Washoe County Library System

"Kept as forced labor on a chocolate plantation in the Ivory Coast, Amadou and his younger brother Seydou had given up hope, until a young girl arrives at the camp who rekindles the urge to escape"--

Kiko Himura yearns to escape the toxic relationship with her mother by getting into her dream art school, but when things do not work out as she hoped Kiko jumps at the opportunity to tour art schools with her childhood friend, learning life-changing truths about herself and her past along the way.

Wanting more than the Maori customs and rituals provide Te Arepa believes his prayers are answered when he is awarded a scholarship to a boarding school across the country.

Seventeen-year-old Astrid Sullivan belongs to a family of compulsive gamblers, and now that her father has been laid off from his job in Detroit and lost all their money betting on the Titans, which are half-horse, half car, and race around impossible tracks, her family is falling apart--but when Astrid's new friends give her the chance to participate in this year's Titan races, she thinks she sees a way to win some money and keep her family together....

A sixteen-year-old Cuban American joins a salsa class to meet a girl, then invites her to spend the summer with his family in Havana. They investigate his mother's reasons for leaving Cuba decades earlier, learning about the impact politics can have on individual lives.

To evade her manipulative ex-boyfriend, sixteen-year-old Hendricks' family moves to small-town New York, where she joins the popular crowd, but only her outcast neighbor, Eddie, can help chase vindictive ghosts from her new house.

In the summer of 1976, when punk rock is taking over England, Lili finds herself playing bass for a wild new band called Naked, and struggling to sort out complicated relationships with self-destructive band mates.

In Bolivia in 1999, when their father is unjustly arrested and their mother leaves, Francisco, seventeen, and his sister Pilar, eight, must move to the dirty, dehumanizing, and corrupt prison.

Once a true daredevil, South Carolina high school junior Casey is in remission from cancer when a terrifying encounter at a Halloween party leads her to become a demon-fighting roller derby girl.