Summer Reading 2021: Contemp(ish) Realistic Fiction

Teaming up with her friends at a creative arts camp, Kaia aspires to win a filmmaking contest by making a movie inspired by Filipino folktales in the hope of convincing her grandfather to stay in California and not move back to the Philippines.

Missing her mother who has returned to Turkey to resolve an immigration problem, sixth-grader Sila welcomes a very large distraction in her life when she helps a surprising new friend – an elderly lottery winner - rescue an abused circus elephant.

Twelve-year-old Lucy Desberg is a natural problem-solver. At her family’s struggling pharmacy, she has a line of makeover customers for every school dance and bat mitzvah. But all the makeup tips in the world won’t help save the business. If only she could find a way to make it the center of town again—a place where people want to spend time, like in the old days. Lucy dreams up a solution that could resuscitate the family business and help the environment, too. But will Lucy’s family stop fighting long enough to listen to a seventh-grader?

Felix is used to a little spontaneity in his life. He’s watched his mom, Astrid, hop from job to job, and since Felix’s grandma died, they’ve moved a lot. When they get evicted and have to live in a van for a while, Felix believes Astrid when she says it’s temporary. Even if Astrid has trouble finding a job, Felix has a backup plan: his favorite game show is hosting a junior edition, and he’s actually freakishly good at trivia. He’s going to audition and win enough money so that he and Astrid will never have problems again.

Sixth-graders Sara, a Pakistani American, and Elizabeth, a Jewish girl, connect in an after-school cooking club and bond over food and their mothers' struggles to become United States citizens. The girls form a shaky alliance that gradually deepens, and they make plans to create the most amazing, mouth-watering cross-cultural dish together and win a spot on a local food show.

Stewart, 13: Socially clueless genius. Ashley, 14: Popular with everyone but her teachers.
Ashley's and Stewart's worlds collide when Stewart and his dad move in with Ashley and her mom. The Brady Bunch it isn't. Stewart is trying to be 89.9 percent happy about it--he's always wanted a sister. But Ashley is 110 percent horrified. They're complete opposites, but they have one thing in common: they--like everyone else--are made of molecules.

Brothers John and Stewart find themselves on their own in a desert with no food or water after a massive blackout creates a crisis that tests their determination to survive. They must walk 96 miles in the stark desert sun to get help. Along the way, they’re forced to question their dad’s insistence on self-reliance and ask just what it is that we owe to our neighbors, to our kin, and to ourselves.

Future rock star or friendless misfit? That’s no choice at all. Eighth-grader Apple, a Filipino American who loves the music of the Beatles, decides to change her life by learning how to play the guitar. She grapples with being different; with friends and backstabbers; and with following her dreams.

Best friends Matt and Eric are hatching a plan for one big final adventure together before Eric moves away: during the marching band competition at a Giant Amusement Park, they will sneak away to a nearby comics convention and meet their idol-a famous comic creator. Without cell phones. Or transportation. Or permission.

A baby great horned owl, Second, so called because his sister, First, is already out of the nest, is reluctant to hunt for himself, but when his mother is injured, he is forced out into the forest. Maureen is a human girl pulled out of her grandmother's violent home and placed with an aunt--but her Aunt Beatrice is involved in falconry and runs a mews where injured raptors can heal, and it is here Maureen and Second (now called Rufus) meet and learn how to heal each other.

Mystery surrounds the death of Mason’s friend Benny, and when a second friend, Calvin, goes missing, Mason falls under suspicion. He's desperate to figure out what happened to Calvin and, eventually, Benny. But will anyone believe him?

Naeem, a senior in high school and an immigrant from Bangladesh, doesn’t feel at home anywhere - at home, at school, or with his friends. Tricked into shoplifting by one “friend,” he is arrested by NYPD and given a choice–go to jail or become an informant, spying on his own Muslim community.

The first time she saw him, she flipped. The first time he saw her, he ran. That was the second grade, but not much has changed by the seventh. Juli says: "My Bryce. Still walking around with my first kiss." He says: "It's been six years of strategic avoidance and social discomfort." But in the eighth grade everything gets turned upside down: just as Bryce is thinking that there's maybe more to Juli than meets the eye, she's thinking that he's not quite all he seemed. A classic romantic comedy of errors told in alternating chapters by two teenagers.

When Theo's photography project is mysteriously vandalized at school there are five suspected students who all say "it wasn't me." Theo’s favorite teacher is determined to get to the bottom of the incident and has the six of them come into school over vacation to talk. She calls it "Justice Circle." The six students - the Nerd, the Princess, the Jock, the Screw Up, the Weirdo, and the Nobody - think of it as detention. AKA their worst nightmare. That is until they realize they might get along after all, despite their differences.

On his first day at a new school, blind sixteen-year-old Will Porter accidentally groped a girl on the stairs, sat on another student in the cafeteria, and somehow drove a classmate to tears. High school can only go up from here, right? Then an unprecedented opportunity arises: an experimental surgery that could give Will eyesight for the first time in his life. But learning to see is more difficult than Will ever imagined, and he soon discovers that the sighted world has been keeping secrets.

Alienated from her more privileged classmates at a Florida private school, sixth-grade scholarship student Merci Suárez is targeted by competitive rival Edna Santos. Things aren't going well at home, either: Merci's grandfather and most trusted ally, Lolo, has been acting strangely lately -- forgetting important things, falling from his bike, and getting angry over nothing. No one in her family will tell Merci what's going on, so she's left to her own worries, while also feeling all on her own at school.

When cell phones are banned at Branton Middle School, Frost and his friends come up with a new way to communicate: leaving sticky notes for each other all around the school. It catches on, and soon all the kids in school are leaving notes; though for every kind and friendly one, there is a cutting and cruel one as well. In the middle of this, a new girl arrives at school, the sticky-note war escalates, and the pressure to choose sides mounts.