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Above Ground

Clint Smith

A Best Book of the Year 2023:



TIME

NPR's Best Books

New York Public Library

Electric Lit

The Root

NBC Today

Mother Jones

The New York Times bestselling poetry collection with "inextinguishable generosity and abundant wisdom" (Monica Youn) from Clint Smith, author of #1 bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner How the Word Is Passed.



Clint Smith's vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions. There are poems that revel in the wonder of discovering the world anew through the eyes of your children, as they discover it for the first time. There are poems that meditate on what it means to raise a family in a world filled with constant social and political tumult. Above Ground wrestles with how we hold wonder and despair in the same hands, how we carry intimate moments of joy and a collective sense of mourning in the same body. Smith's lyrical, narrative poems bring the reader on a journey not only through the early years of his children's lives, but through the changing world in which they are growing up--through the changing world of which we are all a part.



Above Ground is a breathtaking collection that follows Smith's first award-winning book of poetry, Counting Descent.

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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

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Tom Lake

Ann Patchett

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK

In this beautiful and moving novel about family, love, and growing up, Ann Patchett once again proves herself one of America's finest writers.

"Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature." --The Guardian

In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.

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By Any Other Name

Jodi Picoult

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the co-author of Mad Honey comes an “inspiring” (Elle) novel about two women, centuries apart—one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays—who are both forced to hide behind another name.

“You’ll fall in love with Emilia Bassano, the unforgettable heroine based on a real woman that Picoult brings vividly to life in her brilliantly researched new novel.”—Kristin Hannah, author of The Women

Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.

In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.

Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire centers two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on . . . no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten.

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The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt

THE INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Book of 2024 • A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 • A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2024 • Named a Best Book of 2024 by the Economist, the New York Post, and Town & Country • The Goodreads Choice Award Nonfiction Book of the Year

A must-read for all parents: the generation-defining investigation into the collapse of youth mental health in the era of smartphones, social media, and big tech—and a plan for a healthier, freer childhood.

“With tenacity and candor, Haidt lays out the consequences that have come with allowing kids to drift further into the virtual world . . . While also offering suggestions and solutions that could help protect a new generation of kids.” —Shannon Carlin, TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2024

After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.

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The Giver of Stars: Reese's Book Club

Jojo Moyes

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER |  A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
 
“A great narrative about personal strength and really captures how books bring communities together.” —Reese Witherspoon
 
From the author of the forthcoming Someone Else’s Shoes, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond in Depression-era America

Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve, hoping to escape her stifling life in England.  But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.

The leader, and soon Alice's greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient woman who's never asked a man's permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky. 

What happens to them--and to the men they love--becomes an unforgettable drama of loyalty, justice, humanity, and passion. These heroic women refuse to be cowed by men or by convention. And though they face all kinds of dangers in a landscape that is at times breathtakingly beautiful, at others brutal, they’re committed to their job: bringing books to people who have never had any, arming them with facts that will change their lives.

Based on a true story rooted in America’s past, The Giver of Stars is unparalleled in its scope and epic in its storytelling. Funny, heartbreaking, enthralling, it is destined to become a modern classic--a richly rewarding novel of women’s friendship, of true love, and of what happens when we reach beyond our grasp for the great beyond.

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My Name Is Emilia del Valle

Isabel Allende

In this spellbinding historical novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea and The Wind Knows My Name, a young writer journeys to South America to uncover the truth about her father—and herself.

In San Francisco in 1866, an Irish nun, abandoned following a torrid relationship with a Chilean aristocrat, gives birth to a daughter named Emilia del Valle. Raised by a loving stepfather, Emilia grows into an independent thinker and a self-sufficient young woman.

To pursue her passion for writing, she is willing to defy societal norms. At the age of seventeen, she begins to publish pulp fiction using a man’s pen name. When these fictional worlds can no longer satisfy her sense of adventure, she turns to journalism, convincing an editor at The Daily Examiner to hire her. There she is paired with another talented reporter, Eric Whelan.

As she proves herself, her restlessness returns, until an opportunity arises to cover a brewing civil war in Chile. She seizes it, as does Eric, and while there, she meets her estranged father and delves into the violent confrontation in the country where her roots lie. As she and Eric discover love, the war escalates and Emilia finds herself in extreme danger, fearing for her life and questioning her identity and her destiny.

A riveting tale of self-discovery and love from one of the most masterful storytellers of our time, My Name Is Emilia del Valle introduces a character who will never let hold of your heart.

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Dear Martin

Nic Stone

"Powerful, wrenching.” –JOHN GREEN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Turtles All the Way Down

"Raw and gripping." –JASON REYNOLDS, New York Times bestselling coauthor of All American Boys

"A must-read!” –ANGIE THOMAS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give

Raw, captivating, and undeniably real, Nic Stone joins industry giants Jason Reynolds and Walter Dean Myers as she boldly tackles American race relations in this stunning #1 New York Times bestselling debut, a William C. Morris Award Finalist.

Justyce McAllister is a good kid, an honor student, and always there to help a friend—but none of that matters to the police officer who just put him in handcuffs. Despite leaving his rough neighborhood behind, he can't escape the scorn of his former peers or the ridicule of his new classmates.

Justyce looks to the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for answers. But do they hold up anymore? He starts a journal to Dr. King to find out.

Then comes the day Justyce goes driving with his best friend, Manny, windows rolled down, music turned up—way up, sparking the fury of a white off-duty cop beside them. Words fly. Shots are fired. Justyce and Manny are caught in the crosshairs. In the media fallout, it's Justyce who is under attack.

"Vivid and powerful." -Booklist, Starred Review
 
"A visceral portrait of a young man reckoning with the ugly, persistent violence of social injustice." -Publishers Weekly

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Salt to the Sea

Ruta Sepetys

#1 New York Times bestseller and winner of the Carnegie Medal! 

"A superlative novel . . . masterfully crafted."--The Wall Street Journal

Based on "the forgotten tragedy that was six times deadlier than the Titanic."--Time

Winter 1945. WWII. Four refugees. Four stories.

Each one born of a different homeland; each one hunted, and haunted, by tragedy, lies, war. As thousands desperately flock to the coast in the midst of a Soviet advance, four paths converge, vying for passage aboard the Wilhelm Gustloff, a ship that promises safety and freedom. But not all promises can be kept . . .

This paperback edition includes book club questions and exclusive interviews with Wilhelm Gustloff survivors and experts.

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Paper Towns

John Green

From the #1 bestselling author of Turtles All the Way Down and The Fault in Our Stars

Winner of the Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery
#1 New York Times Bestseller
USA Today Bestseller
Publishers Weekly Bestseller
Now a major motion picture  

 

When Margo Roth Spiegelman beckons Quentin Jacobsen in the middle of the night—dressed like a ninja and plotting an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows her. Margo’s always planned extravagantly, and, until now, she’s always planned solo. After a lifetime of loving Margo from afar, things are finally looking up for Q . . . until day breaks and she has vanished. Always an enigma, Margo has now become a mystery. But there are clues. And they’re for Q.

Printz Medalist John Green returns with the trademark brilliant wit and heart-stopping emotional honesty that have inspired a new generation of readers.

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In a Handful of Dust

Mindy McGinnis

Fans of classic frontier survival stories, as well as readers of dystopian literature, will enjoy this futuristic story about an epic cross-country journey.

In a Handful of Dust is set ten years after the first novel, Not a Drop to Drink, as a dangerous disease strikes the community where teenage Lucy lives. When her adoptive mother, Lynn, takes Lucy away from their home and friends in order to protect her, Lucy struggles to figure out what home means. During their journey west to find a new life, the two face nature’s challenges, including hunger, mountains, and deserts.

New York Times bestselling author Michael Grant says Not a Drop to Drink is a debut “not to be missed,” and this companion title is full of Mindy McGinnis’s evocative, spare language matched with incredible drama and danger. In a Handful of Dust is perfect for fans of the Partials, Enclave, and Legend series.

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True Life in Uncanny Valley

Deb Caletti

From the acclaimed author of A Heart in a Body in the World comes the gripping story of a girl living a lie in order to find the truth about her family and herself.

Eleanor, like so many others, is used to watching her famous father from afar. To the world, Hugo Harrison is the brilliant and charismatic tech genius whose AI inventions seem to create a new, better reality. But to Eleanor, whose mother had an affair with Hugo years ago, he is something even more intriguing, and dangerous—a secret. 

When Eleanor’s spying leads her to a posting for a live-in summer nanny job for Hugo's young sonher half-brothershe knows she has to apply. This is finally her chance to learn about her father, his family, and the life that could have been hers. She only has to do one thing: become someone else. With just a few well-placed lies, Eleanor is catapulted into an unfamiliar, intoxicating whirlwind of money and ego, and into a new romance with a cute boy who works for Hugo. But in a place where image is everything and reality can be rewritten, is anything real—even the Harrisons themselves?

Caught between her own secrets and the ones she’s uncovering about her father and his latest invention, Eleanor faces a question that technology can't answer: what is your true self, and how do you know when you find her?

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Lunar New Year Love Story

Gene Luen Yang

An NPR Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Best Book of the Year
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
A Booklist Best Book of the Year
A Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year
A Horn Book Best Book of the Year
A New York Public Library Best Book of the Year

Graphic novel superstars Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham join forces in this heartwarming rom-com about fate, family, and falling in love.

She was destined for heartbreak. Then fate handed her love.

Val is ready to give up on love. It's led to nothing but secrets and heartbreak, and she's pretty sure she's cursed—no one in her family, for generations, has ever had any luck with love.

But then a chance encounter with a pair of cute lion dancers sparks something in Val. Is it real love? Could this be her chance to break the family curse? Or is she destined to live with a broken heart forever?

