CurieMediaCenter Book List
Book Titles with Annotations
Afrika6Collen Craig
Growing up in Canada, Kim, 13, has never known her father. Her mom, journalist Riana van der Merwe, refuses to talk about him or about her South African home. But when Kim goes with Riana to cover the TRC hearings for three months, she learns about her Afrikaner family roots in the heart of the rural Karroo. Then tension quietly builds, until she finally meets her father and discovers why Riana, pregnant with Kim, ran away and never returned. The book reveals the shocking apartheid cruelty, which includes what happened to Themba’s father.
Afterlife3Gary Soto
Chuy is a normal teenage guy, making his way in the barrios of Fresno, California, and hoping to impress a pretty girl. Carefully combing his hair in the restroom at Club Estrella, he only has a few moments to consider his "loverboy" strategy before his young life is (literally) cut short by a knife-wielding stranger who misinterprets a compliment.
Soon Chuy is floating above his bleeding body, embarking on a journey of personal exploration. As he drifts though his hometown (tightening his stomach muscles so as not to get blown off course) he manages to achieve many of the things he didn’t when he was alive--recognizing how much he is loved by family and friends, saving a life, punishing a thug, and even falling in love (with a ghost-girl who has committed suicide). The Afterlife offers a tangibly detailed portrait of a young life worth living. Brangien Davis – Amazon.com
Aurelia4Anne Osterlund
Princess Aurelia is next in line to rule the kingdom of Tyralt, but she would rather be one of the common folk, free to learn and roam and . . . not marry the next tyrannical prince that comes courting. Naturally, the king wants Aurelia to marry for political power. Aurelia wants to marry for love. And someone in the kingdom wants her . . . dead. Assigned to investigate and protect Aurelia is Robert, the son of the king’s former royal spy and one of AureliaÂ’s oldest friends. As Aurelia and Robert slowly uncover clues as to who is threatening her, their friendship turns to romance. With everything possible on the line—her life, her kingdom, her heart—Aurelia is forced to take matters into her own hands, no matter the cost.
Autobiography of My Dead Brother3Walter Dean Myers
Funerals for young men, both murdered in drive-by shootings, begin and end Myers' sobering story about contemporary Harlem teens. Fifteen-year-old Jessie has always seen slightly older Rise as a hero, and the boys made a blood-brother bond as children. Then Rise pulls away, starts dealing drugs and "fronting cool," and Jessie struggles to find his old friend beneath the new persona. His search leads him to art, which is his great talent, and he begins to create a biography of Rise in pictures. The piercing question this book asks is how to survive the violence and hopelessness rooted through a neighborhood's generations. Gillian Engberg – Booklist
Battle of Jericho, The20Sharon Draper
When an elite club, The Warriors of Distinction, invites Jericho and his cousin Josh to pledge, the teens look forward to wearing the black silk jacket, going to great parties, and receiving the admiring glances of the other students at their Ohio high school. Even the girl Jericho has a crush on begins to show an interest in him. The initiation process begins rather tamely with the new pledges helping with the Christmas toy drive, but as it progresses, Jericho becomes increasingly uncomfortable with what they are asked to do and the way they treat Dana, the first-ever female pledge. Adopting the group's "All of us or none of us" creed, the 15 inductees decide to continue and things go terribly wrong. This book captures the essence of teens caught up in peer pressure. JanetHilbun-School Library Journal
Brothers Torres3Coert Voorhees
FrankieTorresTowers knows his older brother, Steve, is endangering his college scholarship by staying out all night with the local cholos and picking fights with his soccer teammates. Accepting of his sibling's good looks and macho charm, Frankie figures Steve is just looking for respect and covers for him, deflecting his parents' questions and picking up the slack at Los Torres, the family's New Mexican restaurant. Frankie's primary obsession is getting a date with Rebecca Sanchez for the Homecoming dance. When he exhibits some bravado against rich kid and soccer jock John Dalton, he only hopes to win her attention, but he unintentionally incites a series of incidents that forces his brother to defend him. With his brother’s friends backing him up, Frankie seeks revenge but soon sees how quickly the situation gets out of hand. Readers will like Frankie, and love this story.—Vicki Reutter – School Library Journal
Blood is Thicker5Paul Langan
Hakeem Randall and his family have moved to Detroit. Far from Bluford High, his old high school, Hakeem quickly finds himself in a world of trouble, and his family is at the center of it. To complicate matters, a new girl hopes to make him forget Darcy, his old girlfriend, forever.
