In Our Choice, Al Gore concedes that solving the earth’s climate crisis is not going to be easy, but it can be done. “If people think the problem is hopeless, they will just give up,” he writes. “The danger is real, but we can still stop the worst effects of the climate crisis—if we act now.”

Adapted from Gore’s adult book of the same title, this Young Readers Edition of Our Choice is a perfect introduction to the climate crisis for children, tweens and teens. Full of bright diagrams, photos and bullet-pointed lists—and printed on 100% recycled paper—the book explains in detail exactly how we can act to save the planet. Some of the solutions are simple: the United States generates 14% of its electricity through lighting, and new light-emitting diodes (LED) bulbs could have an enormous positive impact on our carbon footprint. Other solutions are more complicated: the United States’ electricity should be powered by a “smart” grid that uses solar, wind and geothermal power sources—a major undertaking.

One of the world’s foremost environmental advocates and the recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, Gore employs hard facts and statistics to make his argument for a greener planet. For example, scientists believe that the earth’s population will eventually stabilize at 9.1 billion people. “The planet should be able to support that many people,” Gore writes, “if we change the way we live by cutting global warming pollution and by learning to consume a little less.

The recommended reader age for Our Choice is 8-14, but even older kids and parents will learn from the facts and suggestions within the book. Although some of the sections about energy and fuel sources might be too detailed for younger children to understand, main points are highlighted in colored boxes and colored fonts for easier comprehension. Readers who are inspired to action are directed to the Inconvenient Youth website (www.inconvenientyouth.org) to learn how to advocate for the environment in communities and schools.

Although Our Choice contains many grim facts about humans’ exploitation of the earth, it is ultimately a hopeful book. In his conclusion, Gore predicts that young people will lead the way in stopping the climate crisis. To do so, they must start immediately.

On June 1, 1921, a mob of white people descended on the Greenwood district of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as “Black Wall Street.” They killed hundreds of Black residents and bombed, burned and otherwise laid waste to a neighborhood that spanned 35 blocks. In Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, author Brandy Colbert recounts this history for teen readers and shows how its echoes continue to reverberate today.

As she does in her middle grade and young adult fiction, including the Stonewall Award-winning Little & Lion, Colbert draws readers in with richly detailed settings, and she describes Greenwood with vibrant imagery. Its Black residents built their own economy from the ground up. They could not freely choose where to spend their money in the wider region, but as it recirculated within Greenwood, it created a booming business community. Colbert captures a sense of lively growth that makes the neighborhood’s eventual destruction hit home with visceral impact.

Poor white Tulsans' feelings of grievance and jealousy were factors that led to the massacre, and some local media outlets escalated tensions through false, inflammatory reporting. As the violence spread, the police and the National Guard aided white vigilantes by imprisoning Black residents in internment camps. A grand jury investigation later blamed Black men for inciting violence when they had actually been trying to stop it.

Colbert’s meticulous research holds the book together. Informative sidebars add vital context and will help readers make sense of an almost incomprehensible crime that was driven by white supremacy. A chilling postscript explores efforts to bury this history and the ongoing resistance to its revival. Black Birds in the Sky tells the truth about an event that every American should know about. It’s a horrifying account told with great care.

Deborah Wiles was 16 years old on May 4, 1970, when she heard the news that the National Guard had opened fire on college students who had been protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Ohio. Four students were killed and nine were wounded, one of whom was left paralyzed. Two of the students killed had simply been walking to class. Fifty years later, the award-winning author revisits the tragedy in Kent State, an extraordinary and passionate recounting written in free verse from multiple points of view. “The earthquake of its enormity has never left me,” Wiles reflects in an author’s note.

Like a meticulous theater director, Wiles opens by carefully setting the stage, then coming out from behind the curtain and addressing readers directly. “You are new here,” she writes, “and we don’t want to scare you away, / but we want you to know the truth.” She explains that the military draft provoked angst and uncertainty across Kent State’s campus, and describes mounting student anger at Nixon’s decision to bomb Cambodia.

Wiles’ decision to write in free verse, rather than prose, effectively harnesses her meticulous research and enables her to convey her four-day chronology of events through collective, often conflicting, voices. She captures the vigorous debates and frequent clashes that occurred between these voices, which include white and black students, townies and National Guard soldiers. The opinionated participants remain anonymous on the page, distinguished through careful and varied typography, but together, they form a diverse chorus that offers readers a mix of opinion, memory, fact and misinformation. Wiles also intersperses the lyrics of protest songs through the book, including Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Ohio,” which was written by Neil Young in the aftermath of what happened and, as Wiles explains, “helped change the national conversation about the war in Vietnam.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Deborah Wiles shares the book that inspired Kent State’s verse format and her personal memories of May 4, 1970.

