nonfiction Archives - YAdudebooks

March 1, 2024

The Genius Kid’s Guide to Mythical Creatures

From beautiful mermaids and gentle unicorns to fire-breathing dragons and bloodthirsty vampires, mysterious beings and magical beasts appear in stories told all around the world. This book highlights 20 legendary beings. Twenty types of mythical creatures creep, stalk, hustle, fly or swim through this fun graphic novel. From Bigfoot to dragons, vampires to giants, we are treated to surprising facts, a sense of how their mythologies came into being, and how they live – not just their preferred environment, but what they eat and whether they’re hostile or friendly to human beings. We even learn what movies they’ve starred […]

January 5, 2024

Breaking the Chains: African American Slave Resistance

Generations of American history students have grown up believing that enslaved people accepted their lot and became attached to their enslavers, that rebellion was rare and that liberation from slavery happened thanks to the enslavers. In this newly updated version of a celebrated history book first published in 1990, high school teacher and children’s book author William Loren Katz offers a closer look at the lives of enslaved people in the United States, from their African abductions through to their brave resistance to harsh plantation life and their roles in the Civil War. It documents how enslaved people themselves were […]

January 5, 2024

The Antiracist Kitchen: 21 Stories (and Recipes)

What if talking about racism was as easy as baking a cake, frying plantains or cooking rice? The Antiracist Kitchen: 21 Stories (and Recipes) is a celebration of food, family, activism and resistance in the face of racism. In this anthology featuring stories and recipes from 21 diverse and award-winning North American children’s authors, the authors share the role of food in their lives and how it has helped fight discrimination, reclaim culture and celebrate people with different backgrounds. They bring personal and sometimes difficult experiences growing up as racialized people. I opened the cover of this book with […]

July 7, 2023

Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam

Thien’s first memory isn’t a sight or a sound. It’s the sweetness of watermelon and the saltiness of fish. It’s the taste of the foods he ate while adrift at sea as his family fled Vietnam. After the Pham family arrives at a refugee camp in Thailand, they struggle to survive. Things don’t get much easier once they resettle in California. And through each chapter of their lives, food takes on a new meaning. Strawberries come to signify struggle as Thien’s mom and dad look for work. Potato chips are an indulgence that brings Thien so much joy that they […]

April 7, 2023

Dreamer

This honest, engrossing graphic memoir tells the story of professional athlete and activist Akim Aliu’s incredible life as a hockey prodigy in Canada. Akim Aliu — also known as “Dreamer” — is a Ukrainian-Nigerian-Canadian professional hockey player whose career took him all around the world and who experienced systemic racism at every turn. Dreamer tells Akim’s incredible story, from being the only black child in his Ukrainian community, to his family struggling to make ends meet while living in Toronto, to confronting the racist violence he often experienced both on and off the ice. This is a gut-wrenching and riveting […]

February 3, 2023

Allies: Real Talk About Showing Up, Screwing Up and Trying Again

As an ally, you use your power—no matter how big or small—to support others. You learn, and try, and mess up, and try harder. In this collection of true stories, 17 critically acclaimed and bestselling YA authors get real about being an ally, needing an ally and showing up for friends and strangers. From raw stories of racism and invisible disability to powerful moments of passing the mic, these authors share their truths. They invite you to think about your own experiences and choices and how to be a better ally. There are no easy answers, but this book helps […]

November 4, 2022

I Can’t Do What?: Strange Laws and Rules from Around the World

Did you know that you can’t keep a goldfish in a round goldfish bowl in Rome? That you can’t take a selfie while running with the bulls in Pamplona? That you can’t climb a tree in a Toronto city park? This book is a look at some of the more curious rules and laws that have been created around the world over many years. Some of these rules and laws may make us laugh. Some may make us angry or frightened for the people they influence. All of these rules and laws will make us think. How did they come […]

October 7, 2022

Secret Schools: True Stories of the Determination to Learn

Education goes undercover in this compelling look at some of the world’s most secretive schools through history. Can you keep a secret? What if it meant hiding from your loved ones, sneaking out late at night or risking imprisonment? And what if that secret was that you were going to school? From covert classrooms created by enslaved Africans in the United States, to academic schools disguised as “sewing lessons” for women in Afghanistan, to espionage schools run by powerful governments, Secret Schools explores the hidden classrooms that have opened their doors so children and adults could learn. Vivid linocut […]

September 2, 2022

Big Lies : From Socrates to Social Media

Growing up, Cori, Maz and Sam were inseparable best friends, sharing their love for Halloween, arcade games and one another. Now it’s 1992, Sam has been missing for five years, and Cori and Maz aren’t speaking anymore. How could they be, when Cori is sure Sam is dead and Maz thinks he may have been kidnapped by a supernatural pinball machine?

These days, all Maz wants to do is party, buy CDs at Sam Goody and run away from his past. Meanwhile, Cori is a homecoming queen, hiding her abiding love of horror movies and her queer self under the bubble-gum veneer of a high school queen bee. But when Sam returns—still twelve years old while his best friends are now seventeen — Maz and Cori are thrown back together to solve the mystery of what really happened to Sam the night he went missing. Beneath the surface of that mystery lurk secrets the friends never told one another, then and now. And Sam’s is the darkest of all.

Award-winning author of If You Could Be Mine and Here to Stay, Sara Farizan delivers edge-of-your-seat terror as well as her trademark referential humor, witty narration and insightful characters.

June 30, 2022

Unequal: A Story of America

The true story of racial inequality—and resistance to it—is the prologue to our present. You can see it in where we live, where we go to school, where we work, in our laws and in our leadership. Unequal presents a gripping account of the struggles that shaped America and the insidiousness of racism, and demonstrates how inequality persists. As readers meet some of the many African American people who dared to fight for a more equal future, they will also discover a framework for addressing racial injustice in their own lives.

This book is banned in Texas. And Florida. And wherever else school boards think kids are too fragile to learn the truth. Are they right?

Slavery ended a long time ago, they say. And Martin Luther King Jr. took care of any racism left over, they say. Let’s move on, they say.

And then they’ll ban this book, and books like it, which tell you the truth: that the effects of slavery, Jim Crow, red-lining, voter suppression, mass incarceration, environmental racism and unconscious biases have created a United States that is, in fact, Unequal.