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  • WEEKEND PICKS 2023

Weekend Pick for April 29, 2022

4/29/2022

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Weekend Pick for April 29, 2022

Looking for something to read? 
​Check out our weekly suggestions!
Are your students looking for book recommendations?
Send them to browse through the picks for this or past years.
​
For the picks from 2021 click here
For the picks from 2020 click here.
For older picks click from 2019 click here.
For the even older picks click here.
​

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Sarah Fleming
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The Truth about White Lies by Olivia A Cole
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​For my last weekend pick, I’ve selected a new book, The Truth about White Lies by Olivia A Cole. This book comes highly recommended and is blurbed by other YA authors such as Nic Stone, Tiffany D. Jackson, Mark Oshiro and Brendan Kiely, to name a few of my own favorites (see the jacket for even more!). This is the story of Shania Hester, a white high school junior who has moved to the new town of Blue Rock with her mother, after the death of her grandmother shatters her world back home in Morrisville. While Shania works evenings at the donut shop in a gentrified side of town, by day she attends Bard Academy of Excellence, an elite school for the city’s privileged class, the likes of siblings Catherine and Prescott Tate.

​Shania is enamored with Catherine’s queen-like status, and she can’t resist Prescott’s charm. But something darker lurks just underneath the surface of this shiny new space. In between trying to make the right new friends and figure out the social codes for her new school, Shania seeks refuge in the school’s greenhouse where she is able to tend to the green thumb she inherited from her grandmother. She carries around an old almanac that belonged to Gram, and inside she finds a scrawled note that sets Shania on a scavenger hunt for missing information. As Shania tries to solve the mystery of her grandmother’s past, she comes face to face with the harsh realities of her present and what Bard means for students who aren’t rich or white. Shania must confront the effects of her own silence and greater complicity in a broken system set up to fail so many others. 

​Shania is a complicated character, one who struggles with her own sense of self and her desire to be a good person and to do the right thing. Readers might relate to her squeamishness around the topic of race and her desire to build up walls of protection in her mind when she doesn’t know how to respond to her classmates’ comments. This book prompts important, uncomfortable and very necessary conversations about race and privilege, especially for those young people who identify like Shania and are just coming to realize their own racialized identity as white people. I would recommend this book for readers of Bredan Kiely’s nonfiction text The Other Talk, Reckoning with Our White Privilege, or Frederick Joseph’s The Black Friend: On Being a Better White Person. 
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Olivia A. Cole

​This is my last weekend pick for the month of April, so thank you for joining me in these reviews - and happy reading!

Sarah Fleming
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Weekend Pick for April 22, 2022

4/22/2022

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Weekend Pick for April 22, 2022

Looking for something to read? 
​Check out our weekly suggestions!
Are your students looking for book recommendations?
Send them to browse through the picks for this or past years.
​
For the picks from 2021 click here
For the picks from 2020 click here.
For older picks click from 2019 click here.
For the even older picks click here.
​Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam
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​This weekend’s pick is another celebration of beauty in narrative verse: Punching the Air by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, a National Book Award finalist. I am absolutely in love with this text, and I can’t recommend it enough for everyone to read, especially as we continue to recognize National Poetry Month this April - the minute I finished it I turned right back to the beginning to start rereading it! This is the story of Amal Shahid, a young Black teen who at the beginning of the story finds himself in the courts, awaiting a verdict after being charged with aggravated assault and battery after a neighborhood fight he and his friends were involved in. The reader doesn’t know all the details of the fight yet; those details come out as the story progresses, when Amal is found guilty and sent to a juvenile detention center. And so the reader begins a journey with Amal in hopes that his conviction will be overturned. Each page brings a new poem with a provocative title that speaks to that sense of hope in the face of injustice. 


