young adult Archives - Page 48 of 102

Piñata Moon
by Torran Anderson (Author)

Booktalk: When Envo’s friend, J., commits suicide, he’s caught between his regular routine of driving around looking for parties and his own struggles with depression. Told over the course of one night in Tucson, Arizona, Enzo searches for a rite of passage that will help him confront J.’s death. As Enzo wrestles with his complicated history with J., he struggles to communicate with his friends, Matas and Sci-fi, and imagines the moon is his only confidant. Enzo keeps a running list of the tiny things he enjoys about living to combat his urge to follow in J.’s footsteps and he receives tweets from the moon that give him the guidance he craves.

Snippet:

@themoonforreal
Give me a good reason to exit this life early.
I can’t think of one.

@themoonforreal
No point in taking your life, Envo. You haven’t
lived yet.

A 2019 Cybils Poetry nominee

Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience
Edited by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond

Booktalk: This collection of sixty-four poems by poets who come from all over the world shares the experience of first- and second-generation young adult immigrants and refugees.

Snippet:
A Hymn to Childhood

Childhood? What childhood?
The one that didn’t last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded-up well in the backyard
and the ladder to the attic.

The one presided over by armed men
in ill-fitting uniforms
strolling the streets and alleys
while loudspeakers proclaimed a new era,
and the house around you grew bigger,
the rooms farther apart, with more and more
people missing?

An excerpt from a poem by Li-Young Lee

A 2019 Cybils Poetry nominee