Kathryn's Middle School Summer Reading Picks 2021

This book is written for the young person who doesn't know how to speak up to the racist adults in their life. For the 14 year old who sees injustice at school and isn't able to understand the role racism plays in separating them from their friends. For the kid who spends years trying to fit into the dominant culture and loses themselves for a little while. It's for all of the Black and Brown children who have been harmed (physically and emotionally)...

After an especially rough tackle on the football field, Ash thinks he might be suffering some permanent damage, because suddenly stop signs are blue and always have been. After the second universe-altering hit, he drives a Beemer instead of a Dodge, and a pair of interdimensional twins promises him answers. The more universes he visits, the more Ash has to face perspectives he never thought to consider before, and the closer the universe gets to complete...

When a Connecticut teenager inherits vast wealth and an eccentric estate from the richest man in Texas, she must also live with his surviving family and solve a series of puzzles to discover how she earned her inheritance.

"Sixteen-year-old Alice is spending the summer in Paris, but she isn't there for pastries and walks along the Seine. When her grandmother passed away two months ago, she left Alice an apartment in France that no one knew existed. An apartment that has been locked for more than seventy years. Alice is determined to find out why the apartment was abandoned and why her grandmother never once mentioned the family she left behind when she moved to America...

For fourteen-year-old budding artist Minoru Ito, her two brothers, her friends, and the other members of the Japanese-American community in southern California, the three months since Pearl Harbor was attacked have become a waking nightmare: attacked, spat on, and abused with no way to retaliate--and now things are about to get worse, their lives forever changed by the mass incarcerations in the relocation camps.