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Higher Power of Lucky
Susan Patron

Higher Power of Lucky

Genre:
Fiction
Age Level:
Middle Grade

Ten-year old Lucky lives in a small California desert town with her guardian Brigitte, her father’s ex. Lucky’s “family” also includes the adults at the 12-Step meetings she eavesdrops on. When Lucky begins to worry that Brigitte will return to her native France, she searches for her own “higher power.” This title is a Newbery Award winner.

Hiroshima
John Hersey

Hiroshima

Genre:
Biography, Nonfiction
Age Level:
Middle Grade

Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey interviewed survivors of Hiroshima’s bomb while the ashes were still warm. Hersey describes the lives of six people — a clerk, a widowed seamstress, a physician, a Methodist minister, a surgeon, and a German Catholic priest — shortly before and for about a year after the bombing. While describing the ordeals of these individuals, Hersey manages to convey the devastation and the suffering experienced by the people of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. A final chapter was added in 1985 that continues with the lives of these six people.

Two young men facing one another; one's image is fading away.
Adam Silvera

History Is All You Left Me

Genre:
Fiction
Age Level:
YA

When Griffin’s first love and ex-boyfriend, Theo, dies in a drowning accident, his universe implodes. Even though Theo had moved to California for college, Griffin never doubted Theo would come back to him when the time was right. But now, the future he’s been imagining for himself has gone far off course.

To make things worse, the only person who truly understands his heartache is Theo’s new boyfriend, Jackson. But no matter how much they open up to each other, Griffin’s downward spiral continues. He’s losing himself in his obsessive compulsions and destructive choices, and the secrets he’s been keeping are tearing him apart. If Griffin is ever to rebuild his future, he must first confront his history, every last heartbreaking piece in the puzzle of his life.

Detail of book cover A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World

History and Cultures

A YALSA committee of librarians selected these books to open doors on new worlds, exciting ideas, eccentric personalities, unfamiliar cultures, and distant time periods. Use it to broaden students’ horizons as they prepare for college entrance exams and courses.

Three women from the turn of the century standing with their hands in the air and Vote sashes on.
Kate Messner

History Smashers: Women's Right to Vote

Age Level:
Middle Grade

In 1920, Susan B. Anthony passed a law that gave voting rights to women in the United States. RIGHT? WRONG! Susan B. Anthony wasn’t even alive when the 19th Amendment was ratified. Did you know that when women’s rights activists picketed President Wilson to get his support for voting rights, some men beat them up, tore down their banners, and stole from them?

Through illustrations, graphic panels, photographs, sidebars, and more, author Kate Messner smashes history by exploring the little-known details behind the fight for women’s suffrage.