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The Weight of Blood

Tiffany D. Jackson



 

* AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * INDIE BESTSELLER * JUNIOR LIBRARY GUILD SELECTION * KIDS' INDIE NEXT LIST PICK * NPR BEST PICK * KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR *

New York Times bestselling author Tiffany D. Jackson ramps up the horror and tackles America's history and legacy of racism in this suspenseful YA novel following a biracial teenager as her Georgia high school hosts its first integrated prom.

When Springville residents--at least the ones still alive--are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have the same explanation . . . Maddy did it.

An outcast at her small-town Georgia high school, Madison Washington has always been a teasing target for bullies. And she's dealt with it because she has more pressing problems to manage. Until the morning a surprise rainstorm reveals her most closely kept secret: Maddy is biracial. She has been passing for white her entire life at the behest of her fanatical white father, Thomas Washington.

After a viral bullying video pulls back the curtain on Springville High's racist roots, student leaders come up with a plan to change their image: host the school's first integrated prom as a show of unity. The popular white class president convinces her Black superstar quarterback boyfriend to ask Maddy to be his date, leaving Maddy wondering if it's possible to have a normal life.

But some of her classmates aren't done with her just yet. And what they don't know is that Maddy still has another secret . . . one that will cost them all their lives.

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Song of a Blackbird

Maria van Lieshout

FIVE STARRED REVIEWS!

"This is essential, illuminating reading.” —R. J. Palacio, bestselling author of Wonder

Fight hate. Make art.

In 1943 Amsterdam, Emma Bergsma’s world changes when she witnesses Jewish families being forcibly deported to concentration camps. That pivotal moment lights a fire within her, and she decides to join the Dutch Resistance. Before long, Emma is drawn into a clandestine world of printing presses and counterfeiters, with thousands of lives on the line. 

In 2011 Amsterdam, teenage Annick’s world has changed as well. A search for a bone marrow donor for her beloved oma leads to a shocking revelation: her grandmother was secretly adopted as a child. The only clues to finding their lost family are a series of art prints hanging on the wall—each signed by a mysterious “Emma B.”

This timely graphic novel weaves together two timelines to reveal how art, in the face of political upheaval and nearly insurmountable adversity, can become our greatest lifeline.

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A Long Stretch of Bad Days

Mindy McGinnis

2024 Whippoorwill Award Honor Book

From award-winning author Mindy McGinnis comes a thrilling and gripping YA mystery about a small town's past and the secrets unearthed by way of two teen girls--and a podcast. Perfect for fans of Sadie, The Cheerleaders, and A Good Girl's Guide to Murder.

A lifetime of hard work has put Lydia Chass on track to attend a prestigious journalism program and leave Henley behind--until a school error leaves her a credit short of graduating.

Bristal Jamison has a bad reputation and a foul mouth, but she also needs one more credit to graduate. An unexpected partnership forms as the two remake Lydia's town history podcast to investigate the Long Stretch of Bad Days--a week when Henley was hit by a tornado, a flash flood, as well as its first, only, and unsolved murder.

As their investigation unearths buried secrets, some don't want them to see the light. When the threats escalate, the girls have to uncover the truth before the dark history of Henley catches up with them.

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The Bletchley Riddle

Ruta Sepetys

A stunning collaboration between award-winning and bestselling authors Ruta Sepetys and Steve Sheinkin, this middle grade historical adventure follows two siblings at Bletchley Park, the home of WWII codebreakers, as they try to unravel a mystery surrounding their mother’s disappearance.

Remember, you are bound by the Official Secrets Act…

Summer, 1940. Nineteen-year-old Jakob Novis and his quirky younger sister Lizzie share a love of riddles and puzzles. And now they’re living inside of one. The quarrelsome siblings find themselves amidst one of the greatest secrets of World War II—Britain’s eccentric codebreaking factory at Bletchley Park. As Jakob joins Bletchley’s top minds to crack the Nazi's Enigma cipher, fourteen-year-old Lizzie embarks on a mission to solve the mysterious disappearance of their mother.

The Battle of Britain rages and Hitler’s invasion creeps closer. And at the same time, baffling messages and codes arrive on their doorstep while a menacing inspector lurks outside the gates of the Bletchley mansion. Are the messages truly for them, or are they a trap? Could the riddles of Enigma and their mother's disappearance be somehow connected? Jakob and Lizzie must find a way to work together as they race to decipher clues which unravel a shocking puzzle that presents the ultimate challenge: How long must a secret be kept?

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The Other Side of Tomorrow

Tina Cho



 

Booklist Editor's Choice of 2024: Books for Youth

School Library Journal Best Book of 2024

Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2024

A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

Perfect for fans of Illegal and When Stars Are Scattered, this poignant and moving graphic novel in verse captures the dangers and hope that come with fleeing North Korea and reaching for a brighter future through the lives of Yunho and Myunghee.

From never knowing where they'll find their next meal to avoiding soldiers lurking at every corner, many North Koreans have learned that sticking around can be just as deadly as attempting to flee . . . almost.

Both shy, resourceful Yunho and fierce, vibrant Myunghee know this. So when they each resolve to run away from the bleak futures they face, it's with the knowledge that they could be facing a fate worse than death.

While Yunho hopes to reunite with his omma, who snuck across the border years ago, Myunghee is reaching for dreams that are bigger than anything the regime would allow her to have. The two are strangers to each other until a chance encounter unwittingly intertwines their fates and Myunghee saves Yunho's life.

Kept together by their dreams for a brighter future, they face a road plagued by poisonous jungle snakes, corrupt soldiers, and the daily fear of discovery and imprisonment. But with every step toward freedom, there is also hope. Will it be enough for both of them to make it to safety without losing each other along the way

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Black Star

Kwame Alexander

A Coretta Scott King Honor Book



The thrilling second book in the #1 New York Times bestselling Door of No Return trilogy stars Kofi's granddaughter, Charley, who's set on becoming the first female pitcher to play professional ball but who soon has to contend with the tensions about to boil over in her segregated town.

You can't protect her from knowing. The truth is all we have.



12-year old Charley Cuffey is many things: a granddaughter, a best friend, and probably the best pitcher in all of Lee's Mill. Set on becoming the first female pitcher to play professional ball, Charley doesn't need reminders from her best friend Cool Willie Green to know that she has lofty dreams for a Black girl in the American South.



Even so, Nana Kofi's thrilling stories about courageous ancestors and epic journeys make it impossible not to dream big. She knows he has so many more to tell, but according to her parents, she isn't old enough to know about certain things like what happened to Booker Preston that one night in Great Bridge and why she can never play on the brand-new real deal baseball field on the other side of town.



When Charley challenges a neighborhood bully to a game at the church picnic, she knows she can win, even with her ragtag team. But when the picnic spills over onto their ball field, she makes a fateful decision.



A child cannot protect herself if she does not know her history, and Charley's choice brings consequences she never could have imagined.



In this riveting second book of the Door of No Return trilogy, set during the turbulent segregation era, and the beginning of The Great Migration, Kwame Alexander weaves a spellbinding story of struggle, determination, and the unflappable faith of an American family.

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Alebrijes: Cuentista Book II

Donna Barba Higuera

PURA BELPRÉ HONOR WINNER



BEST OF THE YEAR

New York Times · Kirkus · Booklist · Chicago Public Library



The follow-up to Newbery and Pura Belpré Award-winning The Last Cuentista



For 400 years, Earth has been a barren wasteland. The few humans that survive scrape together an existence in the cruel city of Pocatel - or go it alone in the wilderness beyond, filled with wandering spirits and wyrms. They don't last long.



13 year-old pickpocket Leandro and his sister Gabi do what they can to forge a life in Pocatel. The city does not take kindly to Cascabel like them - the descendants of those who worked the San Joaquin Valley for generations.



When Gabi is caught stealing precious fruit from the Pocatelan elite, Leando takes the fall. But his exile proves more than he ever could have imagined -- far from a simple banishent, his consciousness is placed inside an ancient drone and left to fend on its own. But beyond the walls of Pocatel lie other alebrijes like Leandro who seek for a better world -- as well as mutant monsters, wasteland pirates, a hidden oasis, and the truth.



From Donna Barba Higuera, Newbery and Pura Belpré Medal-winning author of The Last Cuentista, comes another novel to astonish us and create a whole new imaginative world, that holds a mirror to our own.



7 STARRED REVIEWS



★ "An instant classic."

--School Library Journal (starred)



★ "Breathtaking... A ferociously epic and beautiful middle-grade dystopian novel."

--Shelf Awareness (starred)



★ "Combines humanity and technology with imaginative splendor."

--Foreword (starred)



★ "This heartfelt adventure signals hope for humanity, even in the aftermath of darkness."

--Kirkus (starred)



★ "High-stakes adventure... Beautiful, imaginative writing fills this dystopian sf novel. Though it exposes cruelty and corruption, it raises up storytelling, culture, and kindness as stronger yet... A wondrous addition to any collection."

--Booklist (starred)



★ "This stellar speculative narrative explores themes of identity across circumstance, centering an adolescent without structural power working to protect family and community."

--Publishers Weekly (starred)



★ "Higuera brilliantly balances the heaviness of a dystopian future of a ruined Earth with her own blend of science fiction and Mexican folkloric elements once Leandro leaves his human body... Leandro and his unflinching dedication to an uplifting view of humanity that will spark engagement from the first page and linger in the minds of readers well after they finish the novel."

--Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred)



"With its social and environmental commentary, this fast-paced and imaginative novel tackles issues of deception and control and leaves one with a sense of wonder that a single flap of a wing or a solitary voice can bring about unimaginable change."

--Horn Book

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A First Time for Everything

Dan Santat

*Winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature* 

A middle grade graphic memoir based on bestselling author and Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat's awkward middle school years and the trip to Europe that changed his life. 

