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By: Angie Thomas
Overview: A sixteen-year old named Starr Carter who learns to move through two different worlds of the poor neighborhood where she lives and the high end suburban prep school she attends faces a rollercoaster of events when she witnesses the unjustified fatal shooting of her childhood best friend, Khalil, at the hands of a police officer.

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By Christopher Paul Curtis
Overview: Enter the world of ten-year-old Kenny and his family, the Weird Watsons of Flint, Michigan. When Momma and Dad decide it's time for a visit to Grandma, Dad comes home with the amazing Ultra-Glide, and the Watsons head South to Birmingham, Alabama... toward one of the darkest moments in America's history.
A hilarious, touching, and tragic novel about civil rights and the impact of violence on one African American family.
Why: Makes Civil Rights events available and understandable to kids. Great characterization that gets your emotionally invested in the story.

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Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps.

Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

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By Benjamin Alire Saenz
Overview: The friendship of two Mexican boys, Aristotle and Dante, who start to discover themselves and try to figure out who they are in the world. The novel shows the development of their relationship and their discovery of who they are in the world.
Why?: The book is explores identity,   ethnicity, and how both can relate to each other. The book shows us this through two POC (main character), who are both struggling to find their identity and sexuality.
Literary Merit: Lambda Literary Award Winner, Pura Belpre Award, Stonewall Book Award, ALA Honor Book

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By Jean M. Auel
Overview: The book is set in the last ice age as humans slowly began out performing neanderthals. Though it is a piece of historical fiction it does include some accurate historical details that have been discovered by archeologists.
Why: Throughout the book it describes some of the basic human reactions that we still experience today and discusses extreme gender gaps in societies.

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by Christopher Paul Curtis
Literary Merit:
Overview: "We are a family on a journey to a place called wonderful" is the motto of Deza Malone's family. Deza is the smartest girl in her class in Gary, Indiana, singled out by teachers for a special path in life. But it's 1936 and the Great Depression has hit Gary hard, and there are no jobs for black men. When her beloved father leaves to find work, Deza, Mother, and her older brother, Jimmie, go in search of him, and end up in a Hooverville outside Flint, Michigan. Jimmie's beautiful voice inspires him to leave the camp to be a performer, while Deza and Mother find a new home, and cling to the hope that they will find Father. The twists and turns of their story reveal the devastation of the Depression and prove that Deza truly is the Mighty Miss Malone.

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By: Thanhha Lai
Overview: Inside Out and Back Again is the story of Ha and her family being forced to move to the United States because the Vietnam War had reached their home, and it was no longer safe. They board a navy ship and flee. Upon spending a couple months at a refugee camp, they end up moving to Alabama.

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Ann Jaramillo
Literary Merit: La Linea won the award for Best Books for Young Adults in 2007.
Overview: La Linea, published in 1985, is a realistic novel set in Mexico that addresses the controversial issue of illegal immigration into the United States and the reasons Mexican nationals may wish to cross the border. The novel is set to tell the story of 15-year-old Miguel and his younger sister Elena and their passage to California to reunite with their parents to achieve the American Dream.
Why?: This book perfectly describes the trauma, the danger, and the drive each person that crosses the U.S. border goes through.

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By Richard Powers
The Overstory is a book about 10ish charterers who are all connected to nature, and identetify with a tree in some way. The book follows these characters throughout their lives and when they are growing up to where they are now. Many of these characters cross paths. All of these characters come from different backgrounds, have their own struggles, have their own atrributes, and want to help others, and most importantly nature. It also brings up important issues and incorporates real past events like the police brutality against environmentalists in Eugene Oregon.

Why: It has deep meaning, figurative language and descriptive details about nature and relationships. It also talks about people in a very real way, kind of a that´s how life is book.

