Lists and Suggestions for Teens
List: Multicultural Reads
Ask me no Questions
Budhos, Marina Tamar.
Fourteen-year-old Nadira, her sister, and their parents leave Bangladesh for New York City, but the ...
Born Confused
Desai Hidier, Tanuja.
Seventeen-year old Dimple, whose family is from India, discovers that she is not Indian enough for t...
American Born Chinese
Yang, Gene Luen.
Alternates three interrelated stories about the problems of young Chinese Americans trying to partic...
Persepolis
Satrapi, Marjane,
An intelligent and outspoken only child, Satrapi--the daughter of radical Marxists and the great-gra...
Bamboo People
Perkins, Mitali.
Two Burmese boys, one a Karenni refugee and the other the son of an imprisoned Burmese doctor, meet ...
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation.
Anderson, M. T.
After escaping a death sentence in the summer of 1775, Octavian and his tutor find shelter but no sa...
A Brief Chapter in my Impossible Life
Reinhardt, Dana.
Sixteen-year-old atheist Simone Turner-Bloom's life changes in unexpected ways when her parents...
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Alexie, Sherman,
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an ...

Crash Boom Love
Herrera, Juan Felipe.
After his father leaves home, sixteen-year-old Cesar Garcia lives with his mother and struggles thro...
A Step From Heaven
An, Na,
A National Book Award Nominee, A Publishers Weekly Best Children's Book of 2001. In this debut ...
Romiette and Julio
Draper, Sharon M.
Romiette, an African-American girl, and Julio, a Hispanic boy, discover that they attend the same hi...
Chains
Anderson, Laurie Halse.
After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels durin...
Under the Mesquite
McCall, Guadalupe Garcia.
Throughout her high school years, as her mother battles cancer, Lupita takes on more responsibility ...
Muchacho
Johnson, LouAnne.
Living in a neighborhood of drug dealers and gangs in New Mexico, high school junior Eddie Corazon, ...
Dark Dude
Hijuelos, Oscar.
In the 1960s, Rico Fuentes, a pale-skinned Cuban American teenager, abandons drug-infested New York ...
Of Beetles and Angels
Mawi Asgedom.
An autobiography of a boy who, at the age of three, fled civil war in Ethiopia by walking with his m...
Lost Boy, Lost Girl
Dau, John Bul.
One of thousands of children who fled strife in southern Sudan, John Bul Dau survived hunger, exhaus...
Esperanza Rising
Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work...
Does my Head Look Big in This?
Abdel-Fattah, Randa.
Year Eleven at an exclusive prep school in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, would be tough enoug...

Before We Were Free
Alvarez, Julia.
In the early 1960s in the Dominican Republic, twelve-year-old Anita learns that her family is involv...
Jefferson's Sons
Bradley, Kimberly Brubaker.
A fictionalized look at the last twenty years of Thomas Jefferson's life at Monticello through ...
Shine, Coconut Moon
Meminger, Neesha.
In the days and weeks following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Samar, who is of Punjab...
Kira-Kira
Kadohata, Cynthia.
Chronicles the close friendship between two Japanese-American sisters growing up in rural Georgia du...