Critiques en avant-premièreCherise Boothe

A winner of the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award, Kekla Magoon has established herself as one of the most powerful voices in YA fiction. In this hard-hitting work, a 16-year-old black youth is killed by a white shooter, leaving his community to struggle for answers—and meaning—in the aftermath. (Fiction/Ages 12 and up) “Magoon masterfully captures the cycle of urban violence and the raw emotions of the young people who can’t escape its impact.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review When sixteen-year-old Tariq Johnson dies from two gunshot wounds, his community is thrown into an uproar. Tariq was black. The shooter, Jack Franklin, is white. In the aftermath of Tariq’s death, everyone has something to say, but no two accounts of the events line up. Day by day, new twists further obscure the truth. Tariq’s friends, family, and community struggle to make sense of the tragedy, and to cope with the hole left behind when a life is cut short. In their own words, they grapple for a way to say with certainty: This is how it went down.

From the acclaimed author of The Book of Night Women comes a masterfully written novel that explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s. On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5, but he left the country the next day, not to return for two years. Deftly spanning decades and continents and peopled with a wide range of characters—assassins, journalists, drug dealers, and even ghosts—A Brief History of Seven Killings is the fictional exploration of that dangerous and unstable time and its bloody aftermath, from the streets and slums of Kingston in the 1970s, to the crack wars in 1980s New York, to a radically altered Jamaica in the 1990s. Brilliantly inventive and stunningly ambitious, this novel is a revealing modern epic that will secure Marlon James’ place among the great literary talents of his generation.

Terry Farish has garnered recognition from School Library Journal and YALSA for crafting one of the best YA books of the year with The Good Braider. Written in free verse, this haunting novel follows young Viola and her mother as they escape from war-torn South Sudan and make their way to Portland, Maine. There, Viola’s desire to adopt American culture conflicts with her mother’s demands for tradition. “Will go far to help students step outside of their own experience and walk a mile in another’s shoes.”—School Library Journal, starred review The Good Braider was selected as the 2013 Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year and a book of Outstanding Merit. In spare free verse laced with unforgettable images, Viola’s strikingly original voice sings out the story of her family’s journey from war-torn Sudan, to Cairo, and finally to Portland, Maine. Here, in the sometimes too close embrace of the local Southern Sudanese Community, she dreams of South Sudan while she tries to navigate the strange world of America—a world where a girl can wear a short skirt, get a tattoo or even date a boy; a world that puts her into sharp conflict with her traditional mother who, like Viola, is struggling to braid together the strands of a displaced life. Terry Farish’s haunting novel is not only a riveting story of escape and survival, but the universal tale of a young immigrant’s struggle to build a life on the cusp of two cultures. The author of The Good Braider has donated this book to the Worldreader program.