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Set during the Sixties during the Vietnam War, this story is about 12-year-old Nakri when the Khmer Rouge takes over Cambodia. She and her siblings are forced to work in a labor camp until the Vietnamese army liberates the camp, and two surviving family members go to a refugee camp on Thailand’s border. Eventually they immigrate to the U.S. and it is Nakri’s prowess in dancing that helps her survive the trauma.

Kronos is at again and Olympus is threatened by an ancient monster. Percy and his friends must find the kidnapped Artemis — the only god who could hunt down the monster.

All Nestor Lopez wants is to live in one place for more than a few months and have dinner with his dad. He definitely doesn’t want anyone to find out his deepest secret: that he can talk to animals. But when the animals in his new town start disappearing, Nestor’s grandmother becomes the prime suspect after she is spotted in the woods where they were last seen. As Nestor investigates the source of the disappearances, he learns that they are being seized by a tule vieja—a witch who can absorb an animal’s powers by biting it during a solar eclipse. And the next eclipse is just around the corner… Now it’s up to Nestor’s extraordinary ability and his new friends to catch the tule vieja—and save a place he might just call home. 

Teens Haruko, a Japanese American, and Margot, a German American, form a life-changing friendship as everything around them starts falling apart in the Crystal City family internment camp during World War II.

Fourth-grader Kenny goes with his older brother Byron and his parents on a road trip from Flint, Michigan to the South, where Byron will be spending the summer with his grandparents, away from the temptations of city life. Curtis mixes humor with the volatility of the South in the summer of 1963.

It’s 1985 and ten-year-old Gabrielle is excited to be moving from Haiti to America. Unfortunately, her parents won’t be able to join her yet and she’ll be living in a place called Brooklyn, New York, with relatives she has never met. She promises her parents that she will behave, but life proves to be difficult in the United States, from learning the language to always feeling like she doesn’t fit in to being bullied. So when a witch offers her a chance to speak English perfectly and be “American,” she makes the deal. But soon she realizes how much she has given up by trying to fit in and, along with her two new friends (one of them a talking rat), takes on the witch in an epic battle to try to reverse the spell. 

This collection of narrative poetry explores a year in the life of twelve-year-old Güero, a freckled, red-headed, Mexican-American border kid, discovers the joy of writing poetry, thanks to his English teacher.

Mimi is not thrilled to be spending her summer in Karachi, Pakistan, with grandparents she’s never met. Secretly, she wishes to find her long-absent father, and plans to write to him in her beautiful new journal. The cook’s daughter, Sakina, still hasn’t told her parents that she’ll be accepted to school only if she can improve her English test score—but then, how could her family possibly afford to lose the money she earns working with her Abba in a rich family’s kitchen? Although the girls seem totally incompatible at first, as the summer goes on, Sakina and Mimi realize that they have plenty in common—and that they each need the other to get what they want most.

Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, shares his remarkable story of growing up in South Africa with a black South African mother and a white European father at a time when it was against the law for a mixed-race child to exist. But he did exist — and from the beginning, the often-misbehaved Trevor used his keen smarts and humor to navigate a harsh life under a racist government. In a country where racism barred blacks from social, educational, and economic opportunity, Trevor surmounted staggering obstacles and created a promising future for himself thanks to his mom’s unwavering love and indomitable will. 

Tristan, in mourning for his best friend Eddie, attempts to recover Eddie’s story journal and finds himself on a mission to save a world populated with people he knows from stories—African American folk heroes and West African gods.

Black identical twins Francine and Maureen Carter are best friends, but as they start middle school, one is more ready than the other to grow as individuals.

When Marvin Johnson’s twin brother, Tyler, is shot and killed by a police officer, Marvin must fight injustice to learn the true meaning of freedom.

Mara’s older sister has a daughter nearly as old as Mara. Unlike her immature, rebellious older sister, Mara has been accepted to Yale and is obedient to a fault. When Mara’s niece V comes to live with Mara’s family, it seems like she’s allowed to do whatever she wants, and Mara begins to chafe at her role as “the perfect one.”

