By Cherie Priest

With a strong, loving family, an incredibly loyal best friend, and a budding romance with the girl of his dreams, life shows promise for seventeen-year-old Teodoro “T” Avila. But he takes some hard hits the summer before his senior year when his nearly perfect brother Manny returns from a tour in Iraq with a devastating case of PTSD.

By Patrick Flores-Scott

This is the inspirational true story of the Crispus Attucks High School Tigers basketball team and how they broke the color barrier in segregated 1950s Indiana to become state champions.

By Phillip Hoose

A young and reckless Bruce Wayne must team up with a brilliant killer and overcome the challenges of not having superpowers in order to defend against Nightwalker attackers who are targeting the elite of Gotham City.

By Marie Lu

A group of nine high school students grow in understanding of each other's challenges and forge unexpected connections as they prepare for a boys vs. girls poetry slam. 

By Nikki Grimes

Outlaws Bonnie and Clyde have been famous for almost 100 years, celebrated in movies, songs, and pop culture references.  This book details what day-to-day life was really like for the pair, remembered most for their storied romance and tragic deaths. 

By Karen Blumenthal

The history of the Vietnam era is complex. But it's the personal stories of eight people--six American soldiers, one American nurse, and one Vietnamese refugee--that form the heartbeat of Boots on the Ground. From dense jungles and terrifying firefights to chaotic medic rescues and evacuations, each individual's story reveals a different facet of the war. 

By Elizabeth Partridge

Soon after his mother's death, Matt takes a job at a funeral home in his tough Brooklyn neighborhood and, while attending and assisting with funerals, begins to accept her death and his responsibilities as a man.

By Jason Reynolds

Brooklyn lost her boyfriend a year ago and now just lost her friend Gabe.  Every time she closes her eyes, she sees his ghost. Nico is running to escape the pain of losing his brother.  His brother’s ghost begins to leave him messages to help Brooklyn. Neither wants to admit that they are being haunted, but until they do, no one’s soul will be able to rest.

By Lisa Schroeder

Acting out superhero fantasies on the streets and rooftops of Chicago, best friends Corey, Holly, and Savitri are shattered by a murderous act of violence that leaves two of them disillusioned and unable to move on.

Includes graphic art.

By Swathi Avasthi

Seventeen-year-old Zelie, her older brother Tzain, and rogue princess Amari fight to restore magic to the land and activate a new generation of magi, but they are ruthlessly pursued by the crown prince, who believes the return of magic will mean the end of the monarchy.

By Tomi Adeyemi

After surviving a near-fatal drowning that gives her the ability to enter the spirit world, Cassidy, the daughter of television ghost-hunters, visits Edinburgh where the encounters with the city's old ghosts reveals the dangers that come with her powers.

By Victoria Schwab

The events of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein unfold from the perspective of Elizabeth Lavenza, who is adopted as a child by the Frankensteins as a companion for their volatile son Victor.

By Kiersten White

Evan goes from being a nobody to everyone's hero and a social media superstar after a chance encounter with Connor just before his suicide leads others to believe Evan was his only friend.

By Val Emmich

Following a wrongful arrest as a result of racial profiling, Justyce McAllister starts a journal to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to work through his thoughts on contemporary American race relations.

By Nic Stone

Min, a thirteen-year-old girl with fox-magic, stows away on a battle cruiser and impersonates a cadet in order to solve the mystery of what happened to her older brother in the Thousand World Space Forces.

By Yoon Ha Lee

Seven award-winning authors illuminate the lives of Britain's King Henry VIII and his six wives from different viewpoints.  Meet Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard, Anne of Cleves, and Henry’s other wives, each bound for divorce or death and watch as each attempts to survive their unpredictable king.  

By M.T. Anderson

Racial conflict on the Lake Michigan beach erupted into days of urban violence that shook the city of Chicago to its foundations. This mesmerizing narrative draws on contemporary accounts as it traces the roots of the conflict that had been building for decades in race relations, politics, business, and culture.

By Claire Hartfield

This book is as the title suggests: for every one. For every one person. For every one dream. But especially for every one kid. The kids who dream of being better than they are. Kids who dream of doing more than they almost dare to dream.  Originally performed at the unveiling of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, this inspirational poem is a rallying cry to the dreamers of the world.

By Jason Reynolds

It’s been a year since a shark attack took Jane’s arm, along with everything she used to take for granted. Her dream of becoming an artist is on the line, and everything now seems out of reach.  Jane must reevaluates her ambitions and sense of identity, remembering who she was before she was Shark Girl and trying to figure out who she is now.

