With humor and sensitivity, a debut novelist explores the coming of age of a girl caught between two cultures as she finds the courage to forge a new destiny. “Miss, will you be my Amiga?” Amiga means "friend" in Spanish, but at the youth center, it meant a lady to take you places. I never asked myself if two people as different as Miss and me could ever really be amigas. When Jacinta Juarez is paired with a rich, famous mentor, she is swept away from the diapers and dishes of her own daily life into a world of new experiences. But crossing la linea into Miss’s world is scary. Half of Jacinta aches for the comfort of Mamá and the familiar safety of the barrio, while the other half longs to embrace a future that offers more than cleaning stuff for white people. When her family is torn apart, Jacinta needs to bring the two halves of herself together to win back everything she's lost. Can she channel the power she’s gained from her mentor and the strength she’s inherited from Mamá to save her shattered home life?

With humor and sensitivity, a debut novelist explores the coming of age of a girl caught between two cultures as she finds the courage to forge a new destiny. "Miss, will you be my Amiga?" Amiga means "friend" in Spanish, but at the youth center, it meant a lady to take you places. I never asked myself if two people as different as Miss and me could ever really be amigas. When Jacinta Juarez is paired with a rich, famous mentor, she is swept away from the diapers and dishes of her own daily life into a world of new experiences. But crossing la linea into Miss's world is scary. Half of Jacinta aches for the comfort of Mamá and the familiar safety of the barrio, while the other half longs to embrace a future that offers more than cleaning stuff for white people. When her family is torn apart, Jacinta needs to bring the two halves of herself together to win back everything she's lost. Can she channel the power she's gained from her mentor and the strength she's inherited from Mamá to save her shattered home life?

Teaching Diversity in Rural Schools: Attaining Understanding, Tolerance, and Respect Through Young Adult Literature aims to assist secondary English Language Arts rural educatorsand students regarding diversity education through the use of rural, small town-themed young adult literature. While appropriate for any rural educator, the Upper Midwestern states (IA, MN, MT, NE, ND, SD, and WY) are focused on because they are unique in their predominantly White residents, with few to no racial and cultural minorities in all locations, large or small. Teaching rural students about minorities and facilitating in developing understanding, tolerance, and respect toward those different from oneself is difficult when absent from communities and schools. However, this book helps in reaching these goals through the use of titles that consider specific topics of cultural and racial minorities, such as those who are LGBTQ+, undocumented, homeless, having exceptionalities, managing grief/loss, and more. Also addressed are rural communities and schools, the purpose and importance of young adult literature, and locating quality rural, small town-themed novels. Suggestions for using this literature, activities, discussion topics, and recommended titles are also provided.

"A collection of ten short stories that all take place in the same day about kids walking home from school"--

Newbery Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Matt de la Peña's Mexican WhiteBoy is a story of friendship, acceptance, and the struggle to find your identity in a world of definitions. Danny's tall and skinny. Even though he’s not built, his arms are long enough to give his pitch a power so fierce any college scout would sign him on the spot. Ninety-five mile an hour fastball, but the boy’s not even on a team. Every time he gets up on the mound he loses it. But at his private school, they don’t expect much else from him. Danny’ s brown. Half-Mexican brown. And growing up in San Diego that close to the border means everyone else knows exactly who he is before he even opens his mouth. Before they find out he can’t speak Spanish, and before they realize his mom has blond hair and blue eyes, they’ve got him pegged. But it works the other way too. And Danny’s convinced it’s his whiteness that sent his father back to Mexico. That’s why he’s spending the summer with his dad’s family. Only, to find himself, he may just have to face the demons he refuses to see--the demons that are right in front of his face. And open up to a friendship he never saw coming. Matt de la Peña's critically acclaimed novel is an intimate and moving story that offers hope to those who least expect it. "[A] first-rate exploration of self-identity."-SLJ "Unique in its gritty realism and honest portrayal of the complexities of life for inner-city teens...De la Peña poignantly conveys the message that, despite obstacles, you must believe in yourself and shape your own future."-The Horn Book Magazine "The baseball scenes...sizzle like Danny's fastball...Danny's struggle to find his place will speak strongly to all teens, but especially to those of mixed race."-Booklist "De la Peña blends sports and street together in a satisfying search for personal identity."-Kirkus Reviews "Mexican WhiteBoy...shows that no matter what obstacles you face, you can still reach your dreams with a positive attitude. This is more than a book about a baseball player--this is a book about life."-Curtis Granderson, New York Mets outfielder An ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults A Junior Library Guild Selection

Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024, internationally bestselling author and literary icon Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies is "beautiful, heartbreaking and alive ... a lyrical work of historical fiction based on the story of the Mirabal sisters, revolutionary heroes who had opposed and fought against Trujillo." (Concepción de León, New York Times) Alvarez’s new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, is coming April 2, 2024. Pre-order now! It is November 25, 1960, and three beautiful sisters have been found near their wrecked Jeep at the bottom of a 150-foot cliff on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. The official state newspaper reports their deaths as accidental. It does not mention that a fourth sister lives. Nor does it explain that the sisters were among the leading opponents of Gen. Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship. It doesn’t have to. Everybody knows of Las Mariposas—the Butterflies. In this extraordinary novel, the voices of all four sisters--Minerva, Patria, María Teresa, and the survivor, Dedé--speak across the decades to tell their own stories, from secret crushes to gunrunning, and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Trujillo’s rule. Through the art and magic of Julia Alvarez’s imagination, the martyred Butterflies live again in this novel of courage and love, and the human costs of political oppression. "Alvarez helped blaze the trail for Latina authors to break into the literary mainstream, with novels like In the Time of the Butterflies and How the García Girls Lost Their Accents winning praise from critics and gracing best-seller lists across the Americas."—Francisco Cantú, The New York Times Book Review "This Julia Alvarez classic is a must-read for anyone of Latinx descent." —Popsugar.com "A gorgeous and sensitive novel . . . A compelling story of courage, patriotism and familial devotion." —People "Shimmering . . . Valuable and necessary." —Los Angeles Times "A magnificent treasure for all cultures and all time.” —St. Petersburg Times "Alvarez does a remarkable job illustrating the ruinous effect the 30-year dictatorship had on the Dominican Republic and the very real human cost it entailed."—Cosmopolitan.com

Vintage Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities, the #1 bestseller that will forever define late-twentieth-century New York style. "No one has portrayed New York Society this accurately and devastatingly since Edith Wharton" (The National Review) “A page-turner . . . Brilliant high comedy.” (The New Republic) Sherman McCoy, the central figure of Tom Wolfe's first novel, is a young investment banker with a fourteen-room apartment in Manhattan. When he is involved in a freak accident in the Bronx, prosecutors, politicians, the press, the police, the clergy, and assorted hustlers high and low close in on him, licking their chops and giving us a gargantuan helping of the human comedy, of New York in the 1980s, a city boiling over with racial and ethnic hostilities and burning with the itch to Grab It Now. Wolfe's novel is a big, panoramic story of the metropolis that reinforces the author's reputation as the foremost chronicler of the way we live in America. Adapted to film in 1990 by director Brian De Palma, the movie stars Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman.