Here are 100 books that Onyx & Beyond fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have authored four verse novels myself and crafting imagery is my favorite part of writing in the form; most recently, one that revolves around earth imagery, Lilac and the Switchback. I also teach many verse novel classes and have studied the form a great deal, particularly on how to create a successful image system for your novel in verse. When reading verse novels, I am always keeping an eye out as to how the imagery and symbolism help to reveal character growth and change.
The multimodal format is perfect for this moving new book by Kate Messner.
I loved how the main character learned new things about himself with every peak he climbed, the number of obstacles that were in his way, and how directly he examined metaphorical language.
The backstory about the father really came to a satisfying conclusion, and I felt like it was well-earned.
This biography for middle-grade readers and up explains who Jane Addams was and why she caused such a stir worldwide. The story follows Addams' first childhood realization of how poverty limits lives, livelihoods, and health to her becoming one of the most beloved―and disliked―women of her day. She worked to…
I have authored four verse novels myself and crafting imagery is my favorite part of writing in the form; most recently, one that revolves around earth imagery, Lilac and the Switchback. I also teach many verse novel classes and have studied the form a great deal, particularly on how to create a successful image system for your novel in verse. When reading verse novels, I am always keeping an eye out as to how the imagery and symbolism help to reveal character growth and change.
This book has so many stand-alone beautiful poems while maintaining the voice of a realistic middle school character.
The loss of a beloved landscape to wildfire is such a real-world issue, and Chris Baron manages to tackle this in a way that isn’t frightening but somehow hopeful by the end.
I also absolutely love the bearded dragon named Watermelon!
As a community recovers from a devastating wildfire, two friends find their way back to each other and their homes, by award-winning author Chris Baron.
Perfect for fans of Alan Gratz and Lauren Tarshis.
Finn and his friend, nicknamed Rabbit, live in a rural area that's been hit hard by wildfires. Families were displaced and school was interrupted. Moreover, their beloved forest is suffering -- animals and plants haven't been able to come back, and the two friends wonder if there's anything they can do to help. Rabbit's uncle, a science teacher, is part of a study that may help…
I have authored four verse novels myself and crafting imagery is my favorite part of writing in the form; most recently, one that revolves around earth imagery, Lilac and the Switchback. I also teach many verse novel classes and have studied the form a great deal, particularly on how to create a successful image system for your novel in verse. When reading verse novels, I am always keeping an eye out as to how the imagery and symbolism help to reveal character growth and change.
This book takes place in NYC, where the main character longs to be a pilot.
In a beautiful, keystone poem about the blues in the sky (hence the name of the book), Sage sees all of what is beautiful and sorrowful in the world. During the course of the story, she processes the grief surrounding losing her best friend in a way that feels believable.
# 1 New York Times bestselling and Newbery Honor author Renée Watson explores friendship, loss, and life with grief in this poignant novel in verse and vignettes.
Sage's thirteenth birthday was supposed to be about movies and treats, staying up late with her best friend and watching the sunrise together. Instead, it was the day her best friend died. Without the person she had to hold her secrets and dream with, Sage is lost. In a counseling group with other girls who have lost someone close to them, she learns that not all losses are the same, and healing isn't…
Reeni is wild about birds so naturally, when she and her friend Yasmin have to pick a topic for a school assignment, birds in the city are an obvious choice. But when the upcoming bird count is threatened, Reeni has to detour from birding to activism. This is a global…
I have authored four verse novels myself and crafting imagery is my favorite part of writing in the form; most recently, one that revolves around earth imagery, Lilac and the Switchback. I also teach many verse novel classes and have studied the form a great deal, particularly on how to create a successful image system for your novel in verse. When reading verse novels, I am always keeping an eye out as to how the imagery and symbolism help to reveal character growth and change.
I love how this LGBTQ+ verse novel combines magical realism, hurricanes, and family conflict to create a compelling read!
Murray’s deep connection to the ocean is something that shifts and changes through the course of the story as the storm forces her to literally move and for family dynamics to shift.
The water imagery helps reflect Murray’s character growth during the story.