By Kelly L. Bingham

An anthology featuring award-winning diverse authors about diverse characters. Short stories, a graphic novel, and a one-act play explore such topics as gentrification, acceptance, untimely death, coming out, and poverty, and range in genre from contemporary realistic fiction to adventure and romance.

By Various Authors

After seventh-grader Jerome is shot by a white police officer, he observes the aftermath of his death and meets the ghosts of other fallen black boys including historical figure Emmett Till.

By Jewell Parker Rhodes

At the height of WWI, the most dangerous POWs, the ones most talented at escape, were sent to the camp of Holzminden, a site protected by every barrier imaginable, with rules enforced with cruel precision. This is the story of a group of ingenious and defiant Allied pilots and soldiers who dared to escape from Holzminden.

By Neal Bascomb

Determined to see her softball team through a historic tournament run despite severe injuries, a socially awkward teen is prescribed opioid painkillers that initially help, before high pressure leads to an out-of-control addiction.

By Mindy McGinnis

When a popular football player and ladies man and the smartest girl in school lead a school protest, sparks fly as their social media-aided revolution grows.

By Kwame Alexander

Honest Truth

Mark, tired of being sick with cancer, conceives a plan to climb Mount Rainier and runs away from home with his dog, Beau, but there are over two hundred miles between him and his goal and only his best friend, Jessie, suspects where he is heading.

By Dan Gemeinhart

When the sister who delighted their parents by her faithful embrace of Mexican culture dies in a tragic accident, Julia, who longs to go to college and move into a home of her own, discovers from mutual friends that her sister may not have been as perfect as believed.

By Erika L. Sanchez

With only her father’s dog for company in the unforgiving Canadian wilderness, Jess must forage and hunt for food, build shelter, and keep herself warm. Some days it feels like the wild is out to destroy her, but she’s stronger than she ever imagined.

Jess will survive. She has to. She knows who killed her father… and she wants revenge. 

By Kate Marshall

Here are the fictional accounts of animals and their heroic exploits in World War I, including a dog who warns soldiers of a gas attack, a cat who saves soldiers from rat bites, and a pigeon who saves an entire platoon.

By Sigmund Brouwer

In this novel-in-verse, Levi was once a premature baby who suffered from respiratory problems; he recovered, and now he struggles to demonstrate to his divorced mother and overprotective brother that he is okay. So when his father suggests he take up boxing, he falls in love with the sport, but he still must find a way to convince his family to set him free to follow his dream.

By K.A. Holt

Before the days of going toe-to-toe with the Avengers, a younger Loki is desperate to prove himself heroic and capable, while it seems everyone around him suspects him of inevitable villainy and depravity . . . except for Amora, Asgard's resident sorceress-in-training who feels like a kindred spirit, someone who values magic and knowledge, who might even see the best in him.

By Mackenzi Lee

The year is 1942, and Chaim and Gittel, are forced from their beautiful home and made to live in the Lodz Ghetto. Their family's cramped quarters are awful, but when those dire circumstances become too dangerous, their parents decide to make for the nearby Forest, where partisan fighters are trying to shepherd Jews to freedom in Russia.

By Jane Yolen

After a fight at school leaves Marcus facing suspension, Marcus's mother takes him and his younger brother, who has Down syndrome, to Puerto Rico to visit relatives they do not remember or have never met, and while there Marcus starts searching for his father, who left their family ten years ago and is somewhere on the island.

By Pablo Cartaya

Pairing verse with black-and-white watercolor illustrations, this is a unique biography of Mary Shelley, a teenage runaway who became one of the greatest authors of all time.  Shelley penned Frankenstein in answer to a dare to write a ghost story, but the seeds of her novel had been planted long before she began to write. 

By Lita Judge

Indiana basketball prodigy Derrick Bowen, who is D-Bow to his friends, is impatient to start his freshman year, but his coach favors a senior for a guard spot. Meanwhile, pressure at home builds for D-Bow to transfer from his neighborhood school to an exclusive prep school.

By Kevin Waltman

Here are the life stories of George E. Stephens and James Henry Gooding, African American soldiers who fought in the Massachusetts 54th Infantry, the famous black regiment of the Civil War, and who were also the first African American war correspondents to report from the battlefield.

By Ray Anthony Shepard

In an instant, Bea felt almost normal with Beck, and that she could fall in love again. But things change when the psychotherapist who has been helping her deal with past romantic relationships puts her into a group with Beck, a group for teens with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

By Corey Ann Haydu

In this novel-in-verse, Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.

