YA Fiction

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.

African American Bree, 16, grief stricken since her mother’s death in a car accident, is in the Early College program at UNC-Chapel Hill, her mom’s alma mater.

The voices of 14 teenagers and young adults, all friends and acquaintances from San Francisco’s Japantown, narrate this story of Japanese and Japanese American imprisonment during World War II.

Running for prom queen is way outside high school senior Liz Lighty’s comfort zone, but she’s motivated by the $10,000 scholarship for the winner, since she didn’t get the music scholarship she was counting on for college.