Dan's always been a good kid. The kind of kid who listens to his teachers, helps his mom with grocery shopping, and stays out of trouble. But being a good kid doesn't stop him from being bullied and feeling like he's invisible, which is why Dan has low expectations when his parents send him on a class trip to Europe.

At first, he's right. He's stuck with the same girls from his middle school who love to make fun of him, and he doesn't know why his teacher insisted he come on this trip. But as he travels through France, Germany, Switzerland, and England, a series of first experiences begin to change him—first Fanta, first fondue, first time stealing a bike from German punk rockers... and first love.

Funny, heartwarming, and poignant, A First Time for Everything is a feel-good coming-of-age memoir based on New York Times bestselling author and Caldecott Medal winner Dan Santat's awkward middle school years. It celebrates a time that is universally challenging for many of us, but also life-changing as well.

Praise for A First Time for Everything:

"This is Santat at his best."
―Horn Book

"[A] relatable story of self-discovery... the perfect balance of humor and poignancy."
―Kirkus, starred review

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All the Blues in the Sky

Renée Watson

# 1 New York Times bestselling and Newbery Honor author Renée Watson explores friendship, loss, and life with grief in this poignant novel in verse and vignettes.

Sage's thirteenth birthday was supposed to be about movies and treats, staying up late with her best friend and watching the sunrise together. Instead, it was the day her best friend died. Without the person she had to hold her secrets and dream with, Sage is lost. In a counseling group with other girls who have lost someone close to them, she learns that not all losses are the same, and healing isn't predictable. There is sadness, loneliness, anxiety, guilt, pain, love. And even as Sage grieves, new, good things enter her life-and she just may find a way to know that she can feel it all.

In accessible, engaging verse and prose, this is a story of a girl's journey to heal, grow, and forgive herself. To read it is to see how many shades there are in grief, and to know that someone understands.

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Lasagna Means I Love You

Kate O'Shaughnessy

What are the essential ingredients that make a family? Eleven-year-old Mo is making up her own recipe in this unforgettable story that's a little sweet, a little sour, and totally delicious.

Nan was all the family Mo ever needed. But suddenly she’s gone, and Mo finds herself in foster care after her uncle decides she’s not worth sticking around for.
     Nan left her a notebook and advised her to get a hobby, like ferret racing or palm reading.
     But how could a hobby fix anything in her newly topsy-turvy life?
Then Mo finds a handmade cookbook filled with someone else’s family recipes. Even though Nan never cooked, Mo can’t tear her eyes away. Not so much from the recipes, but the stories attached to them. Though, when she makes herself a pot of soup, it is every bit as comforting as the recipe notes said.
     Soon Mo finds herself asking everyone she meets for their family recipes. Teaching herself to make them. Collecting the stories behind them. Building a website to share them. And, okay, secretly hoping that a long-lost relative will find her and give her a family recipe all her own.
     But when everything starts to unravel again, Mo realizes that if she wants a family recipe—or a real family—she’s going to have to make it up herself.

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You'd Be Home Now

Kathleen Glasgow

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the critically acclaimed author of Girl in Pieces comes a stunning novel that Vanity Fair calls “impossibly moving” and “suffused with light”. In this raw, deeply personal story, a teenaged girl struggles to find herself amidst the fallout of her brother's addiction in a town ravaged by the opioid crisis.

For all of Emory's life she's been told who she is. In town she's the rich one--the great-great-granddaughter of the mill's founder. At school she's hot Maddie Ward's younger sister. And at home, she's the good one, her stoner older brother Joey's babysitter. Everything was turned on its head, though, when she and Joey were in the car accident that killed Candy MontClaire. The car accident that revealed just how bad Joey's drug habit was.

Four months later, Emmy's junior year is starting, Joey is home from rehab, and the entire town of Mill Haven is still reeling from the accident. Everyone's telling Emmy who she is, but so much has changed, how can she be the same person? Or was she ever that person at all?

Mill Haven wants everyone to live one story, but Emmy's beginning to see that people are more than they appear. Her brother, who might not be "cured," the popular guy who lives next door, and most of all, many "ghostie" addicts who haunt the edges of the town. People spend so much time telling her who she is--it might be time to decide for herself.

A journey of one sister, one brother, one family, to finally recognize and love each other for who they are, not who they are supposed to be, You'd Be Home Now is Kathleen Glasgow's glorious and heartbreaking story about the opioid crisis, and how it touches all of us.

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If He Had Been with Me

Laura Nowlin

More than ONE MILLION copies sold!

A BookTok Viral Sensation

#1 New York Times Bestseller

A USA TODAY Bestseller

An achingly authentic and raw portrait of love, regret, and the life-altering impact of the relationships we hold closest to us, this YA romance bestseller is perfect for fans of Colleen Hoover, Jenny Han, and Lynn Painter.

If he had been with me, everything would have been different...

Autumn and Finn used to be inseparable. But then something changed. Or they changed. Now, they do their best to ignore each other.

Autumn has her boyfriend Jamie, and her close-knit group of friends. And Finn has become that boy at school, the one everyone wants to be around.

That still doesn't stop the way Autumn feels every time she and Finn cross paths, and the growing, nagging thought that maybe things could have been different. Maybe they should be together.

But come August, things will change forever. And as time passes, Autumn will be forced to confront how else life might have been different if they had never parted ways...

Captivating and heartbreaking, If He Had Been with Me is perfect for readers looking for:

  • Contemporary teen romance books
  • Unputdownable & bingeworthy novels
  • Complex emotional YA stories
  • TikTok Books
  • Jenny Han fans
  • Colleen Hoover fans
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Al Capone Does My Shirts

Gennifer Choldenko

The Newbery Honor Book and New York Times Bestseller that is historical fiction with a hint of mystery about living at Alcatraz not as a prisoner, but as a kid meeting some of the most famous criminals in our history. Al Capone Does My Shirts has become an instant classic for all kids to read!

Today I moved to Alcatraz, a twelve-acre rock covered with cement, topped with bird turd and surrounded by water. I'm not the only kid who lives here. There are twenty-three other kids who live on the island because their dads work as guards or cooks or doctors or electricians for the prison, like my dad does. And then there are a ton of murderers, rapists, hit men, con men, stickup men, embezzlers, connivers, burglars, kidnappers and maybe even an innocent man or two, though I doubt it. The convicts we have are the kind other prisons don't want. I never knew prisons could be picky, but I guess they can. You get to Alcatraz by being the worst of the worst. Unless you're me. I came here because my mother said I had to.

A Newbery Honor Book
A New York Times Bestseller
A People magazine "Best kid's Book"
An ALA Book for Young Adults
An ALA Notable Book
A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
A Krikus Reviews Editor's Choice
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
A Parents' Choice Silver Honor Book
A New York Public Library "100 Titles for Reading and Sharing" Selection
A New York Public Library Best Book for the Teen Age

*"Choldenko's pacing is exquisite. . . . [A] great read."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
*"Exceptionally atmospheric, fast-paced and memorable!"—Publishers Weekly, starred review
*"The story, told with humor and skill, will fascinate readers."—School Library Journal, starred review

"Al is the perfect novel for a young guy or moll who digs books by Gordon Korman, or Louis Sachar."—Time Out New York for Kids

"Funny situations and plot twists abound!"—People magazine

"Heartstopping in some places, heartrending in others, and most of all, it is heartwarming."—San Francisco Chronicle


 

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City Spies

James Ponti

A New York Times bestseller!
A GMA3 Summer Reading Squad Selection!
“Ingeniously plotted, and a grin-inducing delight.” —People
“Will keep young readers glued to the page…So when do I get the sequel?” —Beth McMullen, author of Mrs. Smith’s Spy School for Girls

In this thrilling new series that Stuart Gibbs called “a must-read,” Edgar Award winner James Ponti brings together five kids from all over the world and transforms them into real-life spies—perfect for fans of Spy School and Mrs. Smith’s Spy School for Girls.

Sara Martinez is a hacker. She recently broke into the New York City foster care system to expose her foster parents as cheats and lawbreakers. However, instead of being hailed as a hero, Sara finds herself facing years in a juvenile detention facility and banned from using computers for the same stretch of time. Enter Mother, a British spy who not only gets Sara released from jail but also offers her a chance to make a home for herself within a secret MI6 agency.

Operating out of a base in Scotland, the City Spies are five kids from various parts of the world. When they’re not attending the local boarding school, they’re honing their unique skills, such as sleight of hand, breaking and entering, observation, and explosives. All of these allow them to go places in the world of espionage where adults can’t.

Before she knows what she’s doing, Sara is heading to Paris for an international youth summit, hacking into a rival school’s computer to prevent them from winning a million euros, dangling thirty feet off the side of a building, and trying to stop a villain…all while navigating the complex dynamics of her new team.

No one said saving the world was easy…

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The Benefits of Being an Octopus

Ann Braden

One of Edutopia's "25 Essential Middle School Reads from the Last Decade," NPR Best Book of 2018, Bank Street List for Best Children's Books of 2019, Named to the Vermont Dorothy Canfield Fisher List, Maine's Student Book Award List, Louisiana Young Reader's Choice Award List, Rhode Island Middle School Book Award 2020 List, 2020 Oklahoma Sequoyah Book Award Nominee, 2021 South Carolina Junior Book Award Nominee, 2020-2021 Truman Award​ (Missouri) Nominee, Middle School Virginia Readers’ Choice Titles for 2020–2021​, Charlie May Simon Award 2020–2021 List, 2021–2022 Young Hoosier Book Award Nominee, and 2023 Rebecca Caudill Young Readers Book Award nominee​​.

Some people can do their homework. Some people get to have crushes on boys. Some people have other things they've got to do. 