​But Amal’s story is unique to his own identity and experience, as would be that of every other boy in that detention center - something the reader comes to understand as they listen to Amal. Amal is not just a boy who made a mistake, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time - he is a poet and an artist. He is a passionate young man with a thirst for knowledge and a love for deep books. He is a son, and a brother, and a friend, and a romantic interest, and the reader gets to know him in all these ways. He is more than the crime itself, or the headlines, or the brief quips of those who spoke at his trial (watch for the testimony of his art teacher, Ms. Rinaldi, if you want to see how injustice perpetuates itself in our school and court systems).  
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​This book is so gorgeously creative in its storytelling, weaving the poems together amidst pages and pages of black ink sketches that shape our vision through Amal’s eyes and heart. Each poem takes us one step further into the very dehumanizing world of incarceration, and each poem is Amal’s desperate attempt to stay afloat in such an overwhelming sea of violence and despair. He turns to his poems, rhymes and sketches to see him through, along with the help of a new teacher and prison abolitionist Imani Dawson, who urges him to write his truth. The cover art pays tribute to the metaphors at work in his paintings, the beautiful butterflies that stand testimony to the chrysalis he and all the boys in the detention center must endure as the world seeks to rob them of their very souls. 
​About the authors - Ibi Zoboi is an exceptional writer, author of American Street (also a National Book Award finalist) and my personal favorite, Pride - a modern, Brooklyn remix of the classic Pride and Prejudice (a side note - I’ve taught Pride to my seniors, and they’ve loved it, so I highly recommend that one too!). You may recognize Yusef Salaam as one of the Exonerated Five, the wrongly convicted young men in the Central Park jogger case. Dr. Salaam is a poet, activist and inspirational speaker. While Punching the Air is not his personal story, it is informed by his own experiences as a young poet having been incarcerated for a crime he did not commit. This collaboration between Zoboi and Salaam, which both speak to in the end notes, is the end result of two people whose belief in the power of youth voices serves to remind us of all young people’s beauty and humanity.  
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Ibi Zoboi
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Yusef Salaam
Until next week,
​Sarah
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Weekend Pick for April 15, 2022

4/15/2022

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Weekend Pick for April 15, 2022
 

Looking for something to read? 
​Check out our weekly suggestions!
Are your students looking for book recommendations?
Send them to browse through the picks for this or past years.
​
For the picks from 2021 click here
For the picks from 2020 click here.
For older picks click from 2019 click here.
For the even older picks click here.
Rainy-day mysteries!
It's been a dreary few days up here in central New York, which means it’s a perfect time to curl up with a blanket, a cup of tea and a really good book. This weekend I have three mysteries to offer you, all certain to be engaging, quick, can’t-put-them-down reads to help you get through these April showers and into the days of sunshine that just have to be ahead of us, right?
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Karen M. McManus
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You’ll Be the Death of Me by Karen M. McManus
The first selection is You’ll Be the Death of Me, by mystery writer extraordinaire Karen M. McManus, most famous for her series One of Us Is Lying / One of Us Is Next series.  For those of us of a certain age who work with young people and enjoy reading young adult literature, McManus’s first series brought to mind some nostalgia for our Breakfast Club days, and You’ll Be the Death of Me offers a similar start: noting that the story begins with three friends who spontaneously decide to take the day off from school has us yearning for a Ferris Bueller's Day Off-themed storyline. But just like her other tales, the story quickly takes a dark turn, as Ivy, Cal and Mateo’s seemingly innocent adventure turns into a race to solve a classmate’s murder. Once close friends in middle school who grew apart over time, the threesome have to contend with the awkwardness of navigating estranged relationships all while trying to prove their own innocence when it looks as if they’re being implicated in the murder. The three set off on a dark scavenger hunt of sorts, looking to stay ahead of the police in confronting the details about drugs, family secrets, and a town scandal that is sure to leave readers’ jaws dropped. 
​The Project by Courtney Summers
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The second pick for this weekend is called The Project by Courtney Summers, author of the NYTimes bestseller Sadie.  This too is another dark tale, the story of Lo Denham, a young woman and aspiring journalist whose suspicions about The Unity Project lead her down a harrowing journey of self-discovery. When Lo was just a girl she almost died in a tragic car accident that claimed the rest of her family except for her older sister Bea. Bea, desperately afraid that her little sister Lo would die too, found solace and faith in the Project’s spiritual leader, Lev Warren. When Lo miraculously survived, Bea left to join The Unity Project and Lo was left alone, feeling abandoned and betrayed. When The Unity Project finds itself thrust into the headlines, Lo sees her opportunity to investigate the secretive organization and to hopefully find the answers about her sister she’s been searching for years. Told in alternating chapters of contemporary events and flashbacks, the mystery evolves as readers come to learn more and more of the backstory between Lo and Bea, leaving them to both hope for a reunion and to dread what might become of Lo as she gets even closer to the Project in her investigation. 
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Courtney Summers

