in charge gets more than he bargained for as powerful people do not want Miller exonerated.
Author
Description
An African American woman searches for a fulfilling relationship through two loveless marriages and finally finds it in the person of Tea Cake, an itinerant laborer and gambler. Their Eyes Were Watching God, an American classic, is a luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern black woman in the 1930s whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to seventy...