Didn’t manage to make the Sara Barnard author talk I conducted? Don’t worry! The full discussion is now online. It was such a pleasure to finally to get to talk to Sara about her YA novels and how much I admire and enjoy reading and I hope after watching this, you’ll start reading her books as well!
Continue celebrating Native American Heritage Month now and throughout the year with these amazing YA books that we have at the Augusta-Richmond County Public Library! There is still time to participate in the American Indian Library Association’s Read Native 2021 challenge of which you can earn prizes as you read books by and about Native Americans. To find out more, go to: https://ailanet.org/readnative21/
If you enjoy reading spooky tales, join Ms. Jordi as she gives several YA book recommendations for middle and high school students that you can check out at the library. But be warned: Read if you dare!
As National Hispanic Heritage Month comes to an end today, check out these amazing YA novels to help you celebrate now and throughout the year. Among them, you’ll find Nonfiction, Historical Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, and more that celebrate Hispanic tweens and teens as well as their heritage.
Tween/Teen Storytime: The Beast Player by Nahoko Uehashi
Join Ms. Jordi, our YA Librarian, as she reads chapter 1 of The Beast Player, a YA novel, by Nahoko Uehashi. This year, the theme for our Summer Reading Program is Tails & Tales which celebrates stories about animals. This novel is a great one to read this summer especially if you are an animal lover.
Did you know that listening to audiobooks counts as reading? Starting today, teens ages 13+ can download free audiobooks fromhttps://www.audiofilemagazine.com/sync/ for the next 14 weeks! Each week, there will be two new audiobooks to download, and you’ll have access to them for a lifetime. Now through May 5th, you can download the books “Come On In: 15 Stories About Immigration and Finding Home” edited by Adi Alsaid and “Illegal” by Francis X. Stork. Happy listening!
no no bc u don’t understand…..it’s been years and i’m still a wreck like i could go on about how the ending of tqon subverts tropes in popular ya novels and how it was even more successful bc of it..anyway i love this art and it’s bringing back the feels
Books I’ve Read In 2022 - Can’t Take That Away by Steven Salvatore
Carey Parker dreams of being a diva, and bringing the house down with song. They can hit every note of all the top pop and Broadway hits. But despite their talent, emotional scars from an incident with a homophobic classmate and their grandmother’s spiraling dementia make it harder and harder for Carey to find their voice.
Then Carey meets Cris, a singer/guitarist who makes Carey feel seen for the first time in their life. With the rush of a promising new romantic relationship, Carey finds the confidence to audition for the role of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, in the school musical, setting off a chain reaction of prejudice by Carey’s tormentor and others in the school. It’s up to Carey, Cris, and their friends to defend their rights–and they refuse to be silenced.
Books I’ve Read In 2022 - The Falling In Love Montage by Ciara Smyth
Seventeen-year-old cynic Saoirse Clarke isn’t looking for a relationship. But when she meets mischievous Ruby, that rule goes right out the window. Sort of.
Because Ruby has a loophole in mind: a summer of all the best cliché movie montage dates, with a definite ending come fall—no broken hearts, no messy breakup. It would be the perfect plan, if they weren’t forgetting one thing about the Falling in Love Montage: when it’s over, the characters have fallen in love…for real.
¡Qué bonita bandera! AKA what heritage(s) do you claim?
I am Peruvian. Born in Peru to a mother who was born in Peru whose mother was also born in Peru and so on and so on.
When was the first time you saw yourself represented?
I didn’t really see myself represented in books until fairly recently—but maybe that’s my fault for being a less-than-stellar reader as a kid. The first books that were read to me were picture books in Spanish, and they’re books that I still have and treasure. But when we moved to America it was a huge cultural shift and all the entertainment I consumed was super Americanized. I didn’t really see any Latinx characters in anything I read until adulthood when I picked up Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I was honestly delighted to read Spanglish right there on the page—Spanish words that weren’t translated into English. To me that was a clear message that this was written for me, for us. Reading that and identifying with the Hispanic/American/New York cultures in that book was a thrill.
