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Ruby Hale, who avoids confrontation and spiders, hopes to be a travel influencer. Given that interest, she films, edits, and posts content to her YouTube Show, Ruby’s Hidden Gems. Seeing the feats other cultures have achieved and the architecture that they’ve built all speak to Ruby’s soul. So, when her French class schedules a trip to France, Ruby is beyond excited. She wants to soak in as much of the world as she can in order to earn her way to exploring more of it. Once Ruby reaches Paris, her adrenaline junkie friend Valerie Moreau encounters a young man named Julien who offers a tourRead More →

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Set in 1955 in Levittown, Pennsylvania, The Color of a Lie by Kim Johnson explores a tumultuous period in our country’s history. During this time when school integration was new and Jim Crow Laws were still in effect, Levitt and Sons were mass-producing homes under the guise that they were helping to create affordable housing, especially for veterans. That housing, however, was for white families only, creating a deeply discriminatory practice. After serving as a soldier in World War II, Williams Greene is determined to provide access to the American Dream for his family. He is tired of the race riots in the big city,Read More →

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Stacey Lee’s Kill Her Twice is a fascinating historical fiction/murder mystery written for young adults. Based loosely on the character Anna May Wong, who is considered the first female Chinese American Hollywood movie star, the novel tells the story of the challenges faced by Chinese people living in Los Angeles, California, in 1932. Lee presents her clues by alternating between the perspectives of two teens: May Chow, 19, and her sister Gemma, 17, who sell flowers in City Market. The girls’ father, Ba, always told his daughters that “his three fierce clouds—Mei Wun, or ‘beautiful cloud,’ for May; Gam Wun, or ‘fresh cloud,’ for [Gemma];Read More →

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Set in the early 1800s, Sail Me Away Home by Ann Clare LeZotte tells the story of Mary Elizabeth Lambert. Mary, a deaf-mute living in Chilmark, Massachusetts, travels to Paris to return with ideas for starting a school in the Americas for the non-speaking deaf population. Like a bee pollinating flowers, Mary hopes to return with methods that will enable the languages of the deaf and the speaking to converge. Born with hereditary deafness, something that was not an anomaly in Martha’s Vineyard from 1740 to the late 1800s, Mary is determined “to treat all—no matter their dress, parentage, or how many acres their familyRead More →

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Any reader who enjoys genre bending and a good mystery will likely appreciate Artifice by Sharon Cameron. Set in Amsterdam in 1943-1946, the novel is most clearly a historical fiction piece about the Holocaust, but it’s not “just another Holocaust story.” In this account, Cameron focuses on the efforts of Resistance workers who set out to save the children. An estimated 600 Jewish toddlers and babies were saved from death in the concentration camps. It is also a story about art. Isa De Smit lives in a home that houses Gallery De Smit, a place that is “full of art and artists. Lessons in herRead More →

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With By Any Other Name, Erin Cotter writes a historical fiction novel about William Shakespeare’s London, sharing ample allusions to his work and plays. The story opens in 1593 London at the Rose Theater, where young Will Hughes is aging out of the theater because his voice is changing and he will no longer be able to play the female parts. To further complicate his life, the plague is making its way through the city, and theaters will close until it passes. As a result, his patron, Christopher Marlowe (Kit) encourages him to find another home. Home. The word makes Will’s breath catch. At eightRead More →

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Pride and Prejudice in Pittsburgh by Rachael Lippincott does indeed allude to the Jane Austen novel. However, it is about so much more, taking a deep dive into the magic of attraction and chemistry, where two young women wish for moments charged with potential.   Usually ambitious and inspired, Audrey Cameron lives in 2023 Pittsburgh, but she has put her life on hold. Art school wait lists, rejections, and heartbreaks seem to define her present. Because her heart’s desire involves using art to tell the stories of people, Audrey dreams of attending Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). She wishes to spend her days studyingRead More →

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Kin: Rooted in Hope by Carole Boston Weatherford is a powerful textual tribute to “the ancestors who carried us through” accented by scratchboard-like illustrations by Jeffery Boston Weatherford. In this verse novel, the Weatherfords conjure the voices of their ancestors and speak to them and through them with their art. Seeking answers to key questions: “At what age is hope born, when does resistance first rise up, and when do dreams wither” (22-23), the mother/son pair tells a moving story of their family tree. Their goal is to give voice to their African-American ancestors who were “marginalized, muted, or muzzled” as they tilled fields intoRead More →

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All You Have to Do by Autumn Allen invites readers to consider some important issues and to answer some key questions. Allen follows the lives of two black men: Kevin, an activist in 1968, and his nephew Gibran Wilson, a high school senior in 1995 attending Lakeside Academy in New York. Allen’s intergenerational story is about “Black people taking care of business—the business of and for Black people” (37). It shares the similarities in the fights both young men have in exercising control over their lives, politically, economically, and psychically. Through her two protagonists, Allen asks: Do we join the world with all its imperfectionsRead More →