The Initial Insult by Mindy McGinnis
My final pick for mysteries you can’t put down this weekend is called The Initial Insult by Mindy McGinnis. This one is just pure fun for all lovers of Edgar Allan Poe, as the settings, characters and storylines are borrowed from his most famous tales. Taking place in Amontillado Ohio, this is the story of young Tress Montor and her nemesis Felicity Turnado (get it already, right?). Tress and Felicity used to be best friends, but that ends when Tress’s parents mysteriously disappear and Felicity alone survives. This novel is told from the girls’ alternating perspectives (plus with a third poetic narrator told in the voice of Tress’s panther) and is the story of what happens when one girl’s horrific actions finally push the other one over the edge. Just as in “The Cask of Amontillado,” this is a story of the harshest revenge, and the details are shockingly similar. The reader is tempted to hope that young people couldn’t engage in such terrible treatment of one another, but as anyone familiar with the social realities of high school will attest, wounds run deep - and Tress can’t let go of her resentment for everything Felicity has that Tress herself had lost.  The Initial Insult is the first of a duology, and the end leaves you on a cliffhanger so be prepared to get the second installment in the series, The Last Laugh, which is out now. And that’s where I'll leave you, as it’s the next pick in my to-be-read pile too!
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Mindy Mc Ginnis

​Till next weekend!
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Weekend Pick for April 8, 2022

4/8/2022

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Sarah Fleming continues April weekend suggestions. Welcome her new post!
​Looking for something to read? 
​Check out our weekly suggestions!
Are your students looking for book recommendations?
Send them to browse through the picks for this or past years.
​
For the picks from 2021 click here
For the picks from 2020 click here.
For older picks click from 2019 click here.
For the even older picks click here.

Weekend Pick for April 8, 2022

I Must Betray You by Ruta Sepetys  
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​This weekend’s pick brings us back a little bit in history, to 1989 and the break-up of the communist bloc in Eastern Europe. I Must Betray You is the story of 17-year old Cristian Florescu, a student and aspiring writer who struggles to live under the extraordinarily repressive regime of Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu where everyone lives under the constant threat of surveillance and can’t know who to trust. At the beginning of Cristian’s story, he is confronted by the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, and forced to become an informer in order to secure much-needed medicine for his sick grandfather. He is directed to observe and inform on a friend, the son of an American diplomat and share information about his activities with the Securitate. 

​Cristian is devastated; he knows that “it was not a proposal. It was an order, and one that compromised all principles of deceney. I’d be a rat, a turnător, secretly informing on the private lives of others” (p. 11).  Thus begins his struggle as Cristian adapts to his new life as a secret spy, all while trying to maintain a semblance of normalcy amongst his family and friends. For today's readers, that “normal” is unrecognizable - a life in which students lived in fear, stood for hours in line to get food rations, couldn’t speak with any criticism against their country or leader, weren’t allowed to congregate in groups larger than four people at a time, and were completely cut off from the world outside their country’s borders. When Cristian is able to befriend Liliana, the girl who’s held his interest for some time, he is torn between his desire to tell her the truth and to keep quiet for their safety and the safety of his family, who he fears suspects his betrayal. Things only get more complicated when Crisitan discovers who else around him may also be working as an informer.
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​I Must Betray You is a fascinating, page-turning look at life in Bucharest, Romania just as its people rose in revolution against its tyrannical dictator. Cristian is a likable protagonist with whom readers come to empathize, as his story both teaches about a time and place with which readers are most likely unfamiliar, as well as offers the very recognizable conflicts a young person has in navigating issues of trust with family and friends. This book has much to teach young readers about the realities of living in the Eastern Bloc at this time, yet it also serves as a testimony to the power of a single voice in a sea of so many others. Cristian’s story is truly inspirational and will have young people wondering how they too can speak up and act out in the face of injustice.
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Till next week,
​Sarah
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Weekend Pick for April 1, 2022

