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All American Boys

Jason Reynolds, Brendan Kiely · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Dear Martin

Nic Stone · 224 pages

"Powerful, wrenching.” –JOHN GREEN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Turtles All the Way Down "Raw and gripping." –JASON REYNOLDS, New York Times bestselling coauthor of All American Boys "A must-read!” –ANGIE THOMAS, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give Raw, captivating, and undeniably real, Nic Stone joins industry giants Jason Reynolds and Walter Dean Myers as

Racial ViolenceRacismCorrupt PoliceEmotional
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The Hate U Give

Angie Thomas · 458 pages

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter navigates between the poverty-stricken neighborhood she has grown up in and the upper-crust suburban prep school she attends. Her life is up-ended when she is the sole witness to a police officer shooting her best friend, Khalil, who turns out to have been unarmed during the confrontation – but may or may not have been a drug dealer. As Starr finds herself even more t

RacismCorrupt PoliceRacial ViolenceYoung Adult
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Dreamland Burning

Jennifer Latham · 377 pages

SOME BODIES WON'T STAY BURIED. SOME STORIES NEED TO BE TOLD. When seventeen-year-old Rowan Chase finds a skeleton on her family's property, she has no idea that investigating the brutal century-old murder will lead to a summer of painful discoveries about the past, the present, and herself. One hundred years earlier, a single violent encounter propels seventeen-year-old Will Tillman into

RacismRacial ViolenceYoung AdultTeen Protagonist
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Lie

Caroline Bock · 211 pages

Told in several voices, a group of Long Island high school seniors conspire to protect eighteen-year-old Jimmy after he brutally assaults two Salvadoran immigrants, until they begin to see the moral implications of Jimmy's actions and the consequences of being loyal to a violent bully.

Racial ViolenceRacismMultiple POVYoung Adult
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The Round House

Louise Erdrich · 352 pages

A young man is upended after a violent attack on his mother, which leaves his family in turmoil. Well-written page turner that is hard to put down!

Racial ViolenceRacismTeen ProtagonistEmotional
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The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers · 334 pages

Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior

Racial ViolenceRacismMultiple POVTeen Protagonist
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How It Went Down

Kekla Magoon · 339 pages

When sixteen-year-old Tariq Johnson is shot to death, his community is thrown into an uproar because Tariq was black and the shooter, Jack Franklin, is white, and in the aftermath everyone has something to say, but no two accounts of the events agree.

RacismRacial ViolenceMultiple POVYoung Adult
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Whistling Past the Graveyard

Susan Crandall · 320 pages

Determined to get to Nashville to find her mother in 1963, nine-year-old spitfire Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home, eventually accepting a ride from a Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby. In 1963, determined to get to Nashville to find her mother, nine-year-old spitfire Starla runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home. The

RacismRacial ViolenceEmotionalTeen Protagonist
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Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison · 338 pages

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori

Racial ViolenceRacismEmotionalMultiple POV
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Fire from the Rock

Sharon M. Draper · 240 pages

Racial ViolenceRacismTeen ProtagonistYoung Adult
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Lies We Tell Ourselves

Robin Talley · 376 pages

In 1959 Virginia, Sarah, a black student who is one of the first to attend a newly integrated school, forces Linda, a white integration opponent's daughter, to confront harsh truths when they work together on a school project.

Racial ViolenceRacismMultiple POVYoung Adult
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Natchez Burning

Greg Iles · 791 pages

Penn Cage must investigate when his father, a beloved family doctor and pillar of the community, is accused of murdering Violet Davis, the beautiful nurse with whom he worked in the dark days of the early 1960s.

Racial ViolenceCorrupt PoliceRacismMultiple POV
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Holes

Louis Sachar · 240 pages

Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly sent to a boys' detention center, Camp Green Lake, where the boys build character by spending all day, every day, digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green

Racial ViolenceRacismTeen ProtagonistMultiple POV
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Monster

Walter Dean Myers · 281 pages

While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course his life has taken.

RacismEmotionalYoung AdultContemporary Fiction
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Stand Your Ground

Victoria Christopher Murray · 400 pages

After a seventeen-year-old African American boy is shot dead by a white man, the boy's mother and the shooter's wife face difficulties.

Racial ViolenceRacismEmotionalContemporary Fiction
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House of Sand and Fog

Andre Dubus III · 365 pages

Corrupt PoliceRacismMultiple POVEmotional
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The Weight of Blood

Tiffany D Jackson · 400 pages

Racial ViolenceRacismTeen ProtagonistYoung Adult
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Witness

Karen Hesse · 161 pages

A series of poems express the views of various people in a small Vermont town, including a young black girl and a young Jewish girl, during the early 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan is trying to infiltrate the town.

Racial ViolenceRacismMultiple POVEmotional
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The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay · 518 pages

Follows Peekay, a white British boy in South Africa during World War II, between the ages of five and eleven, as he survives an abusive boarding school and goes on to succeed in life and the boxing ring, with help from a chicken, a boxer, a pianist, black African prisoners, and many others.

Racial ViolenceRacismEmotionalMale Lead
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The House Girl

Tara Conklin · 372 pages

A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.

Racial ViolenceRacismMultiple POVEmotional
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The Known World

Edward P. Jones · 400 pages

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for *Paradise Lost* and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to

Racial ViolenceRacismMultiple POVEmotional
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Mudbound

Hillary Jordan · 335 pages

"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld

RacismRacial ViolenceMultiple POVEmotional
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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fannie Flagg · 403 pages

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Ala

Racial ViolenceRacismMultiple POVEmotional

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