Seventh-grader Zoey has her hands full as she takes care of her much younger siblings after school every day while her mom works her shift at the pizza parlor. Not that her mom seems to appreciate it. At least there's Lenny, her mom's boyfriend—they all get to live in his nice, clean trailer. 

At school, Zoey tries to stay under the radar. Her only friend Fuchsia has her own issues, and since they're in an entirely different world than the rich kids, it's best if no one notices them. 

Zoey thinks how much easier everything would be if she were an octopus: eight arms to do eight things at once. Incredible camouflage ability and steady, unblinking vision. Powerful protective defenses. 

Unfortunately, she's not totally invisible, and one of her teachers forces her to join the debate club. Even though Zoey resists participating, debate ultimately leads her to see things in a new way: her mom’s relationship with Lenny, Fuchsia's situation, and her own place in this town of people who think they're better than her. Can Zoey find the courage to speak up, even if it means risking the most stable home she's ever had? 

This moving debut novel explores the cultural divides around class and the gun debate through the eyes of one girl, living on the edges of society, trying to find her way forward.

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The Inheritance Games

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD OF THE #1 BESTSELLING SERIES!



Don't miss this New York Times bestselling "impossible to put down" (Buzzfeed) novel with deadly stakes, thrilling twists, and juicy secrets -- perfect for fans of One of Us is Lying and Knives Out.



Avery Grambs has a plan for a better future: survive high school, win a scholarship, and get out. But her fortunes change in an instant when billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves Avery virtually his entire fortune. The catch? Avery has no idea why -- or even who Tobias Hawthorne is.



To receive her inheritance, Avery must move into sprawling, secret passage-filled Hawthorne House, where every room bears the old man's touch -- and his love of puzzles, riddles, and codes. Unfortunately for Avery, Hawthorne House is also occupied by the family that Tobias Hawthorne just dispossessed. This includes the four Hawthorne grandsons: dangerous, magnetic, brilliant boys who grew up with every expectation that one day, they would inherit billions. Heir apparent Grayson Hawthorne is convinced that Avery must be a conwoman, and he's determined to take her down. His brother, Jameson, views her as their grandfather's last hurrah: a twisted riddle, a puzzle to be solved. Caught in a world of wealth and privilege with danger around every turn, Avery will have to play the game herself just to survive.



**Avery's story continues in The Hawthorne Legacy and The Final Gambit

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The Lost Year

Katherine Marsh

*A National Book Award Finalist*

From the author of Nowhere Boy - called “a resistance novel for our times” by The New York Times - comes a brilliant middle-grade survival story that traces a harrowing family secret back to the Holodomor, a terrible famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s.

Thirteen-year-old Matthew is miserable. His journalist dad is stuck overseas indefinitely, and his mom has moved in his one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother to ride out the pandemic, adding to his stress and isolation.

But when Matthew finds a tattered black-and-white photo in his great-grandmother’s belongings, he discovers a clue to a hidden chapter of her past, one that will lead to a life-shattering family secret. Set in alternating timelines that connect the present-day to the 1930s and the US to the USSR, Katherine Marsh’s latest novel sheds fresh light on the Holodomor – the horrific famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, and which the Soviet government covered up for decades.

An incredibly timely, page-turning story of family, survival, and sacrifice, inspired by Marsh’s own family history, The Lost Year is perfect for fans of Ruta Sepetys' Between Shades of Gray and Alan Gratz's Refugee.

Lexile 710 L.
 

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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind

William Kamkwamba

Now a Netflix film starring and directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, this is a gripping memoir of survival and perseverance about the heroic young inventor who brought electricity to his Malawian village.

When a terrible drought struck William Kamkwamba's tiny village in Malawi, his family lost all of the season's crops, leaving them with nothing to eat and nothing to sell. William began to explore science books in his village library, looking for a solution. There, he came up with the idea that would change his family's life forever: he could build a windmill. Made out of scrap metal and old bicycle parts, William's windmill brought electricity to his home and helped his family pump the water they needed to farm the land.

Retold for a younger audience, this exciting memoir shows how, even in a desperate situation, one boy's brilliant idea can light up the world. Complete with photographs, illustrations, and an epilogue that will bring readers up to date on William's story, this is the perfect edition to read and share with the whole family.

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Dance Of The Infidels

Francis Paudras

What Charlie Parker was to the saxophone, Bud Powell (1924–1966) was to the piano: No jazz pianist can rival his brilliance. But his life was filled with tragedy, including years of electroshock therapy in psychiatric institutions, illnesses, physical and mental abuse from people who fed him dangerous drugs to control him, and the indifference of his contemporaries to his genius. Francis Paudras, a young jazz fan who met Powell in the late 1950s, released him from his unfavorable surroundings, encouraged him to create some of his finest music, and took care of him as if he were his child. Powell's story, Dance of the Infidels, is one of the most moving of jazz memoirs—and served as the basis for Bertrand Tavernier's film 'Round Midnight, starring Dexter Gordon. Here, for the first time in English, is a portrait of a friendship as surprising and heartbreaking as Bud Powell's timeless music.

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Coming Through Slaughter

Michael Ondaatje

Bringing to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era, this book tells the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players--some say the originator of jazz--who was, in any case, the genius, the guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place. 

In this fictionalized meditation, Bolden, an unrecorded father of Jazz, remains throughout a tantalizingly ungraspable phantom, the central mysteries of his life, his art, and his madness remaining felt but never quite pinned down. Ondaatje's prose is at times startlingly lyrical, and as he chases Bolden through documents and scenes, the novel partakes of the very best sort of modern detective novel--one where the enigma is never resolved, but allowed to manifest in its fullness. Though more 'experimental' in form than either The English Patient or In the Skin of a Lion, it is a fitting addition to the renowned Ondaatje oeuvre.

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The History of Jazz

Ted Gioia

An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's universally acclaimed history of jazz, with a wealth of new insight on this music's past, present, and future.

Ted Gioia's The History of Jazz has been universally hailed as the most comprehensive and accessible history of the genre of all time. Acclaimed by jazz critics and fans alike, this magnificent work is now available in an up-to-date third edition that covers the latest developments in the jazz world and revisits virtually every aspect of the music.

Gioia's story of jazz brilliantly portrays the most legendary jazz players, the breakthrough styles, and the scenes in which they evolved. From Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, Miles Davis's legendary 1955 performance at the Newport Jazz Festival, and Ornette Coleman's experiments with atonality to current innovators such as Kamasi Washington and Esperanza Spalding, Gioia takes readers on a sweeping journey through the history of jazz. As he traces the music through the swamp lands of the Mississippi Delta, the red light district of New Orleans, the rent parties of Harlem, the speakeasies of Chicago, and other key locales of jazz history, Gioia also makes the social contexts in which the music was born come alive.

This new edition finally brings the often overlooked women who shaped the genre into the spotlight and traces the recent developments that have led to an upswing of jazz in contemporary mainstream culture. As it chronicles jazz from its beginnings and most iconic figures to its latest dialogues with popular music, the developments of the digital age, and new commercial successes, Gioia's History of Jazz reasserts its status as the most authoritative survey of this fascinating music.

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Stomp Off, Let's Go

Ricky Riccardi

The revelatory origin story of one of America's most beloved musicians, Louis Armstrong

How did Louis Armstrong become Louis Armstrong?

In Stomp Off, Let's Go, author and Armstrong expert Ricky Riccardi tells the enthralling story of the iconic trumpeter's meteoric rise to fame. Beginning with Armstrong's youth in New Orleans, Riccardi transports readers through Armstrong's musical and personal development, including his initial trip to Chicago to join Joe "King" Oliver's band, his first to New York to meet Fletcher Henderson, and his eventual return to Chicago, where he changed the course of music with the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings.

While this period of Armstrong's life is perhaps more familiar than others, Riccardi enriches extant narratives with recently unearthed archival materials, including a rare draft of pianist, composer, and Armstrong's second wife Lillian "Lil" Hardin Armstrong's autobiography. Riccardi similarly tackles the perceived notion of Armstrong as a "sell-out" during his later years, highlighting the many ways in which Armstrong's musical style and personal values in fact remained steady throughout his career. By foregrounding the voices of Armstrong and his contemporaries, Stomp Off, Let's Go offers a more intimate exploration of Armstrong's personal and professional relationships, in turn providing essential insights into how Armstrong evolved into one of America's most beloved icons.

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Beneath the Underdog

Charles Mingus

Bass player extraordinaire Charles Mingus, who died in 1979, is one of the essential composers in the history of jazz, and Beneath the Underdog, his celebrated, wild, funny, demonic, anguished, shocking, and profoundly moving memoir, is the greatest autobiography ever written by a jazz musician.  
 
It tells of his God-haunted childhood in Watts during the 1920s and 1930s; his outcast adolescent years; his apprenticeship, not only with jazzmen but also with pimps, hookers, junkies, and hoodlums; and his golden years in New York City with such legendary figures as Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie.  Here is Mingus in his own words, from shabby roadhouses to fabulous estates, from the psychiatric wards of Bellevue to worlds of mysticism and solitude, but for all his travels never straying too far, always returning to music. 
 
“This book is the purest of dynamite.  Like the autobiographies of Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday and like A. B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business, it says more about the American psyche in general and black survival in particular than the sociologists and psychologists ever can in their stiff, soulless vocabularies.... Somber, comic, disturbing, boastful, confessional, sentimental, contradictory, poetic, irascible, impish...lyrical, nasty, angelic, reflective...expressionistic, picaresque, jive...this is a powerful book.”— Rolling Stone

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Holy Ghost

Richard Koloda

Holy Ghost is the first extended study of free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler, who is seen today as one of the most important innovators in the history of jazz.