4/1/2022

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Looking for something to read? 
​
Check out our weekly suggestions!
Are your students looking for book recommendations?
Send them to browse through the picks for this or past years.
​
For the picks from 2021 click here

For the picks from 2020 click here.
For older picks click from 2019 click here.
For the even older picks click here.
April showers bring May flowers they say. We bring you Sarah Fleming, who will be our guest-contributor  for the entire month. Sarah is a 21-year veteran English teacher now working at SUNY Oswego as a teacher educator. She loves "all things young adult literature," and lives with her husband, son, dog and cat in Syracuse, NY. Her first weekend pick follows below, and because
April is a National poetry Month, Sarah begins with a verse novel by Elizabeth Acevedo.
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Weekend Pick for April 1, 2022

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo

​It’s one of the worst things we could imagine – the sudden, tragic loss of a parent. But then imagine that loss brings with it an entirely new world full of family secrets and a shocking reality. All of this happens in the first few chapters of Elizabeth Acevedo’s stunning novel in verse,
Clap When You Land, our first novel for April’s Weekend Picks – and, of course, in celebration of National Poetry Month! This is the story of two teenage girls – Camino, who lives in the Dominican Republic, and Yahaira, who lives in New York City – and what happens to them when they learn that their father has died in a plane crash and they each come to find out that he had another secret family, a world away. Imagine that, being sixteen years old and finding out you have a half-sister you never knew about! 
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The story alternates between chapters told from the two girls’ points of view as they grapple with their grief and this new realization. The reader comes to know each girl in her element; Camino, an avid swimmer and an aspiring doctor in her small tropical town who spends more and more time dodging the unwanted attention of a local man, and Yahaira, a talented chess player in love with her best friend next door in her Morningside Heights neighborhood. In the days and weeks that follow, both girls have to painfully navigate the daily realities of family friends and mourners' well-wishing, funeral arrangements and the expectations of school that have not changed. Yahaira decides that if Papi is going to be buried in the Dominican Republic, that she will be there to see it happen, and thus begins her journey to meet the sister she's only recently discovered. ​
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I am a huge fan of Elizabeth Acevedo. Her first novel in verse,
The Poet X, won the National Book Award and was a simply gorgeous story of young Xiomara’s coming of age through the performing of her slam poetry. Her novel With the Fire on High was an unapologetic telling of Emoni, high school senior and mother who works fiercely and tirelessly to protect her daughter, all while daring to dream of her future as a great chef.  Just like with Clap When You Land, in both these books Acevedo writes beautifully strong, complex young women through verse or prose that is lyrical and magical. If you've never seen or heard Acevedo read her work, stop what you’re doing right now and go look it up - her performances will leave you tingling, so I also encourage you to check out the audio versions of her books. Listening to her read is nourishment for the literary soul!

It is my pleasure to bring you titles for this month's weekend picks, and I thank you for reading. I will share a few more novels in verse in recognition of it being National Poetry month, but I will also have some quick, fun reads, plus a few more serious titles I just couldn’t put down. 
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Until next week, thanks! - Sarah
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    Curators for the Weekend Picks

    Leilya Pitre
    Leilya taught English as a foreign language in the Ukraine and ELA/English in public schools in the US. Her research interests include teacher preparation, clinical experiences, secondary school teaching, and teaching and research of Young Adult and multicultural literature. Together with her friend and colleague, Mike Cook, she co-authored a two-volume edition of Teaching Universal Themes Through Young Adult Novels (2021). ​
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    Cammie Jo Lawton
    Cammie is a current doctoral student at the University of Tennessee Knoxville and serves the Center for Children and Young Adult Literature as a graduate research assistant. She is especially interested in how YA can affect readers, create empathy and possibly shift thinking. 
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    Nikki Bylina-Streets
    Nikki is a elementary librarian who just keeps reading YA literature. She is a constant advocate for reading at every level. You can also follow her through her ​Instagram account dedicated to my school library work. @thislibraryrocks
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