Shadowshaper by Daniel Jose Older

Shadowshaper
Daniel Jose Older
Fiction Ol17s

Paint a mural. Start a battle. Change the world.

Sierra Santiago planned an easy summer of  making art and hanging out with her friends. But then a corpse crashes the first party of the season. Her stroke-ridden grandfather starts apologizing over and over. And when the murals in her neighborhood begin to weep real tears... Well, something more sinister than the usual Brooklyn ruckus is going on.

With the help of a fellow artist named Robbie, Sierra discovers shadowshaping, a thrilling magic that infuses ancestral spirits into paintings, music, and stories. But someone is killing the shadowshapers one by one -- and the killer believes Sierra is hiding their greatest secret. Now she must unravel her family's past, take down the killer in the present, and save the future of shadowshaping for generations to come.

Full of a joyful, defiant spirit and writing as luscious as a Brooklyn summer night, Shadowshaper introduces a heroine and magic unlike anything else in fantasy fiction, and marks the YA debut of a bold new voice.

(from Publisher)

Brown Girl Dreaming

Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson
811 W8679br

 Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse.

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world. Woodson’s eloquent poetry also reflects the joy of finding her voice through writing stories, despite the fact that she struggled with reading as a child. Her love of stories inspired her and stayed with her, creating the first sparks of the gifted writer she was to become.

(From Amazon.)

The Sweetness

The Sweetness
Sande Bortiz Berger
Fiction B45s

Vilna, 1941. When her family is forced from their ghetto by the invading Nazis, Rosha Kaninsky, a curious child, asks her grandmother why she is carrying nothing but a jug of lemons and water. “Something to remind me of the sweetness,” the wise woman tells her. Brooklyn, 1941. Rosha’s cousin, Miran Kane, a gifted teen with dreams of escaping to Hollywood to become a designer, finds her plans abruptly thwarted when her father–traumatized by the fate of his Vilna relatives–becomes intent on safeguarding those he loves from a brutal world. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her American family, Rosha is alive, saved when her father thrusts her into the arms of a Polish Catholic candle maker. Inspired by true events, The Sweetness is a tale of heartbreak and hope at a most tragic time in history.

(From publisher.)