Debbie Rigaud

At seventeen Simone Thibodeaux is fed up with her over-protective mother's insistence on micro-managing her life, like picking her prom date from a "nice" Haitian immigrant family, and anyway she is determined to attend with Gavin Stackhouse (even if he does not know that yet); so together with her fellow late-bloomer friends Simone comes up with a bucket list of rule-breaking (like cutting classes, and sneaking out of the house)--but soon things...

New Jersey girl Zora Emerson is attending her pre-college prep at Halstead University, where the incredibly wealthy and stuck-up students go, and after only a week she is feeling academically confident but socially out of place; then an awkward mix-up of cell phones brings her into closer contact with Owen Whittelsey (prince of a small European country) and his security guards--but it is when Owen asks her to be his date at his brother's royal wedding...

"Imagine you had to walk 600 miles to get fair treatment at school!" Twelve-year-old Joyce Clemons introduces a fictional memory book documenting the little-known true story of nineteen Black mothers, thirty-seven children, and their two-year march to integrate an Ohio elementary school. Following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, Black mothers in Hillsboro, OH, attempted to enroll their children at the all-white Webster School. However,...

While running for sixth grade class president, Hope Roberts finds herself making promises she cannot keep as she tries to win over her classmates.

Hope Roberts is a confident eleven-year-old girl who plans to be an astrophysicist, and who loves swimming, Galaxy Girl comic books, her best friend Sam, and her two rescue dogs (not necessarily in that order); but then she starts middle school, and suddenly she cannot seem to do anything right--even science club is a problem because she and another girl, Camilla, get stuck with the boring part of the science project that they suggested, but Hope...

The Eastern Shore Animal Shelter is set to close its doors in just a few weeks, and sixth-grader Hope Roberts is determined to find a way to raise enough money to save the shelter where she adopted her two dogs; she is already working weekends at a doggy day-care site, but it does not seem like that will raise enough money--so Hope needs to come up with another plan to get the support the shelter needs.

Using humor as the common denominator, a multicultural cast of YA authors steps up to the mic to share stories touching on race.
Listen in as ten YA authors — some familiar, some new — use their own brand of humor to share their stories about growing up between cultures. Henry Choi Lee discovers that pretending to be a tai chi master or a sought-after wiz at math wins him friends for a while — until it comically backfires.

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