How do you connect to your heritage through your books (if at all)?
In my latest novel, No Good Deed, the protagonist is named Gregor Maravilla—a nod to both his Eastern European and Latino heritage. A motif in the story involves his bunkmate constantly teasing him for being just another white boy and Gregor constantly having to stand up for his heritage and remind his bunkmate that he’s actually half-Latino. That was written from experience. There’s been plenty of times in my life where people pull the classic Mean Girls line and ask me why I’m so white if I’m really Latina, or they don’t believe me because of my name. It was important for me to show that Latinxs come in all different forms, and we’ve all got a connection to our Latinx heritage.
What do you hope for the future of Latinx books?
I hope to learn more from cultures that aren’t my own. I want to see every kind of Latinx on the page.
What is the book that inspired you to write for kids/teens?
Gossip Girl!
What are you writing now?
Working on something brand new but it’s way too early to talk about it just yet. My latest novel, No Good Deed, just came out this summer from Scholastic.
Goldy Moldavsky was born in Lima, Peru, and grew up in Brooklyn, where she still lives. Her debut novel, KILL THE BOY BAND, is a New York Times bestseller, and her latest novel is NO GOOD DEED. Both books are published by Scholastic in the US and MacMillan in the UK.
¡Qué bonita bandera! AKA what heritage(s) do you claim?
My father is a Mexican immigrant and my mother was born in New York, of Dominican parents. A bit of both heritages have trickled down to my sisters and I.
When was the first time you saw yourself represented?
In the hit 80s TV show CHiPs. It was filmed in southern California, where I was living. It’s hard to overstate the impact of dark-skinned Erik Estrada, accidental star of the show, on a little Latino kid. Miraculously, he didn’t portray a manual laborer or the bad guy. He played a charming cop who chased down criminals and hooked up with beautiful women.
How do you connect to your heritage through your books (if at all)?
In my first book, the main character has grown up in Florida without much family around. He’s a Latino kid who is sometimes rejected by his own for not speaking Spanish well. He doesn’t have a very strong connection to his heritage, which was my own experience growing up.
The book I’m currently writing features some culture from Mexico, where I’ve lived as an adult for many years. The main character has dual identities, Mexican and American. At times these identities overlap and at other times they clash. That sort of reflects my life now.
What do you hope for the future of Latinx books?
Diversity! Latinx people have different socioeconomic statuses, different struggles, and passions. Unfortunately, some people in publishing expect our characters to reinforce their conceptions of what it means to be Latinx. Authors are still told their characters aren’t Latinx enough.
What is the book that inspired you to write for kids/teens?
It might have been The Outsiders, which I’ve read five times. It a great story about the challenges of growing up poor and marginalized in an Oklahoma town. I’m always moved by the narrator’s authentic voice, how he observes the world and feels things deeply, as teenagers do.
What are you writing now?
A second novel. An uncool teenager with low self-esteem attempts to erase and recreate himself. It’s about the dangers of reacting to certain societal pressures, and the mistakes we sometimes make in the name of self-improvement.
Fred Aceves was born in New York but spent most of his youth in Southern California and Tampa, Florida, where he lived in a poor, working class neighborhood like the one described in The Closest I’ve Come. At the age of 21 he started traveling around the world, living in Chicago, New York, the Czech Republic, France, Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico, his father’s native land. Among other jobs, he has worked as a delivery driver, server, cook, car salesman, freelance editor, and teacher of English as a second language. The Closest I’ve Come is his first novel.
¡Qué bonita bandera! AKA what heritage(s) do you claim?
My mom is Mexican American, and my dad is half Puerto Rican and half white.
When was the first time you saw yourself represented?