Ayler synthesized children's songs, La Marseillaise, American march music, and gospel hymns, turning them into powerful, rambunctious, squalling free-jazz improvisations. Some critics considered him a charlatan, others a heretic for unhinging the traditions of jazz. Some simply considered him insane. However, like most geniuses, Ayler was misunderstood in his time. His divine messages of peace and love, apocalyptic visions of flying saucers, and the strange account of the days leading up to his being found floating in New York's East River are central to his mystique, but, as Koloda points out, they are a distraction, overshadowing his profound impact on the direction of jazz as one of the most visible avant-garde players of the 1960s and a major influence on others, including John Coltrane.

A musicologist and friend of Don Ayler, Albert's troubled trumpet-playing brother, Richard Koloda has spent over two decades researching this book. He follows Ayler from his beginnings in his native Cleveland to France, where he received his greatest acclaim, to his untimely death on November 25, 1970, at age thirty-four, and puts to rest speculation concerning his mysterious death.

A feat of biography and a major addition to jazz scholarship, Holy Ghost offers a new appreciation of one of the most important and controversial figures in twentieth-century music.
 


 

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Saxophone Colossus

Aidan Levy

**Winner of the American Book Award (2023)**

​**Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award (2023)**




The long-awaited first full biography of legendary jazz saxophonist and composer Sonny Rollins 

Sonny Rollins has long been considered an enigma. Known as the “Saxophone Colossus,” he is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time, winning Grammys, the Austrian Cross of Honor, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize and a National Medal of Arts. A bridge from bebop to the avant-garde, he is a lasting link to the golden age of jazz, pictured in the iconic “Great Day in Harlem” portrait. His seven-decade career has been well documented, but the backstage life of the man once called “the only jazz recluse” has gone largely untold—until now. 

Based on more than 200 interviews with Rollins himself, family members, friends, and collaborators, as well as Rollins’ extensive personal archive, Saxophone Colossus is the comprehensive portrait of this legendary saxophonist and composer, civil rights activist and environmentalist. A child of the Harlem Renaissance, Rollins’ precocious talent landed him on the bandstand and in the recording studio with Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie, or playing opposite Billie Holiday. An icon in his own right, he recorded Tenor Madness, featuring John Coltrane; Way Out West; Freedom Suite, the first civil rights-themed album of the hard bop era; A Night at the Village Vanguard; and the 1956 classic Saxophone Colossus. 

Yet his meteoric rise to fame was not without its challenges. He served two sentences on Rikers Island and won his battle with heroin addiction. In 1959, Rollins took a two-year sabbatical from recording and performing, practicing up to 16 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge. In 1968, he left again to study at an ashram in India. He returned to performing from 1971 until his retirement in 2012.  

The story of Sonny Rollins—innovative, unpredictable, larger than life—is the story of jazz itself, and Sonny’s own narrative is as timeless and timely as the art form he represents. Part jazz oral history told in the musicians’ own words, part chronicle of one man’s quest for social justice and spiritual enlightenment, this is the definitive biography of one of the most enduring and influential artists in jazz and American history.

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Really the Blues

Mezz Mezzrow

Hailed as an “American counter-culture classic,” this “funny” and candid musical memoir offers a delicious glimpse into the 1930s jazz scene (The Wall Street Journal)
 
Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chicago to New Orleans to New York, working in brothels and bars, bootlegging, dealing drugs, getting hooked, doing time, producing records, and playing with the greats, among them Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, and Fats Waller. 
 
Really the Blues—the jive-talking memoir that Mezzrow wrote at the insistence of, and with the help of, the novelist Bernard Wolfe—is the story of an unusual and unusually American life, and a portrait of a man who moved freely across racial boundaries when few could or did, “the odyssey of an individualist . . . the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends in a jungle where everyone was too busy making money.”

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But Beautiful

Geoff Dyer

"May be the best book ever written about jazz."—David Thomson, Los Angeles Times

In eight poetically charged vignettes, Geoff Dyer skillfully evokes the music and the men who shaped modern jazz. Drawing on photos, anecdotes, and, most important, the way he hears the music, Dyer imaginatively reconstructs scenes from the embattled lives of some of the greats: Lester Young fading away in a hotel room; Charles Mingus storming down the streets of New York on a too-small bicycle; Thelonious Monk creating his own private language on the piano. However, music is the driving force of But Beautiful, and wildly metaphoric prose that mirrors the quirks, eccentricity, and brilliance of each musician's style.

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Miles Davis

Ian Carr

This exhaustively researched, revised edition of Ian Carr's classic biography throws new light on Davis' life and career: from the early days in New York with Charlie Parker; to the Birth of Cool; through his drug addiction in the early 1950s and the years of extraordinary achievements (1954-1960), during which he signed with Columbia and collaborated with such unequaled talents as John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly and Cannonball Adderly. Carr also explores Davis' dark, reclusive period (1975-1980), offering firsthand accounts of his descent into addiction, as well as his dramatic return to life and music. Carr has talked with the people who knew Miles and his music best including Bill Evans, Joe Zawinul, Keith Jarrett, and Jack DeJohnette, and has conducted interviews with Ron Carter, Max Roach, John Scofield and others.

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Coltrane

Ben Ratliff

No other jazz musician has proved so inspirational and so fascinating as Coltrane. Ben Ratliff, jazz critic for the New York Times, has written the first book to do justice to this great and controversial music pioneer. As well as an elegant narrative of Coltrane's life Ratliff does something incredibly valuable - he writes about the saxophonist's unique sound.

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Bird Lives!

Ross Russell

"The best biography of any jazz musician that we have. Bird Lives! will stand for a long time as a major source of information and illumination not only of the great musician with whom it deals but of the entire jazz life in this society."--Ralph Gleason

"Inspired by great affection and dedication, Bird Lives! provides a vivid and accurate picture not only of the saxophonist-composer as artist and human being but of his zeitgeist and the musical/social setting that produced him. Parker was an immensely complex personality; saint and satyr, loving father and footloose vagabond, with a limitless appetite for sex, music, food, pills, heroin, liquor, life. A man of vast influence, the most admired and imitated creator of the mid-1940s bop revolution, he was forced to work in dives, reduced to bumming dollars when he should have been respected as a reigning virtuoso. . . . A sensitive, penetrating portrait."--Leonard Feather, Los Angeles Times

"One of the very few jazz books that deserve to be called literature . . . perhaps the finest writing on jazz to be found anywhere. . . . Those aware of Parker's genius cannot do without this book."--Grover Sales, Saturday Review
 

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Thelonious Monk

Robin Kelley

"The piano ain't got no wrong notes!" So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk's hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.

In the first book on Thelonious Monk based on exclusive access to the Monk family papers and private recordings, as well as on a decade of prodigious research, prize-winning historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk -- witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband. Indeed, Thelonious Monk is essentially a love story. It is a story of familial love, beginning with Monk's enslaved ancestors from whom Thelonious inherited an appreciation for community, freedom, and black traditions of sacred and secular song. It is about a doting mother who scrubbed floors to pay for piano lessons and encouraged her son to follow his dream. It is the story of romance, from Monk's initial heartbreaks to his lifelong commitment to his muse, the extraordinary Nellie Monk. And it is about his unique friendship with the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a scion of the famous Rothschild family whose relationship with Monk and other jazz musicians has long been the subject of speculation and rumor. Nellie, Nica, and various friends and family sustained Monk during the long periods of joblessness, bipolar episodes, incarceration, health crises, and other tragic and difficult moments.

Above all, Thelonious Monk is the gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz's most original composer.

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Most Ardently: A Pride and Prejudice Remix

Gabe Cole Novoa

Oliver Bennet, trapped by societal expectations to live as female, discovers the possibility of love and freedom when he forms a connection with Darcy, but is faced with the choice of living a secure but inauthentic life or risking everything for true self-expression and love.

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Libertad

Bessie Flores Zaldivar

Set during the controversial 2017 Honduran presidential election, seventeen-year-old Libertad finds purpose writing political poetry as she navigates her sexuality and concerns for her activist brother's safety.

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Chronically Dolores

Maya Van Wagenen

"Dolores Mendoza is not thriving. She was recently diagnosed with a chronic bladder condition called interstitial cystitis. The painful disease isn't life threatening, but it is threatening to ruin her life. Just when things seem hopeless, Dolores meets someone poised to change her fate. Terpsichore Berkenbosch-Jones is glamorous, autistic, and homeschooled against her will by her overprotective mother. After a rocky start, the girls form a tentative partnership. Beautiful, talented Terpsichore will help Dolores win back her ex-best friend, Shae. And Dolores will convince Terpsichore's mom that her daughter has the social skills to survive public school. It seems like a foolproof plan, but Dolores isn't always a reliable narrator, and her choices may put her in danger of committing an unforgivable betrayal"--

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On the Bright Side

Anna Sortino

When eighteen-year-old Ellie's Deaf boarding school shuts down, she attends a public high school where she struggles to adjust, but finds an ally in Jackson, a soccer player going through a disability diagnosis of his own.

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Night Owls

A. R. Vishny

Clara loves rules. Rules are what have kept her and her sister, Molly, alive-or, rather, undead-for over a century. Work their historic movie theater by day. Shift into an owl under the cover of night. Feed on men in secret. And never fall in love. Molly is in love. And she's tired of keeping her girlfriend, Anat, a secret. If Clara won't agree to bend their rules a little, then she will bend them herself. Boaz is cursed. He can't walk two city blocks without being cornered by something undead. At least at work at the theater, he gets to flirt with Clara, wishing she would like him back. When Anat vanishes, and New York's monstrous underworld emerges from the shadows, Clara suspects Boaz, their annoyingly cute box office attendant, might be behind it all.--

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Monday's Not Coming

Tiffany D. Jackson

When her friend Monday Charles goes missing and Monday's mother refuses to give her a straight answer, Claudia digs into her disappearance.

