Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is a fiction novel about a girl named Kya Clark and the townspeople living in Barkley Cove, a small North Carolina coast town. The novel alternates between two different timelines: one following Kya throughout her childhood, and the other detailing the progression of a murder investigation in Barkley Cove. As a child, Kya is left to fend for herself living in her family’s shack located in a marsh on the outskirts of the coast town.
Scythe is the first book in Neal Shusterman’s Arc of a Scythe series. It is young adult dystopian fiction and the story follows Citra and Rowan, two teenagers living in a futuristic world in which humanity has conquered death. Citra and Rowan’s Earth is ruled by the benevolent Thunderhead, an evolved form of the Internet that has eradicated all of the problems that once tormented humanity (war, sickness, hunger, etc.). Even death is impossible thanks to revival centers that cover the planet.
Emma Woodhouse is a coding genius who appreciates numbers more than most people; numbers were simple and easy while people were just messy and over-complex. When her sister sparks an idea, Emma decides to build on a code that would determine the person of best compatibility to date as a submission to a coding competition. While some were skeptical at first, who could believe a code could tell you the best person to date, Emma was certain that her code was flawless.
By day, Kiera is one of three Black girls at her private high school as well as an honor roll student on the path to a HBCU, a historically Black college or university. However, Kiera has a massive secret. By night, Kiera is Emerald, the developer of SLAY, an online role-playing game created to be a safe space to express and celebrate Black culture. But when a teenager is murdered in real life over a dispute in the game, SLAY is revealed to the world and immediately targeted as exclusionary and racist.
Piecing Me Together by Renèe Watson is a realistic fiction novel about the main character Jade and her story of friendship and longings. Jade is interested in art as she makes pieces out of anything she can find, like fabrics, and creates it into a masterpiece. She doesn’t live in the best part of town but is invited to come to a private school through tuition. She looks forward to their Study Abroad program which she hopes to get into.
The House on Mango Street is a realistic fiction novel that sets the plot through a bunch of small memories characters have. The main character, Esperanza, feels alone and like she doesn't belong to the new house she moves to on Mango Street. She becomes friends with her neighbors, Rachel and her little sister, and kids at her school. The book explains growing up, shown through someone's own life, and all the things that come with maturity and responsibility.
Rafe Khatchadorian is a 6th grader at Hills Village Prison-I mean Middle School. Rafe loathes school and has enough problems to deal with at home including a stepdad that acts like a bear. Luckily, he has the perfect plan to have the best school year possible. Rafe and Leo, his imaginary friend, devise a plan to break every rule in the book. Can Rafe overcome a school bully, a teacher called the dragon lady, a strict principal, a school bully, a bust soda business, pass his classes, and can Rafe get Jeanne Galleta to like him while trying to have the best school year ever?
After 15-year-old Leigh Chen Sanders finds that her mother has committed suicide, her world is turned upside down. However, after seeing a huge red bird with her mother’s voice, Leigh is positive that her mother’s spirit is still in this world. Grief-stricken, she decides to travel to Taiwan with her father in hopes of solving the puzzle of her mother’s past and finding the elusive bird. While there, Leigh meets her maternal grandparents for the first time and walks down a twisted, complex path of untold stories and unshared memories.
“Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping.” - Lucy Gray Baird
Suzanne Collins bring us another installment of the Hunger Games. This time she takes us back in time to the Tenth Annual Hunger Games (64 years prior to The Hunger Games trilogy, before Coriolanus Snow was President).
Mark Dunn’s realistic fiction novel narrates the life of Ella Minnow Pea through letters as she tries to survive on her dystopian-like island run by a tyrannical council. Ella lives on the fictional island of Nollop, named after Nevin Nollop, the author of the sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” A statue of Nollop with his famous sentence engraved on tiles resides in the town. When tiles, each bearing one letter begin to fall, the heads of the island; the Council, takes it as a sign from Nollop’s ghost to eliminate all use of the fallen letters.
