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Tommy Greenwald website

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Kate Allen website

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J.L. Esplin website

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Gene Luen Yang website

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Dave Connis website

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Varian Johnson website

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Katherine Marsh website

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Trung Le Nguyen website

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Jewell Parker Rhodes website

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Jason Reynolds website

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When brothers John and Stew realize that it is impossible for their father to return home, they must attempt to survive on their own. Fear, danger, violence, and illness follow after a dramatic disaster hits. Will the brothers’ resourcefulness, loyalty, and determination keep them safe?

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Teens Roberta and Tommy Lee just moved to Metropolis, the city protected by Superman. After their family house is targeted by the Klan, Roberta and Tommy must help Superman foil the Klan’s plot and defeat racism and hatred.

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Clara Evans has earned a spot at an elite high school through a scholarship opportunity. But when the books that influenced her begin mysteriously disappearing from the school’s shelves, Clara learns how far she and others are willing to go to give books to those who need them.

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While visiting family in Lambert, South Carolina over the summer, Candace uncovers a decades-old mystery involving her grandmother. She sets out with the help of a quiet neighbor, Brandon, to uncover the past while learning about historical injustices that happened in the town.

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Ahmed doesn’t belong in Brussels, not after he lost his family while fleeing war-torn Syria. American-born Max doesn’t belong in Brussels either, but not being able to speak French is the least of his worries when Max finds a Syrian refugee living in his basement. Two worlds collide in this story of unlikely friendship, hope, and courage.

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After twelve-year-old Lucy's mother dies, she is able to find meaning and comfort by pursuing the work of her marine biologist mother. This thoughtful novel reveals the depths of grief and loss coupled with moments of laughter and redemption.

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Tien and his mom can’t always find the right words, so they express themselves to one another by sharing fairy tales. His mother has a hard time opening up about her trauma coming to the United States, and Tien wanders a road of self discovery as he solidifies his identity. The two navigate their separate lives while communicating their perspectives within layers of fables.

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Teddy Youngblood lies in a coma after receiving a devastating hit at football camp. His teammates know what really happened, but will they find the strength to tell the truth? Details are slowly revealed as his friends, teammates, and coach visit Teddy and his grieving family.

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Biracial brothers Donte and Trey attend Middlefield Prep, an almost entirely white school. Trey presents as white, while Donte presents as black. When Donte is unjustly suspended, he begins to realize that life is not always fair. The unlikely world of fencing provides Donte with unique opportunities to learn more about himself and those around him.

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Ten interconnected stories detail what happens after school lets out and kids are walking home. Skateboards, handshakes, and standing up to bullies are just a few of the detours faced on the way home.

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Superman Smashes the Klan | Official Trailer

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Q: How did you come up with the idea for Suggested Reading, and for your character Clara?

A: Back in the olden days of the internet, there were (and still are) these things called Yahoo Answers. It’s a community where you can just post questions to anything under the sun and random internet strangers would answer.

One girl’s question was spread around Twitter, “Is it okay to run a banned book library from my locker?” and I thought it was an amazing question, and I wanted to explore it, and those explorations became the plot of this book.

Q: What do you think the novel says about censorship?

A: It paints a picture that censorship is incredibly complicated and can't be boiled down to a one-size-fits-all answer. There are some places where it's clear what the answer is, but there are many more places where it's not, and we need to ask questions and figure out where those places are.

The topic of censorship is tied to things like societal ethics, moral philosophy, and other topics that people WAY smarter than us have been wrestling with for ages, and we need to be willing to admit that and attempt to uncover and unravel the depths of these questions while keeping and respecting human dignity for all involved.

Q: The Kirkus Review of the novel says, "Only a true believer could craft a work of such relevance and heart, and every facet of this novel...proves this author’s worth as a champion of literature." What do you think of that assessment?

A: It's really nice of Kirkus to say, and I'm very flattered, though, I do find it quite hilarious considering, for my last book, they said something like "readers of YA fiction about addiction would be better served elsewhere." I leveled up QUITE a bit, apparently. We'll see where the wind blows for my next book.

Q: The novel takes place in Chattanooga. How important is setting to you in your work?