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Shut Up, This is Serious

Carolina Ixta

Belen Dolores Itzel del Toro wants the normal stuff: to experience love or maybe have a boyfriend or at least just lose her virginity. But nothing is normal in East Oakland. Her father left her family. She's at risk of not graduating. And Leti, her super-Catholic, nerdy-ass best friend, is pregnant--by the boyfriend she hasn't told her parents about because he's Black and her parents are racist.

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Canto Contigo

Jonny Garza Villa

In a twenty-four-hour span, Rafael Alvarez led North Amistad High School's Mariachi Alma de la Frontera to their eleventh consecutive first-place win in the Mariachi Extravaganza de Nacional; and met, made out with, and almost hooked up with one of the cutest guys he's ever met. Now eight months later, Rafie's ready for one final win. What he didn't plan for is his family moving to San Antonio before his senior year, forcing him to leave behind his group while dealing with the loss of the most important person in his life--his beloved abuelo. Another hitch in his plan: The Selena Quintanilla-Perez Academy's Mariachi Todos Colores already has a lead vocalist, Rey Chavez--the boy Rafie made out with--who now stands between him winning and being the great Mariachi Rafie's abuelo always believed him to be. Despite their newfound rivalry for center stage, Rafie can't squash his feelings for Rey. Now he must decide between the people he's known his entire life or the one just starting to get to know the real him.

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Wild Dreamers

Margarita Engle

Told in alternating voices, determined to make a difference and heal from their troubled pasts, teens Ana and Leandro fight to protect California wildlife and the endangered puma.

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Bright Red Fruit

Safia Elhillo

"Samira is determined to have a perfect summer filled with fun parties, exploring DC, and growing as a poet--until a scandalous rumor has her grounded and unable to leave her house. When Samira turns to a poetry forum for solace, she catches the eye of an older, charismatic poet named Horus. For the first time, Samira feels wanted. But soon she's keeping a bigger secret than ever before--one that could prove her reputation and jeopardize her place in her community"--

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Aisle Nine

Ian X. Cho

Even though the world is filled with portals to hell and bloodthirsty demons pop out of them on the reg, Jasper spends his days and nights working as a check-out clerk at the Here For You discount mart. Sure, there's even a hell portal in aisle nine, which means he could be maimed, dismembered, or even eaten whole during every shift, but at least at the mart he can be near his crush, Kyle Kuan. That she doesn't seem to even notice that he exists seems about right to Jasper, because Jasper can't remember anything that happened to him before his accident five months ago, either.

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Not Like Other Girls

Meredith Adamo

Not Like Other Girls is a stunning debut that takes a hard look at how we treat young women and their trauma, through the lens of a missing girl and a girl trying to find herself again.

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Road Home

Rex Ogle

"This final, essential chapter in Rex Ogle's memoir trilogy recounts being forced from his home and living on the streets after his father discovered he was gay. When Rex was outed the summer after he graduated high school, his father gave him a choice: he could stay at home, find a girlfriend, and attend church twice a week, or he could be gay--and leave. Rex left, driving toward the only other gay man he knew and a toxic relationship that would ultimately leave him homeless and desperate on the streets of New Orleans. Here, Rex tells the story of his coming out and his father's rejection of his identity, navigating abuse and survival on the streets. Road Home is a devastating and incandescent reflection on Rex's hunger--for food, for love, and for a place to call home--completing the trilogy of memoirs that began with the award-winning Free Lunch."--

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The Ruin of All Witches

Malcolm Gaskill

A gripping story of a family tragedy brought about by witch-hunting in Puritan New England that combines history, anthropology, sociology, politics, theology and psychology.

“The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing. Malcolm Gaskill goes to meet the past on its own terms and in its own place…Thought-provoking and absorbing." —Hilary Mantel, best-selling author of Wolf Hall

In Springfield, Massachusetts in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails, property vanishes, and people suffer convulsions as if possessed by demons. A woman is seen wading through the swamp like a lost soul. Disturbing dreams and visions proliferate. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics and the community becomes tangled in a web of distrust, resentment and denunciation. The finger of suspicion soon falls on a young couple with two small children: the prickly brickmaker, Hugh Parsons, and his troubled wife, Mary.

Drawing on rich, previously unexplored source material, Malcolm Gaskill vividly evokes a strange past, one where lives were steeped in the divine and the diabolic, in omens, curses and enchantments. The Ruin of All Witches captures an entire society caught in agonized transition between superstition and enlightenment, tradition and innovation.

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Weavers, Scribes, and Kings

Amanda H. Podany

A unique history of the ancient Near East that compellingly presents the life stories of kings, priestesses, merchants, bricklayers, and others

In this sweeping history of the ancient Near East, Amanda Podany takes readers on a gripping journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquests of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to brickmakers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that people faced over time are explored through their own written words and the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived.

Rather than chronicling three thousand years of rulers and states, Weavers, Scribes, and Kings instead creates a tapestry of life stories through which readers will come to know specific individuals from many walks of life, and to understand their places within the broad history of events and institutions in the ancient Near East. These life stories are preserved on ancient clay tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to become a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving young couple and their four young children as they suffered through a time of famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to the modern world many of our institutions and beliefs, a truly fascinating place to visit.

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Evvie Drake Starts Over: A Read with Jenna Pick

Linda Holmes

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today • “Everything a romantic comedy should be: witty, relatable, and a little complicated.”—People

A heartfelt debut about the unlikely relationship between a young woman who’s lost her husband and a major league pitcher who’s lost his game.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR

In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn’t correct them.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy’s childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the “yips”: he can’t throw straight anymore, and, even worse, he can’t figure out why. As the media storm heats up, an invitation from Andy to stay in Maine seems like the perfect chance to hit the reset button on Dean’s future.

When he moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie’s house, the two make a deal: Dean won’t ask about Evvie’s late husband, and Evvie won’t ask about Dean’s baseball career. Rules, though, have a funny way of being broken—and what starts as an unexpected friendship soon turns into something more. To move forward, Evvie and Dean will have to reckon with their pasts—the friendships they’ve damaged, the secrets they’ve kept—but in life, as in baseball, there’s always a chance—up until the last out.

A joyful, hilarious, and hope-filled debut, Evvie Drake Starts Over will have you cheering for the two most unlikely comebacks of the year—and will leave you wanting more from Linda Holmes.

Praise for Evvie Drake Starts Over

“A quirky, sweet, and splendid story of a woman coming into her own.”—Taylor Jenkins Reid, New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & The Six 

“Effortlessly enjoyable . . . [a] pitch-perfect . . . adult love story that is as romantic as it is real.”USA Today

“Charming, hopeful, and gently romantic . . . Evvie Drake is great company.”—Rainbow Rowell, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Eleanor & Park

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An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good

Helene Tursten

Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and... no qualms about a little murder. This funny, irreverent story collection by Helene Tursten, author of the Irene Huss investigations, features two-never-before translated stories that will keep you laughing all the way to the retirement home.

Ever since her darling father's untimely death when she was only eighteen, Maud has lived in the family's spacious apartment in downtown Gothenburg rent-free, thanks to a minor clause in a hastily negotiated contract. That was how Maud learned that good things can come from tragedy. Now in her late eighties, Maud contents herself with traveling the world and surfing the net from the comfort of her father's ancient armchair. It's a solitary existence, and she likes it that way. 

Over the course of her adventures—or misadventures—this little bold lady will handle a crisis with a local celebrity who has her eyes on Maud's apartment, foil the engagement of her long-ago lover, and dispose of some pesky neighbors. But when the local authorities are called to investigate a dead body found in Maud's apartment, will Maud finally become a suspect?

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All The Lovers In The Night

Mieko Kawakami

Selected as one of The Oprah Daily's Best Books of 2022

The acclaimed and bestselling author of Breasts and Eggs and Heaven returns with a blistering, shocking and poetic story set in contemporary Tokyo.

Shy, lonely and introverted Fuyuko lives alone and fills her days with her job as a freelance proofreader. About to turn thirty-five, she cannot imagine ever having any emotional or successful relationship in her life as it currently stands. She is regularly haunted by encounters of the past.

But Fuyuko loves the light and goes out on the night of her birthday, Christmas Eve, to count the lights.

Her only friend, Hijiri, offers some light in her life, but it is a chance encounter with another man, Mr. Mitsutsuka, a physics teacher, who offers her access from another dimension to light.

Pulsing, poetic, modern and shocking, All The Lovers in The Night is the third novel from internationally bestselling author Mieko Kawakami.

Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

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Say Nothing

Patrick Radden Keefe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NOW AN FX LIMITED SERIES STREAMING ON HULU • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.

One of The New York Times’s 20 Best Books of the 21st Century
 
"Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." —New York Times Book Review
 
"Reads like a novel ... Keefe is ... a master of narrative nonfiction. . .An incredible story."—Rolling Stone
 
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, NPR, and more! 

Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.

Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. 

From radical and impetuous I.R.A. terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious I.R.A. mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

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The Fountains of Silence

Ruta Sepetys

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Salt to the Sea and Between Shades of Gray comes a gripping, extraordinary portrait of love, silence, and secrets under a Spanish dictatorship.

Madrid, 1957. Under the fascist dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, Spain is hiding a dark secret. Meanwhile, tourists and foreign businessmen flood into Spain under the welcoming promise of sunshine and wine. Among them is eighteen-year-old Daniel Matheson, the son of an oil tycoon, who arrives in Madrid with his parents hoping to connect with the country of his mother's birth through the lens of his camera. Photography--and fate--introduce him to Ana, whose family's interweaving obstacles reveal the lingering grasp of the Spanish Civil War--as well as chilling definitions of fortune and fear. Daniel's photographs leave him with uncomfortable questions amidst shadows of danger. He is backed into a corner of difficult decisions to protect those he loves. Lives and hearts collide, revealing an incredibly dark side to the sunny Spanish city.