When sixteen-year-old Kyra, a potions master, tries to save her kingdom by murdering the princess, who is also her best friend, the poisoned dart misses its mark and Kyra becomes a fugitive, pursued by the King's army and her ex-boyfriend Hal.

By Bridget Zinn

This is an account of the 1944 civil rights protest involving hundreds of African-American Navy servicemen who were unjustly charged with mutiny for refusing to work in unsafe conditions after the deadly Port Chicago explosion.

By Steve Sheinkin

Hailed as a hero, twenty-year-old Jake returns to his pro-military hometown and family, injured physically and emotionally, unsure if he can return to active duty but also uncomfortable with the alternative.

By Todd Strasser

In 1942 sixteen-year-old Chaya is a Jewish girl living in Nazi-occupied Poland. She smuggles food and documents to isolated Jewish ghettos, depending on her forged papers and "Aryan" features.  But when a mission goes wrong and many of her colleagues are arrested she finds herself on a journey to Warsaw, where an uprising is in the works.

By Jennifer A. Nielsen

These are the profiles of star athletes who overcame daunting circumstances to achieve famed careers, including Tim Howard's battle with Tourette's Syndrome, Dwyane Wade's impoverished youth, and Jim Abbott's physical disability.

By Gregory Zuckerman

These are the inspirational real-life stories of female superstar athletes Serena and Venus Williams, Simone Biles, Carli Lloyd, and more -- role models all. The athletes featured in this book met earth-shaking challenges head on, and through hard work and perseverance, went on to conquer the sports world

By Gregory Zuckerman

Told from the alternating perspectives of Sadie, a nineteen-year-old who runs away from her isolated small Colorado town to find her younger sister's killer and a true crime podcast exploring Sadie's disappearance.

By Courtney Summers

After girls mysteriously disappear on the island of Sawkill Rock, three unlikely friends come together to destroy the Collector, a monster from another world who grows stronger with each kill.

By Claire Legrand

Up until her twelfth birthday, Kiranmala considered herself an ordinary kid, but then her parents disappear and a drooling demon shows up in her kitchen, and soon she is swept into another dimension, full of magic, winged horses, talking birds, and cute princes--and now Kiranmala needs to sort it all out, find her parents, and save the world.

By Sayantani DasGupta

In this novel-in-verse, seventeen-year-old Blade endeavors to resolve painful issues from his past so that he can navigate the challenges of his former rockstar father's addictions, scathing tabloid rumors, and a protected secret that threatens his own identity.

By Kwame Alexander

When the dawn breaks, a hero rises.

Clark Kent has always been faster, stronger--better--than everyone around him. But he wasn't raised to show off, and drawing attention to himself could be dangerous. Plus, it's not like he's earned his powers . . . yet.

But power comes with a price.

By Matt de la Pena

In this novel-in-verse, things usually do not go as planned for Noah. He and his best friend Walt have been cut from the baseball team for the third year in a row, and it looks like Noah’s love interest since third grade will leave the “best friend” zone. Noah would love to retire his bat and accept the status quo, but Walt has big plans for them both,

By Kwame Alexander

This book presents biographical information about famous figures and anecdotal accounts of their missing body parts, highlighting curiosities of forensics, brain science, cloning, and organ donation.

By Carlyn Beccia

A collection of sixteen stories introduces a host of strange, wondrous beings that have never existed anywhere but in the imagination, with stories from Neil Gaiman, Diana Wynne Jones, and E. Nesbit.

Edited By Neil Gaiman

This book explores how Joan of Arc changed the course of history to remain a figure of fascination centuries after her extraordinary life and death and is told through verse, in the voices of the people and even the objects in the young girl’s life.

By David Elliot

This book takes readers to an electric era of basketball and reveals for the first time the inner workings of two players, Larry Bird and Earvin "Magic" Johnson, who were set on besting one another.

By Larry Bird and Magic Johnson 

Francisco Ortiz, a handsome straight-A student and gifted basketball player from the barrio, wins a full scholarship to an elite boarding school. His future seems promising. But soon after Francisco moves into the dorm, his new classmates assume the worst of him.

By Greg Takoudes

Princess Diana longs to prove herself to her legendary warrior sisters. But when the opportunity finally comes, she throws away her chance at glory and breaks Amazon law—risking exile—to save a mortal. Diana will soon learn that she has rescued no ordinary girl, and that with this single brave act, she may have doomed the world.

By Leigh Bardugo 

Young T'Challa, prince of the advanced African nation of Wakanda, is sent into hiding at a middle school on the South Side of Chicago, where he must confront unexpected evil and learn to access his superhero powers as the Black Panther.

By Ronald L. Smith