Banned Books 2022

"In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys. Both a primer for teens eager...

"Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters...

"An unapologetically sexually active queer character works to uncover a blackmailer threatening him back into the closet"--

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

"Mike Muñoz is a young Mexican American not too many years out of high school--and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew. Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can't seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it"--

Presents the life cycle of the endangered sea horse, discussing its mating behavior, the defense mechanisms it uses against predators, and the type of environment it lives in.

When high school student Clay Jensen receives a box in the mail containing several cassette tapes recorded by his classmate Hannah, who committed suicide, he spends a bewildering and heartbreaking night crisscrossing their town, listening to Hannah's voice recounting the events leading up to her death.

Moom Shadow was eight years old whe he sailed from China to join his father, Windrider, in America. For years, Windrider had lived in San Francisco and made his living doing laundry. Father and son had never met. But over time, Moon Shadow grows to love and respect his father and to believe in his wonderful dream. And Windrider, with Moos SHadoe's help, is willing to endure the mockery of the other Chinese, the poverty, the separation from his...

From the author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman comes a deep and compassionate novel. When Grant Wiggins, a college-educated man returns to 1940s Louisiana, he visits and forms an unlikely bond with Jefferson, a young Black man convicted of murder and sentenced to death, for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. Best Books for Young Teen Readers.

Good Trouble is the helpful antidote to all the pessimism and name-calling that is permeating today's political and social dialogues. Revisiting episodes from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, it highlights the essential lessons that modern-day activists and the civically minded can extract and embrace in order to move forward and create change. In words and vivid pen-and-watercolor illustrations, journalist Christopher Noxon dives...