Master storyteller Ruta Sepetys once again shines light into one of history's darkest corners in this epic, heart-wrenching novel about identity, unforgettable love, repercussions of war, and the hidden violence of silence--inspired by the true postwar struggles of Spain.

Includes vintage media reports, oral history commentary, photos, and more.

Praise for The Fountains of Silence

"Spain under Francisco Franco is as dystopian a setting as Margaret Atwood’s Gilead in Ruta Sepetys’s suspenseful, romantic and timely new work of historical fiction . . . Like [Shakespeare's family romances], 'The Fountains of Silence' speaks truth to power, persuading future rulers to avoid repeating the crimes of the past." --The New York Times Book Review

“Full of twists and revelations…an excellent story, and timely, too.” --The Wall Street Journal

"A staggering tale of love, loss, and national shame." --Entertainment Weekly

* "[Sepetys] tells a moving story made even more powerful by its placement in a lesser-known historical moment. Captivating, deft, and illuminating historical fiction." --Booklist, *STARRED REVIEW*

"This gripping, often haunting historical novel offers a memorable portrait of fascist Spain." --Publishers Weekly, *STARRED REVIEW*

* "This richly woven historical fiction . . . will keep young adults as well as adults interested from the first page to the last." --SLC, *STARRED REVIEW*

* "Riveting . . . An exemplary work of historical fiction." --The Horn Book, *STARRED REVIEW*

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Kit McBride Gets a Wife

Amy Barry

The four McBride brothers have their worlds turned upside down when their precocious younger sister secretly places an advertisement for a mail-order bride.

Kit McBride knows that Buck's Creek, Montana, is no place to find a wife. Between him and his three brothers—plus little Junebug—they manage all right on their own, thank you very much. But unbeknownst to Kit, his sister is sick to death of cleaning, cooking, and mending for her big brothers, so she places an ad in The Matrimonial News to get them hitched.
 
After Maddy Mooney emigrated from Ireland, she found employment with an eccentric but poor widow. When her mistress decides to answer an ad for a mail-order bride, Madd​y is dragged along for the ride to Montana. But en route to the West, Maddy is suddenly abandoned and left to assume the widow's name, position, and matrimonial prospects….
 
With no other recourse in the wilderness, Maddy must convince Kit she’s the wife he never knew he needed.

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This is Shakespeare

Emma Josephine Smith

An electrifying new study that investigates the challenges of the Bard's inconsistencies and flaws, and focuses on revealing--not resolving--the ambiguities of the plays and their changing topicality

A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else. Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of. But it doesn't tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant.

In This Is Shakespeare, Emma Smith--an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer--takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd (the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day), flirting with and skirting around the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex. Instead of offering the answers, the Shakespeare she reveals poses awkward questions, always inviting the reader to ponder ambiguities.

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Bride

Ali Hazelwood

#1 Indie Next Pick!
A Hall of Fame LibraryReads pick!
One of People’s Best Books to Read in February

A dangerous alliance between a Vampyre bride and an Alpha Werewolf becomes a love deep enough to sink your teeth into in this new paranormal romance from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Love, Theoretically and The Love Hypothesis.

Misery Lark, the only daughter of the most powerful Vampyre councilman of the Southwest, is an outcast—again. Her days of living in anonymity among the Humans are over: she has been called upon to uphold a historic peacekeeping alliance between the Vampyres and their mortal enemies, the Weres, and she sees little choice but to surrender herself in the exchange—again...

Weres are ruthless and unpredictable, and their Alpha, Lowe Moreland, is no exception. He rules his pack with absolute authority, but not without justice. And, unlike the Vampyre Council, not without feeling. It’s clear from the way he tracks Misery’s every movement that he doesn’t trust her. If only he knew how right he was….

Because Misery has her own reasons to agree to this marriage of convenience, reasons that have nothing to do with politics or alliances, and everything to do with the only thing she's ever cared about. And she is willing to do whatever it takes to get back what’s hers, even if it means a life alone in Were territory…alone with the wolf.

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Girl in Pieces

Kathleen Glasgow

Fans of Girl, Interrupted, Thirteen Reasons Why, and All the Bright Places will love the New York Times bestselling novel Girl in Pieces.

"A haunting, beautiful, and necessary book that will stay with you long after you've read the last page."--Nicola Yoon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything

Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At seventeen she's already lost more than most people do in a lifetime. But she's learned how to forget. The broken glass washes away the sorrow until there is nothing but calm. You don't have to think about your father and the river. Your best friend, who is gone forever. Or your mother, who has nothing left to give you. 
Every new scar hardens Charlie's heart just a little more, yet it still hurts so much. It hurts enough to not care anymore, which is sometimes what has to happen before you can find your way back from the edge. 
A deeply moving portrait of a girl in a world that owes her nothing, and has taken so much, and the journey she undergoes to put herself back together. Kathleen Glasgow's debut is heartbreakingly real and unflinchingly honest. It's a story you won't be able to look away from.

"Girl, Interrupted meets Speak."--Refinery29.com

"A dark yet powerful read."--PasteMagazine.com

"One of the most affecting novels we have read."--Goop.com

"Breathtaking and beautifully written."--Bustle

"Intimate and gritty."--The Irish Times
 

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The Killing

When ex-con Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) says he has a plan to make a killing, everybody wants to be in on the action. Especially when the plan is to steal $2 million in a racetrack robbery scheme in which “no one will get hurt.” But despite all their careful plotting, Clay and his men have overlooked one thing: Sherry Peatty (Marie Windsor), a double-crossing dame who’s planning to make a financial killing of her own. The legendary Stanley Kubrick directs this taut, tense crime thriller.

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Point Blank

Lee Marvin stars as Walker, a gangster shot "point blank" and left for dead on Alcatraz by his partner--who leaves with Walker's money and his wife. But Walker doesn't die. Now, ruthless and unstoppable, he pursues the people who betrayed him.

Based on the novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake.

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Le Samourai

In a career-defining performance, Alain Delon plays a contract killer with samurai instincts.

A razor-sharp cocktail of 1940s American gangster cinema and 1960s French pop culture—with a liberal dose of Japanese lone-warrior mythology—maverick director Jean-Pierre Melville’s masterpiece LE SAMOURAÏ defines cool.

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The Long Goodbye

Elliott Gould stars in Robert Altman's quirky send-up of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. Marlowe (Elliot Gould) faces the most bizarre case of his life, when a friend's apparent suicide turns into a double murder involving a sexy blonde, a disturbed gangster and a suitcase of drug money. But as Marlowe stumbles toward the truth, he soon finds himself lost in a maze of sex and deceit - only to discover that in L.A., if love is dangerous … friendship is murder.

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Lady Vengeance

After being wrongfully convicted of kidnapping and murdering a young child, a beautiful young woman (Lee Young-ae) is imprisoned for 13 years and forced to give up her own daughter. While in prison she gains the respect and loyalty of her fellow cellmates, all the while plotting her vendetta on the man responsible (Oldboy's Choi Min-Shik). Upon her release she sets in motion an elaborate plan of retribution, but what she discovers is a truth so horrifying, even revenge doesn't seem punishment enough.

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Brighton Rock

Pinky, the psychotic, razor-toting gang leader, romances and marries a teenage waitress in order to keep her silent about one of his nefarious crimes. Richard Attenborough’s intense performance as teenage gangster Pinkie Brown elevates this adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel.

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Election

Johnnie To

Every two years the senior members of the Wo Shing Triad, the oldest gang in Hong Kong, elect an up-and-coming younger boss as their chairman. The two candidates they are voting on couldn't be farther apart in personality; Lok (Simon Yam) is a levelheaded businessman and Big D (Tony Leung Ka-Fai) is a loud, obnoxious, violent criminal. When the voting does not go how some people would have liked, lines are divided and a gang war begins to form.

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The Friends of Eddie Coyle

As a small time hood Eddie (Robert Mitchum) is about to go back to jail. In order to escape this fate he deals information on stolen guns to the feds. Simultaneously he is supplying arms to his bank robbing/kidnapping hoodlum chums. "A good, tough unsentimental movie about the last days of a small-time Boston Hood." - Vincent Canby

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Caliber 9

Small-time gangster Ugo Piazza has just been released from prison. He tries to convince the police, the mafia, and his one-time associate Rocco, a sadistic hoodlum who enjoys sick violence and torture that he wants to go straight, but everyone believes that he has $300,000 of stolen money hidden somewhere. Caliber 9's stylized violence, fast-paced action sequence, tight editing and plot twists prefigure the work of Quentin Tarantino and John Woo.

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Boiling Point

Takeshi Kitano

Ono Masahiko is an unlucky gas station attendant who belongs to a losing junior baseball team. When the local yakuza threaten and capture his coach, he and a friend get more than they bargained for when they travel to Okinawa seeking revenge. This is the second feature film from renowned action auteur Takeshi "Beat"Kitano.

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The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

Tony Scott

A gang of armed professionals hijack a New York subway train somewhere outside the Pelham station threatening to kill one hostage per minute unless their demands are met. Forced to stall these unknown assailants until a ransom is delivered or a rescue is made, Lt. Garber (Walter Matthau) must shrewdly outmaneuver one of the craftiest and cruelest villains (Robert Shaw) in a battle of wits that will either end heroically or tragically.

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Suzhou River

Lou Ye

Along the banks of the Suzhou River, Mardar falls in love with a beautiful young woman named Moudan. When he tries to kidnap her in order to demand ransom money from her rich father, she escapes him, jumping in to the river and disappearing forever. Mardar serves a three-year jail sentence for his attempted crime. Upon his release, he meets a woman who looks exactly like Moudan, named MeiMei.

