Jennifer Hubert's Blog, page 4

Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas

The phenomenal Angie Thomas has given us an early Valentine’s Day gift with this kick ass origin story of Maverick, the boy who grows up to be Starr’s strict, kind father in The Hate U Give. Maverick Carter has been doing a pretty good job of being the man of the family since his father […]

Just Like That by Gary D. Schmidt

Meryl Lee Kowalkski is lost. It’s 1968, the war is raging in Vietnam, and her best friend Holling Hoodhood just died in a freak car accident. There was no time to say goodbye. It happened “just like that.” Now Meryl Lee can see nothing in front of her but the Blank, and it’s utter nothingness […]

2020 Top Five

Dear Teen Peeps, What year it’s been! And with the disturbing and unprecedented events of last week, 2020 continues to cast a long, dark shadow over 2021. Lucky for us, we have books to help us understand our feelings and escape our sometimes claustrophobic living spaces. Like many of you, I spent most of the […]

Super Fake Love Song by David Yoon

Seventeen year old third-generation Korean-American Sunny Dae is a nerd with a capital “N.” Founder and front-man of the popular video channel “DIY Fantasy FX,” he creates home-made props for LARP use with his two equally nerdy best friends Jamal and Milo. Even though he gets picked on by bullies and ignored by his family, […]

New York Times YA Debuts

Dear Teen Peeps, some of you may have noticed that I haven’t posted to RR AT ALL since, like, September. That’s because of a little thing called Hybrid Teaching in the Time of COVID (which I know you all know about, since you are on the other side of the screen) AND because I was working on […]

The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hill

Florian (actually Flora) is a pirate-in-training, a young girl who must disguise herself as a boy in order to survive working for the ruthless Nameless Captain. She works hard and observes closely in order to keep herself and her foolish older brother Alfie alive and under the Captain’s radar. Evelyn is royalty, a member of […]

The Screaming Staircase (Lockwood & Co, vol. 1) by Jonathan Stroud

Harry Potter meets Scooby Doo in this delightful romp through ghost-ridden London, that was originally published in 2013, and that I took much too long to pick up. In this alternate universe, London is besieged by ghosts, both benign and malevolent, that disrupt everyday life and require constant supernatural maintenance. These tenacious shadows can only […]

All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by George M. Johnson

“Navigating in a space that questions your humanity isn’t really living at all. It’s existing. We all deserve more than just the ability to exist.” Thirty-three year old writer and activist George M. Johnson‘s powerful coming of age story is both a deeply personal narrative and a robust rallying cry in support of Black queer […]

Grown by Tiffany D. Jackson

Seventeen-year-old Enchanted Jones has dreams. While she hopes to snag a competitive swimming scholarship for college, her true passion is singing. She knows all the classic R & B hits by heart, but writing her own songs is what gets her through the long days of school and babysitting her younger siblings, while both her […]

Parachutes by Kelly Yang

Clair is a “parachute,” one of the rich Chinese teens who are sent to live on their own in the United States (“We parachute in…get it?”) to attend American high schools in order to avoid taking the brutal gaokao, or Chinese college entrance exams. She’s used to high end luxury, and not at all sure […]