* A Stonewall Award Honor Book * ALA Notable Book * Bank Street Best Book of the Year *
Perfect for fans of Rebecca Stead, Natalie Lloyd, and Jasmine Warga, this beautiful novel in verse explores one girl's struggle to regain her magic after a hurricane forces her to move away from her beloved ocean that, she believes, has given her special powers.
Bighearted and observant twelve-year-old Murray O'Shea loves the ocean. Every chance she gets, she's in it. It could be because the ocean never makes her apologize for being exactly who she is—something her family refuses to do—but…
Ever since I can remember, I have observed people. I was curious about why people are the way they are, and why do some people have fulfilling lives while others don’t. Something I have learned over the years is meaningful actions require courage first. This world certainly needs people who will live courageously in their day-to-day lives by being authentic, speaking up, being kind, lending a hand, and becoming the best versions of ourselves. When we set the example, it gives others hope that they can also be courageous. I hope you choose to live courageously!
My daughter and I read this book together which started a conversation about Rosa Parks, racism, and courage. We liked reading from a child’s perspective because it evoked deeper emotions and made it more relatable to my daughter. The ending beautifully articulated how our courage gives others hope that they can also be courageous.
It seems like any other winter day in Montgomery, Alabama. Mama and child are riding where they're supposed to--way in the back of the bus. The boy passes the time by watching his marble roll up and down the aisle with the motion of the bus, until from way up front a big commotion breaks out. He can't see what's going on, but he can see the policeman arrive outside and he can see Mama's chin grow strong. "There you go, Rosa Parks," she says, "stirrin' up a nest of hornets. Tomorrow all this'll be forgot." But they both know…
I have studied Black politics since I was an undergraduate student at Savannah State College. My principal mentor at Savannah State was Hanes Walton, Jr. Walton (1941-2013) devoted his career to laying the intellectual foundations for the study of Black politics as a subfield in American political science. I have spent my career researching and teaching Black politics. I have authored and/or edited eight books. I am an expert on American politics, urban politics, and racial and ethnic politics.
In 1972, Black politics was at a crossroads. Leonard N. Moore’s examination of the National Black Political Convention of March 1972 is a wonderful and comprehensive study of perhaps the most important political gathering of Black political leaders.
Moore’s concise and readable account of the convention is riveting and at times dramatic. The reader can feel the tension in the Gary, Indiana high school gymnasium between the disparate ideological factions of Black political leadership at the time – the Black integrationist and moderates versus the Black nationalists and radicals.
Black leaders convened in Gary to confront a central question about the future of Black politics: whether Black voters should work separately or in coalition with other racial minorities and liberal whites to advance their policy goals.
Moore details how the coalition approach won out at the convention and connects what happened in Gary, Indiana in 1972 to the political incorporation…
For three days in 1972 in Gary, Indiana, eight thousand American civil rights activists and Black Power leaders gathered at the National Black Political Convention, hoping to end a years-long feud that divided black America into two distinct camps: integrationists and separatists. While some form of this rift existed within black politics long before the 1968 assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his death- and the power vacuum it created- heightened tensions between the two groups, and convention leaders sought to merge these competing ideologies into a national, unified call to action. What followed, however, effectively crippled the Black…
A gay retelling of the classic fairy tale--a scrumptious love story featuring ungrateful stepsiblings, a bake-off, and a fairy godfather.
Cinderelliot is stuck at home taking care of his ungrateful stepsister and stepbrother. When Prince Samuel announces a kingdom-wide competition to join the royal staff as his baker, the stepsiblings…
I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Virginia, so I am very familiar with America’s southern lands and culture. The South—also known as the Deep South—is a unique part of America’s tapestry of identities, and I love books set in this locale. Southern literature tends to focus on themes such as racial politics, one’s personal identity, and rebellion. When I wrote my book, I knew the story would have to take place in the southern states.
I must be honest: this is perhaps my favorite novel. I love Stockett’s narrative voice, showcased wonderfully in the POVs of three characters: Abilene, Minnie, and Skeeter. Stockett recreates the Jackson, Mississippi, of the early 1960s, and I easily got sucked into the dramas of each character. The only downside to this book is that it’s a one-hit wonder without a sequel. The movie was excellent, too.