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Spot, the Cat

Henry Cole

Simple and stunning images tell the story of a cat named Spot as he weaves his way in and out of a city in this wordless picture book from award-winning author-illustrator Henry Cole.

Through this gorgeous visual narrative, Henry Cole shows us a day in the life of a cat named Spot. Spot sneaks away from home by way of an open window to go on a wordless journey through the city. Follow Spot as he weaves through busy city streets, visits a farmers market, wanders into a park full of kite-flyers, and beyond. But while Spot is out on his adventure, his beloved boy owner is looking for him—seeming to just miss him every time. When all seems almost lost, Spot’s story reminds us that there’s always a way back home.

With stunningly detailed black-and-white illustrations, readers will love following Spot on his adventure—along the way finding characters and objects that appear, disappear, and reappear—and cheering for the sweet reunion at the end.

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Journey

Aaron Becker

A 2014 Caldecott Honor Book 

Follow a girl on an elaborate flight of fancy in a wondrously illustrated, wordless picture book about self-determination — and unexpected friendship.

A lonely girl draws a magic door on her bedroom wall and through it escapes into a world where wonder, adventure, and danger abound. Red marker in hand, she creates a boat, a balloon, and a flying carpet that carry her on a spectacular journey toward an uncertain destiny. When she is captured by a sinister emperor, only an act of tremendous courage and kindness can set her free. Can it also lead her home and to her heart's desire? With supple line, luminous color, and nimble flights of fancy, author-illustrator Aaron Becker launches an ordinary child on an extraordinary journey toward her greatest and most exciting adventure of all.

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The Lion & the Mouse

Jerry Pinkney

In award-winning artist Jerry Pinkney's wordless adaptation of one of Aesop's most beloved fables, an unlikely pair learn that no act of kindness is ever wasted. After a ferocious lion spares a cowering mouse that he'd planned to eat, the mouse later comes to his rescue, freeing him from a poacher's trap. With vivid depictions of the landscape of the African Serengeti and expressively-drawn characters, Pinkney makes this a truly special retelling, and his stunning pictures speak volumes.

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A Ball for Daisy

Chris Raschka

Winner of the 2012 Randolph Caldecott Medal

This New York Times Bestseller and New York Times Best Illustrated Book relates a story about love and loss as only Chris Rashcka can tell it. Any child who has ever had a beloved toy break will relate to Daisy's anguish when her favorite ball is destroyed by a bigger dog. In the tradition of his nearly wordless picture book Yo! Yes?, Caldecott Medalist Chris Raschka explores in pictures the joy and sadness that having a special toy can bring. Raschka's signature swirling, impressionistic illustrations and his affectionate story will particularly appeal to young dog lovers and teachers and parents who have children dealing with the loss of something special.

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Where's Walrus?

Stephen Savage

A happy-go-lucky Walrus escapes the zoo in search of adventure in this wordless instant classic.

Bored with life at the zoo, an adventurous walrus escapes to the outside world. With the zookeeper in hot pursuit, Walrus cleverly tries on all sorts of hats to disguise himself. Will a yellow hardhat point to a new life as a construction worker? Or will a red swimming cap reveal his true talents? Follow the happy-go-lucky runaway as he hides amongst firefighters, businessmen, and even high-stepping dancers in this delightful wordless picture book.

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Another

Christian Robinson

In his eagerly anticipated debut as author-illustrator, Caldecott and Coretta Scott King honoree Christian Robinson brings young readers on a playful, imaginative journey into another world.

What if you…
encountered another perspective?
Discovered another world?
Met another you?

What might you do?

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Mr. Wuffles!

David Wiesner

A 2014 Caldecott Honor Book In a near wordless masterpiece that could only have been devised by David Wiesner, a cat named Mr. Wuffles doesn't care about toy mice or toy goldfish. He's much more interested in playing with a little spaceship full of actual aliens--but the ship wasn't designed for this kind of rough treatment. Between motion sickness and damaged equipment, the aliens are in deep trouble.

When the space visitors dodge the cat and take shelter behind the radiator to repair the damage, they make a host of insect friends. The result? A humorous exploration of cooperation between aliens and insects, and of the universal nature of communication involving symbols, "cave" paintings, and gestures of friendship.

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Monkey on the Run

Leo Timmers

A traffic jam becomes the ultimate playground for Monkey as he leaps from one vehicle to another, finding stories within stories Papa Monkey and Little Monkey are on their way home. But the street is very busy and they are going so slowly! Monkey loses patience and jumps onto the fire engine. Up the ladder from there and he joins a TV crew! Then the rubbish truck, a rabbit takeaway stall packed with carroty treats, Arctic animals travelling by snow globe, a jewel thief's getaway car...

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Dandelion's Dream

Yoko Tanaka

What if a dandelion became a real lion? With enchanting, ethereal art, this wordless story shares a world where reality can be transfigured by imagination.

In a meadow filled with dandelion buds just about to flower, one dandelion blooms into a real lion. Roots and leaves unfurl into four tiny paws and a long tail with a fluffy yellow tuft. What a great, wide world there is to explore when you have paws instead of roots: there are fast trains to ride, regal ships to sail, and cities with lights as bright as Dandelion’s field in full bloom. But will a real lion ever be content to go back to being a rooted dandelion? Yoko Tanaka’s exquisite illustrations take us on an adventure where even the smallest seeds contain cosmic dreams.

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While You Are Sleeping

Mariana Ruiz Johnson

While you are sleeping, does the rest of the world sleep, too?
Not everyone.

In this dreamy book, which won the 2015 Silent Book Contest at the prestigious Bologna Children's Book Fair, Mariana Ruiz Johnson conjures up the ordinary yet extraordinary world outside the window of a sleeping child. Some people are working. Some people are eating. Some are walking their dogs, others are watching the stars. And some are setting off on an adventure that might inspire an artist to create a book. As magical as the night sky, readers will return to Mariana Ruiz Johnson's illustrations again and again, finding new stories each time they visit.

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One Gorilla

Anthony Browne

Primo primate artist Anthony Browne is at the top of his form with a simple -- and simply fascinating -- array of creatures for kids to count.

What better attention-getter for small children than primates in all their variety? And who better to render them than Anthony Browne? In this elegant counting book, the author-illustrator outdoes himself with a vivid presentation of primates from gorillas to gibbons, macaques to mandrills, ring-tailed lemurs to spider monkeys. With his striking palette, exquisite attention to detail, and quirky flair for facial expressions, Anthony Browne slyly extends the basic number concept into a look at similarities and differences -- portraying an extended family we can count ourselves part of.

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Rooster's Off to See the World

Eric Carle

"One fine morning, a rooster decided he wanted to travel." In strikingly designed, colorful collage illustrations and a beguiling simple text, Eric Carle takes his young readers on a trip with the rooster and his companions. As he travels, the rooster is joined by two cats, three frogs, four turtles and five fish, offering the child a graphic introduction to the meaning of numbers, number sets and addition within the context of an entertaining story. When night falls, the rooster's friends find he has made no provisions for their food or shelter and, disappointed, they abandon the expedition -- once again in sets of five, four, three and two, but this time in a declining series. Finally the rooster, too, decides that he has seen enough of the world and that he is, in fact, a little bit homesick.

Eric Carle believes in letting children make learning discoveries at their own pace. This book can be read and enjoyed for its story and its beautiful illustrations alone; however, the child who is ready to begin to think mathematically will find additional pleasures in the opportunities presented in the text, the pictures and the diagrams for learning basic arithmetic concepts.

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1-2-3 Peas

Keith Baker

The peas are back in this counting-themed follow-up to the New York Times bestselling LMNO Peas.

Meet the peas—the 1-2-3 Peas! Come along as they count from one to one hundred in this pea-filled picture book that’s packed with bright, bold numbers and playful number-themed scenes. These tiny green mathematicians will have young readers everywhere calling for more peas, please!

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Circle! Sphere!

Grace Lin

Caldecott Honor winner Grace Lin celebrates math for every kid, everywhere!

Manny and his friends Olivia and Mei blow bubbles in this playful introduction to geometry. Manny's wand is a circle. Olivia's wand is a square. Mei's wand is a heart. What shape will their bubbles be? (Surprise! They're all spheres.)

Storytelling Math celebrates children using math in their daily adventures as they play, build, and discover the world around them. Joyful stories and hands-on activities make it easy for kids and their grown-ups to explore everyday math together. Developed in collaboration with math experts at STEM education nonprofit TERC, under a grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation.

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The Animals Would Not Sleep!

Sara Levine

Celebrate diversity, math, and the power of storytelling!

It's bedtime for Marco and his stuffed animals, but the animals have other ideas. When Marco tries to put them away, they fly, swim, and slither right out of their bins! Can Marco sort the animals so everyone is happy? A playful exploration of sorting and classifying that combines math with empathy. The perfect bedtime book, featuring Latinx characters and a note about scientific classification.

Storytelling Math celebrates children using math in their daily adventures as they play, build, and discover the world around them. Joyful stories and hands-on activities make it easy for kids and their grown-ups to explore everyday math together. Developed in collaboration with math experts at STEM education nonprofit TERC, under a grant from the Heising-Simons Foundation.

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Arithmechicks Add Up

Ann Marie Stephens

This exuberant picture book demonstrates key math concepts to children as ten math-loving chicks make a new friend.

As the Arithmechicks slide down the slide, swing on the swings, and play hide-and-seek, they don't realize that a lonely mouse is copying them, longing to join in. However, when their basketball becomes stuck, the chicks discover that a two-inch-tall new friend is exactly what they need. In this heartwarming story, there are many ways to add up ten cheerful chicks--but a new friend is what makes them cheer. The book includes a helpful glossary that defines the eight arithmetic strategies the chicks use throughout the story, providing a playful introduction to essential math for young children and their caregivers.

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