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The Bracelet
Yoshiko Uchida

The Bracelet

Genre:
Historical Fiction
Age Level:
Middle Grade

Emi is filled with sadness as she prepares to leave her home for the internment camp where she and her fellow Japanese-Americans will be forced to live. Just before she leaves, her best friend Laurie brings her a special bracelet so that Emi will not forget her. When Emi loses the bracelet though in the crowds, she feels that has lost so much more and even more alone — until she realizes that maybe she doesn’t need the bracelet to remember Laurie after all.

Four children running across a bridge at sunset
Padma Venkatraman

The Bridge Home

Genre:
Fiction
Age Level:
Middle Grade

Life is harsh in Chennai’s teeming streets, so when runaway sisters Viji and Rukku arrive, their prospects look grim. Very quickly, eleven-year-old Viji discovers how vulnerable they are in this uncaring, dangerous world. Fortunately, the girls find shelter — and friendship — on an abandoned bridge. With two homeless boys, Muthi and Arul, the group forms a family of sorts. And while making a living scavenging the city’s trash heaps is the pits, the kids find plenty to laugh about and take pride in too. After all, they are now the bosses of themselves and no longer dependent on untrustworthy adults. But when illness strikes, Viji must decide whether to risk seeking help from strangers or to keep holding on to their fragile, hard-fought freedom. Washington Post Best Books 2019.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Genre:
Fiction, Romance
Age Level:
YA

“Ghetto nerd,” outcast, and anime-loving Oscar Wao is the latest in a long line of doomed generations to suffer the dreaded fuku curse of his native Dominican Republic. With humor and talent as his weapons, he perseveres, knowing “you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”

The Brothers' War: Civil War Voices in Verse
J. Patrick Lewis

The Brothers' War: Civil War Voices in Verse

Genre:
Nonfiction, Poetry
Age Level:
Middle Grade

With speeches of Civil War leaders, Lewis’ poignant poetry gives young readers a vivid insight into the brutal conflict that tore America apart. 

burning
Tim Madigan, Hilary Beard

The Burning: Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

Genre:
Nonfiction
Age Level:
YA

The Burning recreates Greenwood at the height of its prosperity, explores the currents of hatred, racism, and mistrust between its Black residents and Tulsa’s White population, narrates events leading up to and including Greenwood’s devastation, and documents the subsequent silence that surrounded this tragedy. Delving into history that’s long been pushed aside, this is the true story of Black Wall Street and the Tulsa Race Massacre, with updates that connect the historical significance of the massacre to the ongoing struggle for racial justice in America.

 

the cage
Ruth Minsky Sender

The Cage

Genre:
Autobiography and Memoir
Age Level:
YA

This is the memoir of a Nazi Holocaust survivor. This grandmother speaks from her experiences in the Lodz ghetto in Poland and Auschwitz when she was a teenager. Riva Minska vividly shares how the Nazis destroyed her family, her community, and her way of life and tells how she managed to survive the death camps of World War II.

Young woman holding cat near a war zone
Amra Sabic-El-Rayess, Laura L. Sullivan

The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival

Genre:
Autobiography and Memoir
Age Level:
YA

When Amra’s best friend said they couldn’t speak anymore, she realized that this was the first sign her world was changing. Amra, who was Muslim, lived in Bihac, Bosnia. Then Muslim refugees from other Bosnian cities started arriving, fleeing Serbian persecution. When the tanks rolled into Bihac, bringing her own city under seige, Amra’s happy life in her peaceful city vanished. But there is light even in the darkest of times, and she discovered that light in the warm, bonfire eyes of a stray cat. Here is the stunning true story of a teen who, even in the brutality of war, never wavered in her determination to obtain an education, maintain friendships, and even find a first love ― and the cat who gave comfort, hope, and maybe even served as the family’s guardian spirit. YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist.

Chana Abells

The Children We Remember

Genre:
Nonfiction
Age Level:
Middle Grade

Through moving photographs from the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, Israel, archivist Chana Byers Abells has created an unforgettable essay about the children who lived and died during the Holocaust. While it is a story of death and loss, it is also a story of courage and endurance, a story to be shared with today’s children.