Good Reads

Winner - 2003 Coretta Scott King Award
Eighteen students in a high school English class open up and take the risky challenge of self-revelation in weekly poetry sessions. Through their poetry and narratives, they share their most intimate thoughts about themselves and one another, their lives, and what lies beneath the skin and beyond the masquerade. Winner of the Coretta Scott King Award for 2003. ...More

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A BookPage Notable Title
Newbery Medalist Sharon Creech ("Walk Two Moons") masterfully weaves this story, told in free verse, about a young girl finding her identity and learning how it fits within the many rhythms of life. ...More

CCBC Choices - 2004
Told through his own poetry, 11-year-old Lonnie shares his heartbreak over his parents, killed in a fire four years ago, and his love for his younger sister Lili, separated from him when they were placed in foster care. "Powerful and engaging."--"School Library Journal, " starred review. ...More

Winner - 1993 Golden Kite Award - Fiction
Virginia Euwer Wolff writes about tenacious people. In Make Lemonade she tells the story of Jolly--17-years-old, barely literate, with two kids from two different, absent fathers--and how she begins the slow process of building a future for herself. This is another startling novel by an extraordinary writer. ...More

CCBC Choices - 1997
Winner - 1998 Newbery Award
In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression. ...More

Tayshas Reading List 2008-2009

Fifteen-year-old Jane Arrowood struggles through a physical loss to the start of acceptance in this absorbing, artful novel which is at once honest and insightful, wrenching and redemptive. ...More

This inspiring coming-of-age story introduces 17-year-old Laura Crapper, a "slam" poet who with her best friend hits the road for New York City. Once there, the girls and their fresh style of poetry take the city by storm. Told entirely in Laura's in-your-face slam poetry style. ...More

2005 ALA Young Adult Top Ten Selection
In this new novel by the acclaimed author of "Boy Meets Boy," readers meet a boy whose girlfriend is in love with Holden Caulfield; a girl who loves the boy who wears all black; and a girl who writes love songs for a girl she can't have in a story about those ever-changing moments of love and heartbreak during high school. ...More

Two teen siblings run from foster life -- and find new expression as graffiti artists -- in a stark but hopeful poetic novel.
For sixteen-year-old Sissy and her brother Boy, trash is a reminder of one too many sorry foster placements they've endured, a way of life they can't wait to escape. Now on the run in search of their big sister Raynell, ironically they are forced to rely on their trash-picking skills for sustenance and shelter. Reunited at last with Raynell in St. Louis, Boy and Sissy shed their old identities, reinvent themselves as graffiti artists, and splash their new names on city bridges and walls. But one night's expedition goes horribly wrong, and Sissy looks again to trash, this time as the beginning of something artful and beautiful. ...More

In the tradition of Karen Hesse's "Out of the Dust," Fullerton's free-verse novel gives voice to an important, if controversial, issue in this story about a young man who wrestles with a horrifying decision: whether or not to turn off the machines that are keeping his mother alive. ...More