River Readers

Chaya Lindner is a teenager living in Nazi-occupied Poland. Simply being Jewish places her in danger of being killed or sent to the camps. After her little sister is taken away, her younger brother disappears, and her parents all but give up hope, Chaya is determined to make a difference. Using forged papers and her fair features, Chaya becomes a courier and travels between the Jewish ghettos of Poland, smuggling food, papers, and even people.

"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 the Great Depression 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.

They killed my mother.
They took our magic.
They tried to bury us.

Now we rise.

Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie’s Reaper mother summoned forth souls.

But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope.

After being liberated from Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Gerta Rausch finds herself with no one left and nowhere to go. Taken from her home by the Nazi's in when she was just past 14 years old, Greta survives time in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and eventually Bergen-Belsen. She survives by playing her father's viola in the camp orchestras. But after the liberation, she finds herself alone. Bergen-Belsen becomes a type of refugee camp for the survivors and it is there that they try to heal from the atrocities they withstood.

What happens when you put six special kids in a room, once a week, without a teacher to monitor their conversation? That is the premise of this beautiful book, Harbor Me by Jaqueline Woodson. The six students call the room the ARTT (A Room to Talk) and it becomes their safe space to talk about all that is going on in their lives. This book covers alcoholic parents, incarceration, immigration, racism and many other important topics, as they affect the lives of these twelve year olds.

Celebrated novelist David Treuer has gained a reputation for writing fiction that expands the horizons of Native American literature. In Rez Life, his first full-length work of nonfiction, Treuer brings a novelist’s storytelling skill and an eye for detail to a complex and subtle examination of Native American reservation life, past and present.

Leslie Odom, Jr. has acclaimed much recognition and a Tony Award playing Aaron Burr in the Broadway musical Hamilton. But it almost didn't happen. Odom shares his beginnings as a mouthy boy who meets his match in a teacher that gets his attention and trust, and then channels his expression. He shares the decisions he made, even when it is choosing between two good options. A key moment is when he considers giving up and is challenged to make the most of those times when the phone isn't ringing, a story told on a late-night show told with such passion that it drew me to this book.