Crank8Ellen Hopkins
Ellen Hopkins chronicles the turbulent and often disturbing relationship between Kristina, a character based on her own daughter, and the "monster," the highly addictive drug crystal meth, or "crank." Kristina is introduced to the drug while visiting her largely absent and ne'er-do-well father. While under the influence of the monster, Kristina discovers her sexy alter-ego, Bree: "there is no perfect daughter, / no gifted high school junior, / no Kristina Georgia Snow. / There is only Bree." Bree will do all the things good girl Kristina won't, including attracting the attention of dangerous boys who can provide her with a steady flow of crank. Soon, her grades plummet, her relationships with family and friends deteriorate, and she needs more and more of the monster just to get through the day. Kristina hits her lowest point when she is raped by one of her drug dealers and becomes pregnant as a result. Her decision to keep the baby slows her drug use, but doesn't stop it, and the author leaves the reader with the distinct impression that Kristina/Bree may never be free from her addiction. In the author's note, Hopkins warns "nothing in this story is impossible," but when Kristina's controlled, high-powered mother allows her teenage daughter to visit her biological father (a nearly homeless known drug user), the story feels unbelievable.
Jennifer Hubert – Amazon.com
Criss Cross3Lynne Rae Perkins
Debbie, who wishes that something would happen so she'll be a different person, and Hector, who feels he is unfinished, narrate most of the novel. Both are 14 years old. Hector is a fabulous character with a wry humor and an appealing sense of self-awareness. A secondary story involving Debbie's locket that goes missing in the beginning of the tale and is passed around by a number of characters emphasizes the theme of the book. The descriptive, measured writing includes poems, prose, haiku, and question-and-answer formats. There is a great deal of humor in this gentle story about a group of childhood friends facing the crossroads of life and how they wish to live it. B. AllisonGray-School Library Journal
Cuba 154Nancy Osa
Violet Paz, growing up in suburban Chicago, barely knows Spanish, and her dad refuses to talk about his Cuban roots, so it's a real surprise when Abuela insists that Violet have a grand quinceanero, the traditional Latina fifteenth-year coming-of-age ceremony. But Violet insists that she is an American. After all, she looks a lot like her Polish American mother. What's more, she wouldn't be caught dead in any onstage ceremony wearing a ruffled pink dress and a tiara. There is a cross-generational conflict between assimilation and the search for roots. Violet's hilarious, cool first-person narrative veers between slapstick and tenderness, denial and truth, as she shops for her party dress, attends a Cuban peace rally, despairs of her dad's values and his taste in clothes, sees that her American friends are also locked in crazy families, and finds the subject for her school comedy monologue in her own wild home, where she is "sentenced to life." There's no message, unless it's in the acceptance that resolution doesn't happen and that Dad is still worth loving--even if he comes to the elegant quinceanero in his favorite sunshine-yellow shirt with multicolored monkeys printed on it. Hazel Rochman-Booklist
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time6Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon's bitterly funny debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a murder mystery of sorts--one told by an autistic version of Adrian Mole. Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents who can barely cope with their child's quirks. He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers.
Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor's poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves--against the objection of his father and neighbors--to discover just who has murdered Wellington. He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result--quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number--is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.Jack Illingworth- Amazon.com
Donald Duk3Frank Chin
In San Francisco's Chinatown, a boy's 12th Chinese New Year is a momentous occasion, but Donald feels cranky about the holiday, annoyed by his comical name, and by all things Chinese. Over the festive days, folklore, Donald's singular family, and his alluring dreams of the historic completion of the Central Pacific Railroad by Chinese workers in 1869 draw him to a new, emphatic racial pride. A California-based playwright, poet, and outspoken critic against Chinese-American stereotypes, Chin spices his first novel with a flip, clipped, present-tense narrative voice, slapstick dialog, and kinetic dreamscapes. The result is a tart social comment packed into a cartoon, with verbal energy verging on hyperactivity. - Janet Ingraham-Library Journal
Donorboy3Brendan Halpin
When Rosalind, 14, loses her mom and her mommy in a freak auto accident, she suddenly finds herself living with Sean Cassidy, her donor father. The baffled Sean has had little to do with Ros since her mothers asked him to assist in her conception. Told as a series of e-mail and text messages, as well as diary entries, Donorboy is a funny, poignant tale of a bereaved teen and a novice father coming to terms with one another. At first Ros refuses to speak to Sean. He communicates with her by e-mail and parries her hostile questions on how, exactly, she was conceived. He responds with a detailed description of his part in the in vitro fertilization process. As Ros negotiates her grief and the pitfalls of adolescence, he confides his doubts and anxiety in e-mails to a married friend, fearing that he took on his daughter for selfish reasons. But over time the two learn to communicate, cook, write heavy-metal song lyrics, and become a family.
