Summer Reading Committee's Recommended Reads

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission--and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it. All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses...

Reina Ramos is excited about dressing up as Frida Kahlo for the class wax museum. Frida was a strong person like her mami and abuela-plus Reina has the perfect headband for the costume! But when her best friend Nora picks Frida first, Reina doesn't know what to do. Who will she dress up as now?

Built to explore Mars, Resilience begins to develop human-like feelings as he learns from the NASA scientists who assembled him, and as he blasts off and explores Mars, Resilience must overcome different obstacles as he explores the red planet.

A hot dog named Dog and a chicken nugget named Nugget hope to have fun at summer camp, but things get sticky when fellow camper Dijon implements his evil plan.

Lula Viramontes dreams of one day becoming someone whom no one can ignore: a daring ringleader in a Mexican traveling carpa, despite her father's traditional views of what girls should be. When her family arrives for the grape harvest in Delano, California, Lula meets activist Dolores Huerta and el Teatro Campesino (the official theater company of the United Farm Workers). She discovers an even more pressing reason to raise her voice: the upcoming...

"Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York. When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and...

"Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray's niece, six-year-old Nessie. Their playdates are little oases of wildness, joy, and ease in all three of their lives, which ping-pong between familial tensions and deep-seeded personal stumbling blocks. As their emotional intimacy erodes, Ray and Bron isolate from each other and attempt to repair their broken family ties -- Ray with her overworked, resentful single-mother...

"What if you could take a vacation to your past, without the filter of memory? What would you give to go back in time and relive your youth, in person, with the people who shared it? On the eve of her 40th birthday, Alice's life isn't terrible. She likes her job, even if it isn't exactly the one she expected. She's happy with her apartment, her romantic status, her independence, and she adores her lifelong best friend. But something is missing. Her...

Illustrations and text follow a family's morning routine from the perspective of the earliest riser in the house.

"The long-awaited conclusion to the beloved New York Times bestselling Beartown series--which inspired an HBO series of the same name--follows the small hockey town's residents as they grapple with change, pain, hope, and redemption. It starts with a storm, a death, and two funerals on the same day. One person's life is being celebrated by all of Beartown. One person's life is being forgotten. Maya Andersson and Benji Ovich, two young people who left...