The #1 New York Times bestselling novel and basis for the Academy Award-winning film-a timeless and universal story about the lines we abide by, and the ones we don't-nominated as one of America's best-loved novels by PBS's The Great American Read.
Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who's always taken orders quietly, but lately she's unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless. White socialite Skeeter just graduated college. She's full of ambition, but without a husband, she's…
I’m a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and an op-ed writer for numerous publications. I’m also a former Peace Corps volunteer and high school teacher. I’ve spent my adult life studying the ways that human beings imagine education, across space and time. Schools make citizens, but citizens also make schools. And we’re all different, so we disagree—inevitably and often profoundly—about the meaning and purpose of “school” itself. In a diverse nation, what should kids learn? And who should decide that? There are no single “right” answers, of course. I’m eager to hear yours.
This is one of those books that reminds you of something that was hiding in plain sight, but that you somehow overlooked: Black students who desegregated schools in the South were disproportionately female. Take the Little Rock Nine, for example: six women, three men. Rachel Devlin takes us inside the lives of these brave Black girls, who incurred enormous risks to help America live out its founding creed: all men (and, now, women) are created equal. We are all in their debt, whether we realize it or not.
A new history of school desegregation in America, revealing how girls and women led the fight for interracial education
The struggle to desegregate America's schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls far outnumbered boys in volunteering to desegregate formerly all-white schools.
In A Girl Stands at the Door, historian Rachel Devlin tells the remarkable…
First a memory from my twelve years as a high school teacher: One day one of my ninth-grade history students remarked, “You are a nice guy Mr. Mayer. You can’t help it if you teach a boring subject.” That comment energized me, pushing me to show my students just how exciting the discipline of history was. I wanted my students to come to know historical actors, to hear their voices, and to feel their humanity. I then took that same project into my twenty-nine years as a teacher educator and finally into my life as a writer of historical non-fiction for young people.
Young people need to know that they are a part of history. I believe this with all my heart and so does Ellen Levine.
In Freedom’s Children the words fly as young African Americans describe their ugly experiences growing up in the segregated South and then their exhilarating involvement in major civil rights events including the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Birmingham Movement, and the Selma voting rights campaign.
Ellen Levine travelled south and interviewed many, capturing these riveting stories. And I include the voices of some of these amazing young people in a book I wrote about the Birmingham marches. Readers of both books will see the vital role young people played in the civil rights movement.
In this inspiring collection of true stories, thirty African-Americans who were children or teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s talk about what it was like for them to fight segregation in the South-to sit in an all-white restaurant and demand to be served, to refuse to give up a seat at the front of the bus, to be among the first to integrate the public schools, and to face violence, arrest, and even death for the cause of freedom.
"Thrilling...Nothing short of wonderful."-The New York Times
Awards:
( A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year ( A Booklist…
Lois Lowry looks back at history through a personal lens as she draws from her own memories as a child in Hawaii and Japan, as well as from historical research, in this stunning work in verse for young readers.
On the Horizon tells the story of people whose lives were…
I’m the author of five books on subjects ranging from comedy and music to sports and pants (specifically, blue jeans). I’m a longtime Boston Globe contributor, a former San Francisco Chronicle staff critic, and a onetime editor for Rolling Stone. I help develop podcasts and other programming for Sirius and Pandora. I teach in the Journalism department at Emerson College, and I am the Program Director for the Newburyport Documentary Film Festival and the co-founder of Lit Crawl Boston.
Now teaching at UT Austin after founding the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at Tufts University, Joseph recently wrote a twin biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. called The Sword and the Shield. His first published book, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour (2006), was a thriller; it helped shift the prevailing narrative of the core years of the Civil Rights era toward the essential legacies of Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and other Black “radicals” whose contributions were too long willfully neglected.
In 1966, a group of black activists, including Stokely Carmichael and Huey P. Newton, turned their backs on Martin Luther King's pacifism in order to build on the legacy of Malcolm X. The result? The Black Power movement, a radical new approach to the fight for equality. Joseph traces the history of the men and women of the movement - many famous and infamous, some forgotten. Drawing on original archival research and more than 60 original oral histories, this narrative history vividly reports the way in which Black Power redefined black identity in the USA.
