17-year-old Rico has a lot on her plate. She works the afternoon shift at the Gas n Go and spends the rest of her free time looking after her little brother and trying to cushion the effects of her mom’s poor financial decisions on their family. But when the owner of a winning lottery ticket purchased from her doesn’t show up to claim the prize, Rico is forced to partner with her wealthy (and wildly attractive) classmate Zan to track the woman down and maybe get her to split her wins with Rico. The post Review | Jackpot appeared first on Reading Middle Grade ..read more

Summary: NerdCrush Ramona is a shy 16-year-old who loves cosplay. After she leaves a picture of her cosplay character with a poem in her crush’s locker, the two start communicating via email. In class, though, she can’t seem to work up the courage to talk to that same crush, Caleb. But when Caleb suddenly starts Read More > The post Review | NerdCrush appeared first on Reading Middle Grade ..read more

Summary: Gloria Buenrostro Is Not My Girlfriend Gary Vo is a Vietnamese-American soon-to-be junior high schooler. Gary and his friend Preston have been at the bottom of the social totem pole forever, and Preston is determined that this is the summer they rise up the ranks. So when they’re approached by two popular classmates with Read More > The post Review | Gloria Buenrostro Is Not My Girlfriend appeared first on Reading Middle Grade ..read more

Zurika Damani plays the violin with a sprinkle of hip-hop and has just been rejected by Julliard. Her current options are to go to college for pre-law or compete in a contest judged by major college scouts (including Julliard scouts). The only problem is that the contest is during her big sister’s week-long Indian wedding. Thankfully, her cousins band together to help her disappear during the ceremony without being discovered. But things get complicated when Zurika finds out that the group's South African cousin is a fellow contestant. The post Review | My Sister’s Big Fat Indian Wedding appea ..read more

Chloe Chang lives a boring life in Oklahoma -- with her busy single mom and her two best friends -- where she loves watching K-dramas. But when her best friends gift her a 23-and-me test kit for her birthday, things take a dramatic turn. She finds out that her father was a son of the Noh family, a prestigious family in Seoul, South Korea and before she knows it, she's off to meet them for the first time. Unfortunately, she's thrust into a web of lies as she realizes that the family might have ulterior motives for reaching out to her. The post Review | The Noh Family appeared first on Reading M ..read more

Jessie is a fifteen-year-old Palestinian-Canadian who’s getting into high school soon after an autism diagnosis. She feels “abnormal,” especially as she doesn’t have a cellphone, but is determined to belong to a friend group and fall in love this school year. However, when she finds herself caught between two very different boys, she realizes that things don’t always go to plan. The post Review | Something More appeared first on Reading Middle Grade ..read more

In Give Me a Sign, Lilah is a teen with hearing loss but who isn’t profoundly deaf. So she has always felt caught in the middle -- not deaf enough to be part of the Deaf community and not fully hearing to fit in completely there either. But when she becomes a counselor at a summer camp for deaf and blind kids, her experiences (and the boy she falls in love with) change the way the views her disability. The post Review | Give Me a Sign appeared first on Reading Middle Grade ..read more

Faint at Heart is set in a dystopian world where no one but high schooler June has a heart. When a scientist (known simply as The Scientist) discovers that removing your heart takes away negative emotions like heartbreak, sadness, and anxiety, everyone undergoes the procedure. Unfortunately, the procedure also takes away the positive feelings. As June grapples with the loneliness of being the only one with a heart, she discovers a classmate whose heart is now growing back. Both teens work together to find the scientist and get her to reverse the procedure. The post Graphic Novel Review | Faint ..read more

Adanna or Sophie as she's known at school is the 17-year-old daughter of Nigerian immigrants whose main goal is that she excels at school and become a lawyer. Sophie is on the debate team and has zero hobbies. She does have crushes on two guys: Tayo, a fellow Nigerian-Canadian family friend and another Canadian boy on her debate team. Ada is fairly content with her life until the wedding of her cousin Genny to a popular Afrobeats musician, and her new poetry elective bring her back in contact with her older estranged brother whom her parents effectively disowned a few years ago. As Ada tries t ..read more

Don't Hate the Player opens with two kids: Emilia and Jack meeting at a game arcade while attending another kid's birthday party. Jack is entranced by Emilia's gaming ability, and the two become fast friends meeting up every year at that same kid's birthday until Jack moves and they're separated. Emilia is now an overachieving teen, on the hockey team, running for class VP and with a cute guy vying to be her boyfriend. But she's also secretly a gamer by night, as part of a team of online gamers. Her real life and online world come close to meshing when she gets the chance to play in a gaming c ..read more