Copper Sun

By Sharon M Draper (2008)

Multicultural Fiction

It’s hard being a teenager. Now imagine being ripped away from everything you know, shipped half way across the world like cargo, sold as a slave, and raped nightly by your master’s son. Amari could have never fathomed the turn her life would take when strangers with “skin the color of goat’s milk” walked into her village. Many times she’d question whether she had the strength to continue on – whether it was even worth it when everything she loved had been taken from her. 

“Long as you remember, chile, ain’t nothin’ really gone.”

This Coretta Scott King Award Winner will break your heart then piece it back together again as this young heroine teaches a lesson about suffering, strength, and hanging on to hope.

My Sister’s Keeper

By Jodi Picoult (2005)

Contemporary Fiction

"If you have a sister and she dies, do you stop saying you have one? Or are you always a sister, even when the other half of the equation is gone?” 

While many young adults are struggling to find a purpose, Anna is not. She knows hers.

Anna’s sister, Kate, has been battling leukemia since she was young and when her parents realized she would need continual transfusions and bone marrow transplants they decided to conceive a perfect genetic match – Anna. From the beginning her identity is defined by her sister and the terrible disease she is fighting. For years she has accepted this role but now, quite frankly, she is sick of it. What lengths will Anna's parents go to save Kate? What lengths will Anna go to to make her life her own?

This tender story of family, devotion, and sisterly love brings to light a whole list of moral and ethical dilemmas. Does Anna have the right to make these choices about her own body?  Even though she’s only 13? Even though the choice she makes could very likely determine the fate of her sister?

“Maybe who we are isn’t so much what we do, but rather what we’re capable of when we least expect it.”

Note: This book was created for a more mature audience.  The characters are deep and there is a lot of ethical and moral debate taking place. I would say upper high school students (maybe 17 – 20+) would be able to have some great discussions centering around this book.


Another Note: This is one of my all time favorite books. Read it. 

Bluesman

By Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo (2006)

A Graphic Novel

“Even after I bought and paid for one with my own money, he never allowed me to play it in the house. We had a well house out back where I’d go and practice. Every second you spend with your fingers on the strings is another second worth of better that you get.” – Lem Taylor, p. 127

All Lem Taylor ever dreamed of doing was playin’ music – even if it meant sleeping in barns and moving from town to town trying to find a gig. He and traveling partner, Ironwood Malcott, finally hit it big and are promised a recording deal if they can make it to Memphis by Friday. But a series of unfortunate events leads to a triple murder and suicide, leaving Ironwood dead and Lem wanted for murder.

The intricate illustrations in this graphic novel tell more of the story than the dialogue itself. They will draw you in with their tale of friendship, overcoming racism, and fighting for your dreams.  

Out of the Dust

By Karen Hesse (1997)

Poetry 

There is one thing Billie Jo loves more than anything else – playing the piano. As her family struggles through the Great Depression and the Oklahoma dust storms, Billie Jo finds joy in this. Until one day, the unthinkable happens.

Her mother and baby brother are dead and it’s her fault. Her father has shut down. The crops have dried up and the fields have turned to dust. And if all that isn’t enough, the fire that destroyed her family destroyed her hands.

“I don’t say

It hurts like the parched earth with each note.

I don’t say,

One chord and

my hands scream with pain for days.

I don’t show him

the swelling

or my tears.

I tell him, ‘I’ll try.’

At home, I sit at

Ma’s piano,

I don’t touch the keys.

I don’t know why.”

Billi Jo has a lot she could run from – or a lot she could make peace with. This Newberry Award winner models how to stay strong in the face of adversity; because, just like Billie Jo, we can’t “get out of the dust” when it makes us who we are. “And what I am is good enough. Even for me.”

The Demon in the Freezer

By Richard Preston (2002)
Nonfiction

If the decision to eliminate a dangerous, deadly virus was yours to make, would you eradicate it?

“Small pox can bring the world to its knees.”

The Demon in the Freezer is a daunting recollection of the devastation that small pox caused, it’s “eradication,” and how the very secure samples hidden safely away in only two facilities worldwide have quite possibly been leaked to countries that now have the power to create global chaos if it’s ever set loose. After anthrax scares following 9/11 show that bio warfare is not an unreal possibility, researchers begin searching for a new small pox vaccine that would hold up if a super-strand were created. “Given human nature and the record of history, it seems possible that someone could be playing with the genes of small pox right now” (p. 277). 

This real life thriller will make you sit and ponder major ethical decisions such as saving samples of a deadly virus, testing live small pox strands on animals to see how they respond, and whether reawakening a virus that has all but been eradicated would ever prove worth it.

Bad Boy: A Memoir

By Walter Dean Myers (2002)

Biography

Walter Dean Myers was searching.  He didn’t know where he belonged, couldn’t speak right, and was always causing trouble. He didn’t choose to be bad because he wasn’t smart – in fact, reading and writing were his passion – he just wanted to be noticed and respected. Growing up in 1940s Harlem, Myers drifted in and out of school and even joined a gang as he struggled to find his identity.  Would he become the person he felt society pushed him to be – or would he defy the odds and become something altogether different?

Caveat: The main character in this story does not always make the right choices. Many of the decisions he makes are rebellious, sometimes even dangerous. He doesn’t alter reality; he simply tells his story – the good and the bad – and allows his readers to form their own opinions. Be sure to know your reader before recommending this moving coming of age story. 

The Watsons Go to Birmingham -- 1963

By Christopher Paul Curtis (1995)

Historical Fiction

“Ready, aim, fire.”  Enter the life of Kenny Watson, a junior high, lazy eyed boy with “Daddy Cool” for a brother. Big brother Byron is full of himself, up to no good, and always picking on Kenny.  And when his parents are finally sick of the attitude (and terrified that Byron will end up in one of those no good gangs) they pack up the family in the Brown Bomber, newly equipped with the True-Tone A-B model  700 Ultra Glide record player, and haul Bryon eighteen hours from Michigan down to mama’s home town – Birmingham, Alabama. In mama’s mind Birmingham is a quaint town free from temptations and trouble where Byron will learn a lesson or two about hard work from Grandma Sands without causing any mischief. But the Birmingham they find is different – and the lesson they learn changes everyone.


This Coretta Scott King Award winner is packed with the sarcastic humor of a junior high boy while introducing young adults to the horrors that racism can cause. You’ll easily get wrapped up in the everyday lives of the "Weird Watsons" and fly through the pages.