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Bram Stoker
Literary Merit:
Overview: Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. It introduced the character of Count Dracula and established many conventions of subsequent vampire fantasy.[1] The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse

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Margaret Atwood, 1985

Literary Merit: It won the 1985 Governor General's Award and the first Arthur C. Clarke Award in 1987; it was also nominated for the 1986 Nebula Award, the 1986 Booker Prize, and the 1987 Prometheus Award
Overview: The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England, in a totalitarian state, known as Gilead, that has overthrown the United States government
Why?: "explores a relevant aspect of our society which had reached a climatic point in the decade leading up to the release of her book: the women’s rights movement. It is no coincidence that a story focused on women’s lack of freedom over their own bodies was published only shortly after the landmark Supreme Court rulings on abortion." - https://brotherkumar.wordpress.com/

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By: Henrik Ibsen
The play is significant for the way it deals with the fate of a married woman, who at the time in Norway lacked reasonable opportunities for self-fulfillment in a male-dominated world, despite the fact that Ibsen denies it was his intent to write a feminist play. It aroused a great sensation at the time, and caused a "storm of outraged controversy" that went beyond the theatre to the world newspapers and society.

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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

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One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

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Regarded as one of the five key novels in Hispanic American literature

Overview:One Hundred Years of Solitude is the story of seven generations of the Buendía Family in the town of Macondo. The founding patriarch of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and Úrsula Iguarán, his wife (and first cousin), leave Riohacha, Colombia, after José Arcadio kills Prudencio Aguilar after a cockfight for suggesting José Arcadio was impotent. One night of their emigration journey, while camping on a riverbank, José Arcadio dreams of "Macondo", a city of mirrors that reflected the world in and about it. Upon awakening, he decides to establish Macondo at the riverside; after days of wandering the jungle, his founding of Macondo is utopic.

Why?: Multi-generational science fiction-esque utopia turned dystopia, so cool

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Literary Merit: American Book Award
a memoir by Mary Brave Bird, a Sicangu Lakota who was formerly known as Mary Crow Dog. Reared on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota, she describes her childhood and young adulthood, which included many historical events associated with the American Indian Movement.

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Literary Merit:
Awarded the 2015 Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature.
Overview:
A story told from the alternating perspectives of teenage fraternal twins, a boy and girl named Noah and Jude, each of them narrating from a different side of the accident that forever changed their lives.
Why?
The descriptions in the book are extremely vivid and beautiful and it talks about sexual assault and questioning your sexuality which are important topics.

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Literary Merit: ummmmmm
Overview: A story about the earth being taken over by people from Mars.
Why? It's one of the earliest works of science fiction.

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A unique story with amazing world building and the perfect amount of questions left unanswered. The Graveyard book has won the Newberry medal, the Hugo award for best novel, and the Locus award for best young adult novel.

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Literary Merit: Prometheus Hall of Fame Award,Retro Hugo Award for Best Novel
Overview:  dystopian novel by American writer Ray Bradbury, first published in 1953. Often regarded as one of his best works, the novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and "firemen" burn any that are found. The book's tagline explains the title: "Fahrenheit 451
Why? Very interesting reading about a society that bans books, the society wants to keep control over the people.

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By: Lois Lowry
Literary Merit: Awarded the 1994 Newbery Medal and the 1996 William Allen White Children's Book Award and has been designated an American Library Association (ALA) Best Book for Young Adults and an ALA Notable Children's Book
Overview: Jonas, an eleven-year-old boy living in a futuristic society that has eliminated all pain, fear, war, and hatred. There is no prejudice, since everyone looks and acts basically the same, and there is very little competition. Everyone is unfailingly polite. The society has also eliminated choice: at age twelve every member of the community is assigned a job based on his or her abilities and interests.
Why: Writing is very interesting about a futuristic society.

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By: Stephen King
Overview: The Shining is set in Colorado in the 1970s. It centres on the Torrance family: husband Jack, wife Wendy, and their five-year-old son, Danny.
Merit: A lot of good stuff.
Why? The writing is excellent, and the story is engaging and exciting.

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Literary Merit: Awarded the Premio Quinto Sol, national Chicano literary award
Overview: a coming of age tale about a young Chicano boy who is torn between the religious expectations of his mother's family and the free-wheeling vaquero culture of his father's
Why? The protagonist is guided by a medicine woman named Ultima who helps him (and me) make sense of the world.

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Literary Merit: Awarded the American Book Award
Overview: The novel follows the story of the rise and fall of Coyote Springs, a rock and blues band of Spokane Indians from the Spokane Reservation.
Why? It's a book about a rock band. That's awesome!