by Alia Trabucco Zerán, trans. by Sophie Hughes
Clean, by International Booker Prize finalist Alia Trabucco Zerán, opens as the narrator introduces herself: "My name is Estela. Can you hear me?" The context of Estela's situation is unclear at first, but readers soon understand that she is alone in a room with a two-way mirror, offering some kind of testimony or confession. She isn't being interrogated, but the entirety of the novel, rendered in a taut translation from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes, could be seen as Estela's answer to the question:
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by Glory Edim
Long before she created her online book club, Well-Read Black Girl, Glory Edim found solace and inspiration in literature. In her insightful first memoir, Gather Me, Edim (On Girlhood) traces her life's journey through the books and authors that have shaped her as a writer and a person.
The daughter of Nigerian immigrants, Edim adored her father and was devastated when he suddenly moved back to Nigeria after her parents' divorce. She spent much of her childhood caring for her two younger brothers and, when
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by Jen Ferguson
After a climbing accident led to a permanent injury and splintered their once unbreakable bond, a brother, a sister, and their best friend hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) together in this marvelous contemporary YA novel about love--for others and for the land.
Ever since Hank's (18, white) climbing accident, his half-sister, Molly (17, Metís, "half-white"), has tiptoed around him. The duo's best friend, Tray (18, Metís), has been secretly crushing on Molly--who blames him for Hank's fall--while
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by Jared Sullivan
Journalist Jared Sullivan's compelling Valley So Low: One Lawyer's Fight for Justice in the Wake of America's Great Coal Catastrophe details the aftermath of the 2008 collapse of a holding pond that contained waste byproduct from the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston, Tenn., power station. The catastrophe released "more than a billion gallons of coal-ash slurry--about fifteen hundred times the volume of liquid that flows over Niagara Falls each second," burying some 300 acres of property and swamping nearby
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by Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada
In their lauded Banned Book Club, Korean creative team Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada, with illustrator Ko Hyung-Ju, used the graphic novel format to tell Kim's gripping story of book club rebellion under martial law. Kim and Estrada inspiringly continue Kim's autobiographical journey in No Rules Tonight, this time illustrated by Estrada himself.
No Rules Tonight opens in 1984, after Hyun Sook's banned book club was disbanded. The government's draconian curfews have been lifted, but "saying, thinking, watching,
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by Ann Clare LeZotte
Ann Clare LeZotte (Show Me a Sign) takes inspiration from a real-life court case and her own experiences as a "completely deaf" member of the Deaf community to sensitively explore language deprivation among deaf children in Deer Run Home, a devastating but hopeful middle-grade novel-in-verse.
Twelve-year-old Effie, who's deaf, speaks American Sign Language (ASL), which her family refuses to learn. She and her sister, Deja, live with their mom and stepdad during the Covid-19 pandemic. When Effie starts having
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by Russell Cobb
Corrupt oil barons and desperate people struggle to possess a plot of oil-rich land in the meticulously researched, vividly told Ghosts of Crook County: An Oil Fortune, a Phantom Child, and the Fight for Indigenous Land, a work of historical nonfictionby fourth-generation Oklahoman author Russell Cobb (The Great Oklahoma Swindle).
Cobb thoroughly explores the practice of land transfers "from Native hands to the portfolios of white oilmen and their companies" via a single case, that of the allotment granted
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