September 2024

Graphic Novel (A Banned or Challenged Book)

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia’s intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity–what it means and how to think about it–for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

Fiction (A Banned or Challenged Book)

Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different.

Teen Fiction (A Banned or Challenged Book)

Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

Fantasy (A Banned or Challenged Book)

Though Feyre now has the powers of the High Fae, her heart remains human, but as she navigates the feared Night Court’s dark web of politics, passion, and dazzling power, a greater evil looms–and she might be key to stopping it.

(A Thriller or Crime Fiction)

Popular podcaster Alix Summer becomes the subject of her own podcast after a woman named Josie Fair comes into her life and then disappears, leaving behind a terrible and terrifying legacy that puts her life and her family’s lives in mortal danger.

(A Thriller or Crime Fiction)

A woman working as a nanny for a young boy who has strange and disturbing secrets.

(A Thriller or Crime Fiction)

Finding unexpected support from a new friend while collecting stories from her rapidly vanishing Brooklyn community, Sydney uncovers sinister truths about a regional gentrification project and why her neighbors are moving away.

(A Thriller or Crime Fiction)

Tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books, 26-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel is hired until she after a string uncomfortable events, is elevated to Office Darling, leaving Nella in the dust.