Yet always at the forefront of this chorus are the victims, to whom Wiles dedicates Kent State. Allison Krause was “attractive in every way” and died in her boyfriend’s arms. She was 19 years old. Jeffrey Miller had recently chatted with his mother by phone, telling her, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to get hurt.” He was 20 years old. Bill Schroeder had just met with his ROTC advisor and eventually planned to help frontline solders as a military psychologist. He was 19 years old. Sandy Scheuer was a “delightful square” who loved Dinah Shore and Perry Como. She was 20 years old. Wiles doesn’t mince words when describing the circumstances of their deaths: “America turned on its unarmed children, in their schoolyard, and killed them.”

In Kent State, Deborah Wiles has created a powerful work of art that serves as both as a historical record of a national tragedy and a call to action for every American, but especially for young people. After all, as she writes, “It has always been the young / who are our champions / of justice. / Who stand at the vanguard / of change.”

In his first memoir, Brave Face, bestselling YA author Shaun David Hutchinson (We Are the Ants) tells the story of young adulthood and the harrowing experience of growing up and coming out in the 1990s.

Hutchinson always felt different, like something was missing or out of place, though he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. As he entered adolescence and high school, the feeling only got stronger. He tried to cover it up by doing everything that a “normal” teenage boy should: goofing off in class, joining extracurricular activities and going on dates with girls. But none of those things filled the void in Hutchinson or drowned out the voices that told him he wasn’t good enough and would never find love. To do that, he needed to learn to accept who he really was. But how do you do that when the world is telling you that who you are is wrong, and how do you find love when you don’t even love yourself?

By turns funny and heartbreaking but always gut-wrenchingly honest, Hutchinson pours his soul onto the pages of this memoir, offering up his own struggles as a source of understanding and solace for other queer people of all ages and in all stages of their journeys. His real journal entries and emails provide a level of heightened authenticity and make it all the more relatable.

Hutchinson’s story, though full of triggering topics such as depression and self-harm, is ultimately one of hope, and certainly one that still needs to be heard by so many LGBTQ+ youths who are struggling to accept themselves in a world that keeps trying to change them.

Laurie Halse Anderson’s groundbreaking 1999 novel, Speak, drastically changed the ways in which authors wrote about teenage characters, helping to usher in the modern young adult genre as we know it today. After Anderson’s story of a high school student reckoning with the rage and pain of her rape became a bestseller, the dark and painful parts of adolescent life were up for exploring, and the coming-of-age experience was worth writing about.

Now, Anderson is breaking ground again with a memoir-in-verse that challenges categorization and the ways we’ve thought about the YA genre for the past 20 years.

Anderson, now 57, begins with short glimpses into her tumultuous early childhood in upstate New York, and we quickly learn about her veteran father’s PTSD and ensuing domestic violence, which informed her 2014 novel, The Impossible Knife of Memory. But the ferociously raw, burning heart of this memoir is the recounting of her rape at the age of 13. In searing free verse, Anderson unloads decades of trauma on these pages. Although younger teens will benefit from being able to unpack and discuss many passages with an emotionally available adult, there’s good reason to believe that SHOUT will become popular assigned reading in classrooms around the country—especially in light of our atrocious cultural problem with rape, sexual abuse and consent.

Longtime Anderson fans will appreciate this deeply personal look into how the author channeled her pain into the writing of Speak, and readers new to her work will be swept up in her singular style, which melds bold honesty with fluttering moments of lyrical beauty. 

Sara Saedi thought hormonal acne and microscopic boobs were her biggest problems of her 8th-grade existence in 1993 until she discovered that she was an “illegal alien” (the more common and politically correct term undocumented immigrant was yet to enter her vocabulary) born in Iran. In an effort to flee a war-torn country that was becoming less tolerant of basic freedoms, Saedi’s parents hatched a plan to escape to the United States with 2-year-old Saedi and her older sister, Samira, in tow. In her new memoir, Americanized, Saedi chronicles her 18-year process to obtain a green card.

With a constant threat of being deported back to Iran for even the slightest infraction, Saedi’s narrative should be a tale of despair mired in endless paperwork. Instead, her irreverent, self-deprecating humor focuses on the woes shared by most American teens: bad skin, sexuality, body image hang-ups and the perfect prom date. Saedi's commentary on the time period, from VCRs to landline phones, adds to the wit. Saedi balances her teenage perspective, complemented with entries from her actual diary from the time, with narration from the more mature, self-assured woman she’s become as a result of those experiences.

Through both good and bad times, Saedi recognizes the importance of family and maintaining her Iranian identity as she increasingly becomes more “American.” As she weaves in facts and observations about Iranian culture, she’s also not afraid to speak up about the current political climate regarding immigrants and debunk many myths (undocumented immigrants do pay taxes!). Readers will come away laughing yet pondering what it means to be an immigrant today.