YA Fiction

Peruvian American sisters Lulu and Milagro aren’t exactly close and certainly weren’t planning to spend spring break together.

When 17-year-old Cristian Florescu is called to his school office and confronted by a member of the Romanian secret police, the Securitate officer tells Cristian that he and his family won’t be punished for the illegal American dollar Cristian possesses if he’s willing to become an informer.

In Guangzhou province, China, 1968, teenage Ming lives with other older orphans and works in the fields like everyone else in his village. Six years before, Ming’s mother, like many in the village, died during the great famine that the government attributes to natural disasters when in fact it was the result of poor policy.

Six stories by six different contributors are set during a citywide blackout in New York that begins on a hot summer day and extends into the night, ending at a Brooklyn block party where all the characters converge.

Indian American Rani Kelkar’s parents have always been clear: No dating in high school. She’s always respected that rule.

Daunis, 18, has postponed attending the University of Michigan to stay in Sault Ste. Marie for her mother, who is reeling from the recent death of Daunis’s uncle and the failing health of Daunis’s grandmother–the wealthy white woman who wouldn’t allow Daunis’s Ojibwe father to be named on Daunis’s birth certificate.

In 1954, high school senior Lily Hu is everything her parents expect her to be: studious, respectful, responsible, and she never ventures far from her close-knit Chinese American community in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Jane, 18, is the oldest of the five Spellbound princesses of Ever, each cursed to go without something particular from the moment she turns 13. Jane can’t eat, Nora can’t love, Alice can’t sleep, Grace can’t remember. Eden, about to turn 13, will go without hope.

Sia (Artemesia) Martinez’s mother was deported to Mexico three years ago and disappeared while trying to make the desert crossing back to the United States; she’s now presumed dead.