A: Very! Setting, for me, often informs the story and plot. One of the first things I do when I start researching a story is go to www.atlasobscura.com to see what sort of crazy/unique things I can include in a story set in a particular place.

Sometimes, the setting is fine with being a minor character, but other times it demands more, but in order to know what it demands, I need to know everything I can about it.

I'd wanted to do a book based in Chattanooga for a while, and when I was thinking about the setting for Suggested Reading, I felt like I needed to devote the bulk of my brain power to the complexity of the topic and making the characters well-rounded, and I felt that I needed a setting I was more familiar with so the paths converged perfectly.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: Oooh. Lots of things. The main two being a funny picture book about the similarities between a little girl who invents things and God, and a middle grade urban fantasy about a boy and a girl discovering that the giants who created America live in the National Parks.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I'm in the middle of deciding if I like Cheez-Its better than Goldfish, which is a pretty major thing considering how I've fought tooth-and-nail for Team Goldfish for the last five years.

--Interview with Deborah Kalb

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Dave Connis is the author of the new young adult novel Suggested Reading . He also has written the YA novel The Temp...

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Game Changer By: Tommy Greenwald Book Trailer

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"Black Brother, Black Brother" book trailer

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Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru discuss the modern relevance of SUPERMAN SMASHES THE KLAN

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Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru discuss the modern relevance of SUPERMAN SMASHES THE KLAN

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Suggested Reading by Dave Connis (Audiobook Excerpt)

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The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson

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The Line Tender began with a girl and a shark. I had a summer job in 1996, working for a chocolatier in Beverly, Massachusetts, my hometown. One day, I was behind the counter and a customer came into the shop. He told everyone that a fisherman had caught a great white shark and was towing it into Beverly Harbor. He could have said that an alien had just walked into City Hall to apply for a dog license and I wouldn't have been more surprised. Beverly had an ocean, but not one that included great whites. Those sharks lived somewhere else.

Hundreds of people went down to the dock at Beverly Harbor that day to watch biologists dissect the shark and collect samples. Everyone was curious about the enormous fish that had been brought ashore. They stayed long enough for the tide to change and to see the end of the necropsy.

Twelve years later, I was taking a novel writing class at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. The last assignment of the course was to write the beginning of a novel. I had nothing in mind. But I remembered the Beverly shark and what a disturbance it had created in my town. I wrote fifteen pages about a girl named Lucy and her best friend, Fred, goofing around on a summer day in a coastal town, when a fisherman snags a white shark in his net and hauls it in. It was the beginning of The Line Tender.

When the class was over, I tracked down and interviewed the fisherman who caught the Beverly shark and one of the biologists who performed the necropsy on the dock. The research spiraled from there. The Beverly shark had seemed like a fluke to me, but as it turned out, it was probably a sign of the changing ecosystem in the North Atlantic.

About a year after I had started writing The Line Tender, an Atlantic white shark was tagged off Cape Cod for the first time by a biologist named Greg Skomal. For several summers, I read articles about the work that Skomal's team was doing to track white sharks and observe their behavior. And I began to imagine Lucy's mother as a biologist, inspired by Skomal and several women scientists, including Eugenie Clark, the pioneer ichthyologist. Once I finally understood Lucy's mother's character and the powerful connection they could have, the middle and end of the story started to emerge.

The book is about a shark that comes to town, causing a girl to long for her mother. White sharks are certainly central to the story, but it's also about how some connections never break, even when someone dies. It's about the enduring pieces that Lucy's mother left behind and how Lucy is both an extension of her mother and uniquely herself. For both Lucy and me, these revelations all began in a candy store with one shark.

The Line Tender is on B&N bookshelves now.

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When a Shark Comes to Town: A Guest Post from The Line Tender Author Kate Allen - B&N Reads

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Hundreds of people went down to the dock at Beverly Harbor that day to watch biologists dissect the shark and collect samples. Everyone was curious about the enormous fish that had been brought ashore. They stayed long enough for the tide to change and to see the end of the necropsy.

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Introducing... Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes

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Author Jason Reynolds Speaks On His Latest Book, "Look Both Ways"

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Jason Reynolds Reads from Look Both Ways