Fri Feb 21: what we talked about

Glad you all enjoyed the locker decorations! Stop by your locker to admire -- or, if you never use your locker, wander the school aimlessly looking for your name - ha! Thank you LMC aide Ms. Kennedy for the cool artwork.

• Summary: When assassins ambush her best friend, Rielle Dardenne risks everything to save him, exposing herself as one of a pair of prophesied queens: a queen of light, and a queen of blood. To prove she is the Sun Queen, Rielle must endure seven elemental magic trials. If she fails, she will be executed...unless the trials kill her first. One thousand years later, the legend of Queen Rielle is a fairy tale to Eliana Ferracora. A bounty hunter for the Undying Empire, Eliana believes herself untouchable--until her mother vanishes. To find her, Eliana joins a rebel captain and discovers that the evil at the empire's heart is more terrible than she ever imagined. As Rielle and Eliana fight in a cosmic war that spans millennia, their stories intersect, and the shocking connections between them ultimately determine the fate of their world--and of each other.
• Genre: fantasy

• Summary: The author was just ten years old when she found herself with a gun pointed at her head. The rebels had come at night -- wielding weapons, torches, machetes. She watched as her mother and six-year-old sister were gunned down in a refugee camp, far from their home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The rebels were killing people who weren't from the same community, the same tribe. In other words, they were killing people simply for looking different. "Goodbye, life," she said to the man ready to shoot her. Remarkably, the rebel didn't pull the trigger, and Sandra escaped into the night. Thus began a new life for her and her surviving family members. With no home and no money, they struggled to stay alive. Eventually, through a United Nations refugee program, they moved to America, only to face yet another ethnic disconnect. Sandra may have crossed an ocean, but there was now a much wider divide she had to overcome. And it started with middle school in New York. In this memoir, Sandra tells the story of her survival, of finding her place in a new country, and of her hope for the future.
• Genre: non-fiction
• Nominated for 2020 Illinois Teen Choice Award

• Summary: A story of first love, family, loss, and betrayal told from different points in time, and in separate voices, by artists Jude and her twin brother Noah
• Genre: realistic

• Summary: The lives of Cyra Noavek and Akos Kereseth are ruled by their fates, spoken by the oracles at their births. The fates, once determined, are inescapable. Akos is in love with Cyra, in spite of his fate: He will die in service to Cyra’s family. And when Cyra’s father, Lazmet Noavek—a soulless tyrant, thought to be dead—reclaims the Shotet throne, Akos believes his end is closer than ever.
• Genre: fantasy
• Sequel to Carve the Mark

• Summary: In this reimagining of The Arabian Nights, Shahrzad plans to avenge the death of her dearest friend by volunteering to marry the murderous boy-king of Khorasan but discovers not all is as it seems within the palace.
• Genre: fantasy

• Pet by Awaeke Emezi has transgender character who is also selectively mute and uses American Sign Language; her friend has 3 parents; and the public librarian who helps them uses a wheelchair. Author seems to be successful at integrating many social identities with less awkwardness than in other books.
• Books in which the cover art introduces the racial identity of the characters also can be successful.
• Less successful is the use of food analogies to describe diverse skin colors, "chocolate skin" and "mocha skin" are especially cringey.
• Rick Riordan seems to be successful in including many social identities, especially his emphasis that characters with ADHD have powers
• If diverse characters are introduced, author can be more successful if they don't make them "sidekick" characters or give them tragic endings

• Love, Hate and Other Filters
  • Summary: Maya Aziz is caught between her India-born parents' world of college and marrying a suitable Muslim boy, and her dream world of film school and dating her classmate, Phil. In the aftermath of a terrorist attack hundreds of miles away, the community she's known since birth is transformed by fear, bigotry, and hatred.
  • genre: realistic
• Internment
  • Summary: It's been one year since the census landed seventeen-year-old Layla Amin and her family on the registry. Five months since the attorney general argued that Korematsu v. United States established precedent for relocation of citizens during times of war. And one month since the president declared that "Muslims are a threat to America." And now, Layla and her parents are suddenly taken from their home and forced into an internment camp for Muslim American citizens. With the help of new friends also trapped within the detention center, her boyfriend on the outside, and an unexpected alliance, Layla begins a journey to fight for freedom, leading a revolution against the internment camp's Director and his guards.
  • Genre: realistic or science fiction
• Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know  (released April 2020)
  • Summary: It’s August in Paris and 17-year-old Khayyam Maquet—American, French, Indian, Muslim—is at a crossroads. This holiday with her professor parents should be a dream trip for the budding art historian. But her maybe-ex-boyfriend is probably ghosting her, she might have just blown her chance at getting into her dream college, and now all she really wants is to be back home in Chicago figuring out her messy life instead of brooding in the City of Light.
    Two hundred years before Khayyam’s summer of discontent, Leila is struggling to survive and keep her true love hidden from the Pasha who has “gifted” her with favored status in his harem. In the present day—and with the company of a descendant of Alexandre Dumas—Khayyam begins to connect allusions to an enigmatic 19th-century Muslim woman whose path may have intersected with Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Delacroix, and Lord Byron.
    Echoing across centuries, Leila and Khayyam’s lives intertwine, and as one woman’s long-forgotten life is uncovered, another’s is transformed. 
  • genre: ?