PatBangs-School Library Journal
Durango Street4Frank Bonham
When Rufus Henry gets out of work camp for Grand Theft Auto, he has only one place to go— back to Durango Street. Almost right away, he gets on the wrong side of the Gassers, has to join the rival Moors— and starts running for his life. Years ahead of its time, Durango Street, like The Outsiders, shows that gang violence is, sadly, nothing new— and nothing glamorous. – Product Description
Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa4Micol Ostow
After the death of the grandmother she has never met, Emily, a Jewish teen from a New York City suburb, spends a life-changing summer in Puerto Rico. Her mother left her homeland to attend college in New York and stayed on to earn a doctorate, marry, and, seemingly, never look back. Now, the girl must sacrifice a precollege road trip and final weeks with her boyfriend to stay in Puerto Rico while her grieving parent reconnects with her past. At first, relations are strained between Emily and her relatives; though polite and tactful, she's shy and sometimes mistaken for "stuck-up," particularly by her cousin Lucy, who treats her like a spoiled, privileged brat. As her mother comes to grips with her estranged sisters and her loss, Emily learns the truth about their severed ties as well as about life in the real Puerto Rico-not the one in "getaway brochures." When Lucy suspects that she is pregnant, only her New York family can help; old-fashioned attitudes and limited options for women are part of her decision to leave the island, just as her aunt did so many years before. Emily's honest, thoughtful narrative tells this engaging story of family and culture drawn from the author's own experience.—Barbara Auerbach – School Library Journal
Esperanza Rising3Pam Muñoz Ryan
Esperanza's expectation that her 13th birthday will be celebrated with all the material pleasures and folk elements of her previous years is shattered when her father is murdered by bandits. His powerful stepbrothers then hold her mother as a social and economic hostage, wanting to force her remarriage to one of them, and go so far as to burn down the family home. Esperanza's mother then decides to join the cook and gardener and their son as they move to the United States and work in California's agricultural industry. They embark on a new way of life, away from the uncles, and Esperanza unwillingly enters a world where she is no longer a princess but a worker. Set against the multiethnic, labor-organizing era of the Depression, the story of Esperanza remaking herself is satisfyingly complete, including dire illness and a difficult romance. Francisca Goldsmith – School LibraryJournal
Every Time a Rainbow Dies3Rita Williams-Garcia
Both Thulani and his girlfriend Ysa have an isolating spiritual wound. Ever since his mother suddenly returned to their Jamaican home to die four years ago, Thulani, 16, has withdrawn from the brother and sister-in-law who have raised him and who want to "man him up." Thulani spends long hours on the roof of their brownstone alone with his beloved doves, and school is to him "simply the sitting place." One day he hears a scream and looks over the parapet to see a young woman being raped in the alley below. He rescues her, covers her nakedness, and takes her home, although she fights him every step of the way. Later, fascinated by her proud rejection and grace, he begins to seek her out and follow her in her colorful clothes. "Every time you step out," he tells her, "a rainbow must die." At first she rejects him angrily because he has seen her shamed, but then she shares her name, Ysa, and her fierce ambition to become a textile designer. Little by little they begin to reach out (and then pull back again), to comfort and strengthen each other. - Patty Campbell – Amazon.com
Fallen Angels4Walter Dean Myers
A coming of age tale for young adults set in the trenches of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, Fallen Angels is the story of Perry, a Harlem teenager who volunteers for the service when his dream of attending college falls through. Sent to the front lines, Perry and his platoon come face-to-face with the Vietcong and the real horror of warfare. But violence and death aren't the only hardships. As Perry struggles to find virtue in himself and his comrades, he questions why black troops are given the most dangerous assignments, and why the U.S. is there at all. – Amazon.com
Fan Boy and Goth Girl, The Astonishing Adventures of4Barry Lyga
Starred Review. Grade 9 Up–On good days, Fanboy is invisible to the students at his high school. On bad ones, he's a target for bullying and violence. When a classmate is cruel to him, Fanboy adds him to The List and moves on. His only real friend, Cal, is a jock who can't be seen with him in public. Their love of comics, though, keeps them close friends outside of school. Reading comics and writing his own graphic novel, Schemata, are the only things that keep him sane. He dreams of showing his work to a famous author at a comic-book convention and being discovered as the next great graphic novelist. When Goth Girl Kyra IMs him with photos of him being beaten up, he's skeptical. Why does she care what happens to him? He learns, though, that she's as much an outsider as he is. The two form a tentative friendship based on hatred of their classmates, particularly jocks, and her interest in Schemata. Fanboy is a rule follower, but Kyra is a rebel with a foul mouth. She teaches him to stand up for himself, and gives him the confidence to do it. This book takes an honest look at how teens are pushed to the limits. Fanboy’s love of comics carries over into all three teen characters, breathing animation into a potentially sad but often funny story. This is a great bridge book for teens who already like graphic novels.–Stephanie L. Petruso – School Library Journal