Category: young adult

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A Long Time Coming

A Long Time Coming: A Lyrical Biography of Race in America from Ona Judge to Barack Obama
by Ray Anthony Shepard (Author) and R. Gregory Christie (Illustrator)
@ Amazon | Bookshop

Booktalk: This YA biography-in-verse of six important Black Americans from different eras, including Ona Judge, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barack Obama, chronicles the diverse ways each fought racism and shows how much–and how little–has changed for Black Americans since our country’s founding.

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Copyright © 2023 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved.

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Dear Medusa

Dear Medusa: (A Novel in Verse)
by Olivia A. Cole (Author)
@ Amazon | Bookshop

Booktalk: TRIGGER ALERT: In this #MeToo novel in verse, it’s time to go back to school, but sixteen-year-old Alicia Rivers has a reputation that precedes her. But there’s more to her story than the whispers that follow her throughout the hallways at school–whispers that splinter into a million different insults that really mean: a girl who has had sex.

What her classmates don’t know is that Alicia was sexually abused by a popular teacher, and that trauma has rewritten every cell in her body into someone she doesn’t recognize. To the world around her, she’s been cast, like the mythical Medusa, as not the victim but the monster of her own story: the slut who asked for it.

Alicia was abandoned by her best friend, quit the track team, and now spends her days in detention feeling isolated and invisible. When mysterious letters left in her locker hint at another victim, Alicia struggles to keep up the walls she’s built around her trauma. At the same time, her growing attraction to a new girl in school makes her question what those walls are really keeping out.

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Copyright © 2023 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved.