TEN THINGS I HATE ABOUT ME
by Randa Abdel-Fattah
Lebanese-Australian Jamilah, known in school as Jamie, hides her heritage from her classmates and tries to pass by dyeing her hair blonde and wearing blue-tinted contact lenses, until her conflicted feelings become too much for her to bear.

THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART TIME INDIAN
by Sherman Alexie
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

BEFORE WE WERE FREE
by Julia Alvarez
Twelve-year-old Anita tries to live a normal life amidst a revolution in her native Dominican Republic in the 1960s.

CHAINS: SEEDS OF AMERICA
by Laurie Halse Anderson
After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

HOME OF THE BRAVE
by Katherine Applegate
Kek, an African refugee, is confronted by many strange things at the Minneapolis home of his aunt and cousin, as well as in his fifth grade classroom, and longs for his missing mother, but finds comfort in the company of a cow and her owner.

NAUGHTS & CROSSES
by Malorie Blackman
Sephy is a Cross – a member of the dark-skinned ruling class. Callum is a Naught – a "colorless" member of the underclass who were once slaves to the Crosses. The two have been friends since early childhood, but that's as far as it can go. In their world, Naughts and Crosses simply don't mix.

SHE'S SO MONEY
by Cherry Cheva
Maya, a high school senior bound for Stanford University, goes against her better judgement when she and a popular but somewhat disreputable boy start a profitable school-wide cheating ring in order to save her family's Thai restaurant, which she fears will be shut down due to her irresponsible actions.

REVENGE OF THE MOONCAKE VIXEN: A MANIFESTO IN 41 TALES
by Marilyn Chin
Raucous twin sisters Moonie and Mei Ling Wong are known as the double happiness Chinese food delivery girls. Each day they load up a crappy donkey-van and deliver Americanized (bad) Chinese food to homes throughout their southern California neighborhood. United in their desire to blossom into somebodies, the Wong girls fearlessly assert their intellect and sexuality, even as they come of age under the care of their dominating, cleaver-wielding grandmother from Hong Kong. They transform themselves from food delivery girls into accomplished women, but along the way they wrestle with the influence and continuity of their Chinese heritage.

JASON & KYRA
by Dana Davidson
Handsome and popular Jason tries to come to terms with his irascible, often absent father and his growing attraction to the quiet, studious Kyra.

FOR THE WIN
by Cory Doctorow
A group of teens from around the world find themselves drawn into an online revolution arranged by a mysterious young woman known as Big Sister Nor, who hopes to challenge the status quo and change the world using her virtual connections.

BORN CONFUSED
by Tanuja Desai Hidier
Seventeen-year-old Dimple, whose family is from India, discovers that she is not Indian enough for the Indians and not American enough for the Americans, as she sees her hypnotically beautiful, manipulative best friend taking possession of both her heritage and the boy she likes.

A YELLOW WATERMELON
by Ted M. Dunagan
Growing up in poverty-stricken, racially segregated, rural Alabama in the late 1940s, a white boy named Ted and a black boy named Poudlum become secret friends, join forces to integrate the cotton field laborers, and try to stop evil forces from depriving Poudlum's family of their property and livelihood.

THE BREADWINNER
by Deborah Ellis
Young Parvana lives with her family in one room of a bombed-out apartment building in Kabul, Afghanistan. Because Parvana's father has a foreign education, he is arrested by the Taliban. The family becomes increasingly desperate until Parvana conceives a plan.

AMERICA
by E.R. Frank
Teenage America, a part-black, part-white, part-anything boy who has spent many years in institutions for disturbed, antisocial behavior, tries to piece his life together.

MAP OF IRELAND
by Stephanie Grant
In 1974, the first year of busing in Boston, Massachusetts, seventeen-year-old Ann Ahern's lesbianism, which has isolated her from other white students, draws her to her African French teacher and leads her to insights into Blacks' struggles in the post-Civil Rights era.

NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH, AND A FEW WHITE LIES
by Justina Chen Headley
Fifteen-year-old Patty Ho, half Taiwanese and half white, feels she never fits in, but when her overly-strict mother ships her off to math camp at Stanford, instead of being miserable, Patty starts to become comfortable with her true self.

WHALE RIDER
by Witi Ihimaera
As her beloved grandfather, chief of the Maori tribe of Whangara, New Zealand, struggles to lead in difficult times and to find a male successor, young Kahu is developing a mysterious relationship with whales, particularly the ancient bull whale whose legendary rider was their ancestor.

LA LÍNEA
by Ann Jaramillo
When fifteen-year-old Miguel's time finally comes to leave his poor Mexican village, cross the border illegally, and join his parents in California, his younger sister's determination to join him soon imperils them both.

RED SCARF GIRL: A MEMOIR OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
by Ji-li Jiang
When China's Communist Party detains Ji-li's father, the 12-year-old is faced with a difficult choice.

THE FIRST PART LAST
by Angela Johnson
Bobby's carefree teenage life changes forever when he becomes a father and must care for his adored baby daughter.

KIRA KIRA
by Cynthia Kadohata
Chronicles the close friendship between two Japanese-American sisters growing up in rural Georgia during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the despair when one sister becomes terminally ill.

MY MOST EXCELLENT YEAR: A NOVEL OF LOVE, MARY POPPINS, AND FENWAY PARK
by Steve Kluger
Three teenagers in Boston narrate their experiences of a year of new friendships, first loves, and coming into their own.

THE NAMESAKE
by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.

SNOW FALLING IN SPRING: COMING OF AGE IN CHINA DURING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
by Moying Li-Marcus
In 1966 Moying, a student at a prestigious language school in Beijing, seems destined for a promising future. Everything changes when student Red Guards begin to orchestrate brutal assaults, violent public humiliations, and forced confessions. After watching her teachers and headmasters beaten in public, Moying flees school for the safety of home, only to witness her beloved grandmother denounced, her home ransacked, her father's precious books flung onto the back of a truck, and Baba himself taken away. From labor camp, Baba entrusts a friend to deliver a reading list of banned books to Moying so that she can continue to learn. Now, with so much of her life at risk, she finds sanctuary in the world of imagination and learning.

SOLD
by Patricia McCormick
A novel in vignettes, in which Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl from Nepal, is sold into prostitution in India.

A STEP FROM HEAVEN
by An Na
A young Korean girl and her family find it difficult to learn English and adjust to life in America.

TIES THAT BIND, TIES THAT BREAK: A NOVEL
by Lensey Namioka
Ailin's life takes a different turn when she defies the traditions of upper class Chinese society by refusing to have her feet bound.

WHEN MY NAME WAS KEOKO
by Linda Sue Park
With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.

MEXICAN WHITEBOY
by Matt de la Peña
Sixteen-year-old Danny searches for his identity amidst the confusion of being half-Mexican and half-white while spending a summer with his cousin and new friends on the baseball fields and back alleys of San Diego County, California.

THE EVER-AFTER BIRD
by Ann Rinaldi
In 1851, thirteen-year-old Cecilia has her eyes opened to the horrors of slavery when she accompanies her ornithologist uncle on an expedition in search of the rare "Scarlet Ibis," and watches as he shows slaves the way to the Underground Railroad.

ESPERANZA RISING
by Pam Muñoz Ryan
Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.

BOYFRIENDS WITH GIRLFRIENDS
by Alex Sanchez
When Lance begins to date Sergio, who is bisexual, he is not sure that it will work out, and when his best friend Allie, who has a boyfriend, meets Sergio's lesbian friend, she has unexpected feelings which she struggles to understand.

KEEPING CORNER
by Kashmira Sheth
In India in the 1940s, thirteen-year-old Leela's happy, spoiled childhood ends when her husband since age nine, whom she barely knows, dies, leaving her a widow whose only hope of happiness could come from Mahatma Ghandi's social and political reforms.

SHIVA'S FIRE
by Suzanne Fisher Staples
When a great guru invites Parvati to study with him, she devotes her life to the dance. Then she meets a gentle-eyed boy who turns her life upside down.

DOUBLE CROSSING: A JEWISH IMMIGRATION STORY
by Eve Tal
In 1905, as life becomes increasingly difficult for Jews in Ukraine, eleven-year-old Raizel and her father flee to America in hopes of earning money to bring the rest of the family there, but her father's health and Orthodox faith become barriers.

SKIM
by Mariko Tamaki
When her classmate Katie is dumped by her boyfriend, who then kills himself, the entire school goes into mourning overdrive. The popular clique stars a club to boost school spirit, but Skim sinks into an ever-deepening depression.

CUBANITA
by Gaby Triana
Seventeen-year-old Isabel, eager to leave Miami to attend the University of Michigan and escape her overprotective Cuban mother, learns some truths about her family's past and makes important decisions about the type of person she wants to be.

FIRST THEY KILLED MY FATHER: A DAUGHTER OF CAMBODIA REMEMBERS
by Loung Ung
When Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army stormed into Phnom Penh in April 1975, Ung's family fled their home and moved from village to village to hide their identity, their education, their former life of privilege.

AMERICAN BORN CHINESE
by Gene Luen Yang
Alternates three interrelated stories about the problems of young Chinese Americans trying to participate in popular culture.

SERIES

PERSEPOLIS SERIES
VOLUME 1
by Marjane Satrapi
In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah's regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran's last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.