by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe
Coast Salish author and artist Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe (Red Paint) engages in the art of the essay in the autobiographical collection Thunder Song. She skillfully sifts through the past, present, and the unraveling future, drawing from the different branches of her identity as a punk, queer Indigenous woman. Each essay presents distinctly captivating narratives that immerse readers in the powerful and rhythmic heartbeat of LaPointe's emotions. At one point she writes: "It was a dam or a dike bursting open
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by Tessa Hulls
It's a rare author who brings into clear focus the ever-shifting complexities of mother-daughter relationships. Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir by Tessa Hulls, covers the nesting-doll lives of three generations of women. It follows Hulls's grandmother, Sun Yi, a journalist who escaped from Communist China; the trajectory of Hulls's mother, Rose, from China to the U.S.; and Hulls's own arc of emotional growth. The skillfully told stories entwine in ways that make each section build on the previous one, propelling
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by Erin Entrada Kelly
Newbery Medalist Erin Entrada Kelly (Those Kids from Fawn Creek; Hello, Universe) introduces a tender-hearted tween boy with anxiety who learns to live mindfully from a time traveler in this buoyant and entertaining middle-grade novel.
Twelve-year-old Michael worries about him and his single mom surviving Y2K, believing the theory that computers will glitch when systems switch to 2000 and shut down the world. But it isn't Y2K that threatens the universe first. It's a 16-year-old boy named Ridge, half Filipino
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by Téa Obreht
Téa Obreht (The Tiger's Wife; Inland) is a wildly inventive magician of a writer, every performance new and wonder-inducing, every book a distinctive blend of realism and fantasy. The Morningside enters the same world as the author's short story of the same name, but the novel is a weightier thing. It teases out the strands of truth and secrets that circle the narrator, Sil, who moves with her mother to the Morningside building when she is 11.
Their presence in Island City is due to the
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by Kate DiCamillo
In the reflective and worldly-wise middle-grade novel Ferris, Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo (The Tale of Despereaux) renders with melancholy gusto a child's mission to shine love into all her relationships.
Ten-year-old Emma Phineas Wilkey, nicknamed Ferris because of her fairground birth, is having an eventful summer. Ferris's younger sister, Pinky, fully commits to a life of crime; their beloved grandmother Charisse falls ill and befriends a ghost; and their home may harbor raccoons. Meanwhile, Ferris's
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by Kekla Magoon, Cynthia Leitich Smith, illus. by Molly Murakami
Coretta Scott King and Printz Honor winner Kekla Magoon (Revolution in Our Time), American Indian Youth Literature Award winner Cynthia Leitich Smith (Hearts Unbroken), and debut children's illustrator Molly Murakami collaborate in the charming, quick-witted middle-grade graphic novel, Blue Stars, about two cousins adjusting to life in their grandmother's home.
Riley, who lives in Muscogee Nation, Okla., is moving with her family to live with her activist Grandma Gayle in Urbanopolis so her mother can accept
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by James Kaplan
Hepcats, rejoice: fans of jazz and its mid-20th-century evolution who are looking for a history that's the cat's meow (for nonenthusiasts, that means excellent) will want to snap up a copy of 3 Shades of Blue by James Kaplan (Irving Berlin). Kaplan devotes this appreciation to jazz created from 1942 to 1967, music he calls "[n]ot antique, not anodyne, not forbiddingly difficult, and viscerally thrilling." Center stage are three indisputable giants: Miles Davis, who grew up in privilege and developed "a sound
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