Central Kansas Library System

Twelve-year-old Trip Westbrook lives in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964 and discovers the underlying racism in his family and neighborhood when he invites his maid's son Dee to play football in the yard.

With the Rodney King riots closing in on high school senior Ashley and her family, the privileged bubble she has enjoyed, protecting her from the difficult realities most black people face, begins to crumble.

Still reeling from seeing police shoot his unarmed cousin to death on the roof of a New York City housing project, seventeen-year-old Clay is dragged into the whirlwind of political manipulation that follows.

Joey, the batboy for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, learns a hard lesson about respect for people of different races after Jackie Robinson joins the team.

Twelve-year-old Alfa Merryfield, his older sister, and their grandmother struggle for rent money, food, and their dignity as they participate in the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in the summer of 1956.

In 1963 in the Bronx, New York, eighth-graders Fiona and Yolanda help one another face hard decisions at home despite family and social opposition to their interracial friendship, but Fiona is on her own when popular classmates start paying attention to her and give her a glimpse of both a different way of life and a new kind of hatefulness.

Intertwining the stories of two Black students decades apart, this compelling and honest novel follows Kevin and Gibran as they navigate similar forms of insidious racism while discovering who they want to be instead of what society tells them they are.

Along with the usual concerns of senior year in high school, Alice faces some very difficult situations, including vandalism by a group of Neo-Nazis and a friend's confession that a teacher has been taking advantage of her.

Things aren't looking good for fourteen-year-old Mehrigul. She is a member of the Uyghur tribe, a group oppressed by the Chinese government. She yearns to be in school, but she's needed on the family farm. The longer she's out of school, the more likely it is that she'll be sent off to a Chinese factory... perhaps never to return. Her only hope is an American who buys one of her decorative baskets for a staggering sum and says she will return in three...

Seventeen-year-old Anglet Sutonga lives repairing the chimneys, towers, and spires of the city of Bar-Selehm. Dramatically different communities live and work alongside each other. The white Feldish command the nation's higher echelons of society. The native Mahweni are divided between city life and the savannah. And then there's Ang, part of the Lani community who immigrated over generations ago as servants and now mostly live in poverty on Bar-Selehm's...