After her Mom and stepdad divorce, Addie moves with Mommers into a trailer owned by stepdad Dwight. Mommers is dysfunctional and inattentive, but Addie loves her and struggles to hold their life together. As she meets the trailer’s neighbors, Addie and this makeshift family become a group of folks you can’t help but root for.

Can two cousins on opposite sides of the Cold War and a divided city come together when so much stands between them? Drew is an army brat in West Berlin, where soldiers like his dad hold an outpost of democracy against communist Russia. Drew’s cousin Matthias, an East Berliner, has grown up in the wreckage of Allied war bombing, on streets ruled by the secret police.

From enemy sides of this Cold War standoff, the boys become wary friends, arguing over the space race, politics, even civil rights, but bonding over music. If informants catch Matthias with rock ’n’ roll records or books Drew has given him, he could be sent to a work camp. If Drew gets too close to an East Berliner, others on the army post may question his family’s loyalty. As the political conflict around them grows dire, Drew and Matthias are tested in ways that will change their lives forever.

Set in the tumultuous year leading up to the surprise overnight raising of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, and illustrated with dozens of real-life photographs of the time, Walls brings to vivid life a heroic and tragic episode of the Cold War.

The Hart family of Portland, Oregon, faces many setbacks after Ryan’s father loses his job, but no matter what, Black fourth-grader Ryan tries to bring sunshine to her loved ones.

Cal’s mother acts weird sometimes, but Cal always knows how to deal with that — until that day at the library. When Cal is put in a group home with the knitting lady and four other girls, he’s sure the situation is just temporary, but the other foster home girls know differently.

Omar and his younger brother, Hassan, have spent most of their lives in Dadaab, a refugee camp in Kenya. Life is hard there: never enough food, achingly dull, and without access to the medical care Omar knows his nonverbal brother needs. So when Omar has the opportunity to go to school, he knows it might be a chance to change their future … but it would also mean leaving his brother, the only family member he has left, every day. Heartbreak, hope, and gentle humor exist together in this graphic novel about the day-to-day life of a refugee, as told to New York Times Bestselling author/artist Victoria Jamieson by Omar Mohamed, the Somali man who lived the story. National Book Award Finalist.

Pinmei's gentle, loving grandmother always has the most thrilling tales for her granddaughter and the other villagers. However, the peace is shattered one night when soldiers of the Emperor arrive and kidnap the storyteller. Everyone knows that the Emperor wants something called the Luminous Stone That Lights the Night. Determined to have her grandmother returned, Pinmei embarks on a journey to find the Luminous Stone alongside her friend Yishan, a mysterious boy who seems to have his own secrets to hide. Together, the two must face obstacles usually found only in legends to find the Luminous Stone and save Pinmei's grandmother — before it's too late.

A fast-paced adventure with stunning illustrations, When the Sea Turned to Silver is a masterpiece companion novel to Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and Starry River of the Sky. Finalist for National Book Award.

When Lily and her family move in with her sick grandmother, a magical tiger straight out of her halmoni’s Korean folktales arrives, prompting Lily to unravel a secret family history. 

With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both. 

Rue, a Black teen from inner-city Houston, learns to use her ancestral magic to protect her sister and her East Row neighborhood and bring the truth about the origins of magic to the people of Ghizon.

Ever since she got pregnant freshman year, Emoni Santiago’s life has been about making the tough decisions — doing what has to be done for her daughter and her abuela. The one place she can let all that go is in the kitchen, where she adds a little something magical to everything she cooks, turning her food into straight-up goodness. Even though she dreams of working as a chef after she graduates, Emoni knows that it’s not worth her time to pursue the impossible. Yet despite the rules she thinks she has to play by, once Emoni starts cooking, her only choice is to let her talent break free. Golden Kite Award for Young Adult Fiction.