SOTAREADING 2021-2027

Sunny G’s Series of Rash Decisions  by  Navdeep Singh Dhillon.    Monday, May 23, 2022 4 pm “Pitch-perfect. One of the most endearing teen voices I’ve ever encountered.” —Becky Albertalli, #1  New York Times  bestselling author of  Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda For fans of Sandhya Menon and Adam Silvera comes a prom-night romantic-comedy romp about a Sikh teen's search for love and identity. Sunny G's brother left him one thing when he died: His notebook, which Sunny is determined to fill up with a series of rash decisions. Decision number one was a big one: He stopped wearing his turban, cut off his hair, and shaved his beard. He doesn't look like a Sikh anymore. He doesn't look like himself anymore. Even his cosplay doesn't look right without his beard.   Sunny debuts his new look at prom, which he's stuck going to alone. He's skipping the big fandom party—the one where he'd normally be in full cosplay, up on stage playing bass with his band...

  Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award! Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing  New York Times -bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth.  Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best ke...

  March 28, 2022 4:00 Tommy Orange’s “groundbreaking, extraordinary” ( The New York Times )  There There  is the “brilliant, propulsive” ( People Magazine ) story of twelve unforgettable characters, Urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who converge and collide on one fateful day. It’s “the year’s most galvanizing debut novel” ( Entertainment Weekly ).   As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow—some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent—momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will to perform in ...

  NEW YORK TIMES  • 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2021 New York Times  • Times Critics Top Books of 2021 New York Times  Bestseller Best Books of the Year •  Washington Post ,  TIME , NPR, Oprah Daily,  Boston Globe ,  Christian Science Monitor ,  Kansas City Independent , Los Angeles Public Library, Washington Independent Review of Books, Spy, Audile, Biblioracle, AbeBooks Monday, Feb. 28  4 pm Moderator: Jim Tillotson The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth’s integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Texas native.   Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s  On Juneteenth  provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond....

Call Us What We Carry poetry by Amanda Gorman Monday, January 31 Moderator:  Marcy Gamzon The instant #1  New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and   USA Today   bestseller The breakout poetry collection by #1  New York Times  bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman Formerly titled  The Hill We Climb and Other Poems , the luminous poetry collection by #1  New York Times  bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In  Call Us What We Carry,  Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning.  Call Us What We Carry  reveals that Gorman ha...

  The Beekeeper of Aleppo Monday, Dec. 20. 2021 Moderator: Shelly Davis Nuri is a beekeeper and Afra, his wife, is an artist. Mornings, Nuri rises early to hear the call to prayer before driving to his hives in the countryside. On weekends, Afra sells her colorful landscape paintings at the open-air market. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the hills of the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo—until the unthinkable happens. When all they love is destroyed by war, Nuri knows they have no choice except to leave their home. But escaping Syria will be no easy task: Afra has lost her sight, leaving Nuri to navigate her grief as well as a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece toward an uncertain future in Britain. Nuri is sustained only by the knowledge that waiting for them is his cousin Mustafa, who has started an apiary in Yorkshire and is teaching fellow refugees beekeeping. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of ...

  Acclaimed author Renee Watson offers a powerful story about a girl striving for success in a world that too often seems like it's trying to break her. Jade believes she must get out of her poor neighborhood if she's ever going to succeed. Her mother tells her to take advantage of every opportunity that comes her way. And Jade has: every day she rides the bus away from her friends and to the private school where she feels like an outsider, but where she has plenty of opportunities. But some  opportunities  she doesn't really welcome, like an invitation to join Women to Women, a mentorship program for "at-risk" girls. Just because her mentor is black and graduated from the same high school doesn't mean she understands where Jade is coming from. She's tired of being singled out as someone who needs help, someone people want to fix. Jade wants to speak, to create, to express her joys and sorrows, her pain and her hope. Maybe there are some things she could s...