With exactly those ingredients? Never. Before I was really into books and set my sights on being a writer, I was into music. When I was a teen, my goal in life was to join a rock band and tour the world. I played the bass. One of my idols was Cristina Martinez from the band Boss Hog. I don’t even know what her heritage is, but I saw her name and her long, dark hair and was in goo-goo eyes in love.
How do you connect to your heritage through your books (if at all)?
Most of the main characters in my books have some kind of mixed heritage. In A Fierce and Subtle Poison, Lucas is white and Dominican, and Isabel is white and Puerto Rican. In All the Wind in the World, Sarah Jacqueline is referred to as “mixed blood,” and you get the sense that a lot of people in her world are as well. I’m always interested in the ways in which multi-racial people can both claim their identity, but also be claimed by it. There are certain ways in which a person can exert power by controlling who they are and what they do, but also there are ways in which people’s bloodlines are inescapable. They call to you–tug at you–from the past. Well, I shouldn’t speak for everyone. This is just how it feels for me. I like to write characters that are both propelling themselves forward while being snagged on something from the past.
What do you hope for the future of Latinx books?
I hope that a wider variety of the Latinx experience can be explored. I once had a student tell me that she wanted to become more involved with issues that affected her community, but that she sometimes felt excluded or shamed, sort of like she wasn’t Latina enough because she wasn’t totally fluent in Spanish. To me, this is really frustrating, because there’s no one way to be Latinx. There never has been! We can continue to write past stereotypes and present varied experiences, and hopefully, that can make a difference.
What is the book that inspired you to write for kids/teens?
I’m working on a ghost story set in San Antonio. And also a story about bandits. They’re both coming along slowly but surely.
Samantha Mabry grew up in Texas playing bass guitar along to vinyl records, writing fan letters to rock stars, and reading big, big books, and credits her tendency toward magical thinking to her Grandmother Garcia, who would wash money in the kitchen sink to rinse off any bad spirits. She teaches writing and Latino literature at a community college in Dallas, Texas, where she lives with her husband, a historian, and her pets, including a cat named Mouse. She is the author of the novels A Fierce and Subtle Poison andAll the Wind in the World(on sale today October 10 from Algonquin Young Readers!). Visit her online at samanthamabry.com or on Twitter: @samanthamabry.
I never considered myself a fan of Catwoman. I love cats and I love complicated female characters but Selina Kyle never spoke to me. That is, until I read Lauren Myracle and Isaac Goodhart’s Under the Moon: A Catwoman Tale.
[image: character designs for the book It’s Not Me, It’s You. There are two versions of Avery Dennis, a White girl with long blonde hair and then a shorter haircut, Coco Kim, a Korean girl with long black hair in a bun and sunglasses. She and Avery are dressed fashionably. James “Hutch” Hutcherson is a Black boy with short hair and glasses. He is wearing a D20 shirt and holding a notebook.]
[Comics of 2 scenes from the book It’s Not Me, It’s You. 1. labelled “Recently dumped”, Avery Dennis, a white girl with long blonde hair, points at the camera and yells, “Impossible? Audrey Hepburn once said, ‘Nothing is impossible; the word itself says, “I’m possible!” Tell JFK to stick that in his pipe and smoke it!” Labelled “Best friend, heart emoji”, Coco Kim, a Korean girl with long black hair in a bun, says brightly, “JFK liked to smoke cigars, but he didn’t want to be photographed smoking them.” She is overlaid with text saying “all appearances to the contrary, this is actually not an oral history of the Kennedys”.
2. Avery, now with short hair, blushes while Hutch, a black boy with short hair and glasses, says “let the record show this clown made a horrible kissing noise that was audible over a transcontinental phone connection like a cartoon chef presenting a plate of tortellini”. There is a shot of Fabrizio (A young italian man with curly black hair) edited over a cartoon chef and a photo of tortellini. Avery smugly says, “Let the record show that I determine the historical record, not one James “Hutch” Hutcherson”. Hutch smirks and hands her his pen. end id]
