From the Page to the Stage!

Much Ado About Baseball
By LaRocca, Rajani

Loosely based on Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing, ” twelve-year-olds Trish and Ben should be automatic friends because they both play baseball on a Little League team in Comity, Massachusetts, and they both love solving math puzzles, but obstacles stand in their way.

I Think I love You
By Desombre, Auriane

Competing for a first-prize trip to a Los Angeles film festival, die-hard romantic Emma and her archnemesis, the practical-minded Sophia, find their frequent clashes turning into something more.

Abuzz
By Chase, Amy

Shakespeare’s beloved romcom Much Ado About Nothing gets a modern update with an LGBTQ cast and the same classic miscommunications! Feuding senior students Ben and Beatriz drag half of Messina High into their never-ending arguments, making things difficult as budding sweethearts Hero and Claudio are asked to pick sides in the battle. 

The Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano
By Margarita Engle

Juan Francisco Manzano was born in 1797 into the household of wealthy slaveowners in Cuba. He spent his early years at the side of his owner’s wife, entertaining her friends. His poetry was his outlet, reflecting the beauty and cruelty of his world. Written in verse.

The Surrender Tree
By Margarita Engle

A collection of poems in which Rosa, a healer, describes her experiences trying to help Cuban peasants who have been forced to leave their farms and villages in 1896 and given eight days to find their way to “reconcentration camps” or be killed.

Your Heart, My Sky: Love in a Time of Hunger
By Margarita Engle

In Cuba’s “special period in times of peace” of 1991, Liana and Amado find love after their severe hunger gives both courage to risk government retribution by skipping a summer of labor to seek food. Told in their two voices plus that of the stray dog that brought them together.

Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey
By Rodriguez, Edel

Following a young Cuban American whose passion for reading becomes both refuge and compass, this story traces the tender, funny, and complicated journey of growing up between cultures. 

Akissi: Tales of Mischief
By Marguerite Abouet

Set in the vibrant rhythms of Côte d’Ivoire, this spirited tale follows a fearless girl whose daily adventures brim with humor, friendship, and unstoppable imagination. Her mischievous escapades highlight the warmth, community, and lively traditions that shape her world. As she dashes from one bold idea to the next, she discovers both the joy of belonging and the lessons tucked inside everyday trouble. It’s a celebration of childhood energy grounded in rich West African culture.

The Hunterman and the Crocodile
By Baba Wagué Diakité

Rooted in the rich oral traditions of West Africa, this tale follows a wise hunter whose compassion is tested after he rescues a boastful crocodile. Guided by the storytelling rhythms of the region, the journey blends humor, justice, and community wisdom. As animals debate right and wrong, the story celebrates ingenuity, moral lessons, and the enduring power of African folklore.

Emmanel’s Dream the True Story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah
By Laurie Ann Thompson

Born in Ghana, West Africa, with one deformed leg, he was dismissed by most people-but not by his mother, who taught him to reach for his dreams. As a boy, Emmanuel hopped to school more than two miles each way, learned to play soccer, left home at age thirteen to provide for his family, and eventually, became a cyclist. He rode an astonishing four hundred miles across Ghana in 2001, spreading his powerful message- disability is not inability. Today, Emmanuel continues to work on behalf of the disabled.

We Are Water Protectors
By Carole Lindstrom

Water is the first medicine. It affects and connects us all… When a black snake threatens to destroy the Earth and poison her people’s water, one young water protector takes a stand to defend Earth’s most sacred resource. Inspired by the many indigenous-led movements across North America, this bold and lyrical picture book issues an urgent rallying cry to safeguard the Earth’s water from harm and corruption.

Moon Song
By Michaela Goade

As a family goes to bed on a cold night, a young girl begins a story to ease her cousin to sleep. The tale unfolds as a walk through the world around them, illuminating the winter landscape and all who find solace in the quiet hours and tempering her cousin’s worries about the dark by urging him to “Come! Haagu! Follow the light.”

Johnny’s Pheasant
By Cheryl Minnema

Johnny and his grandmother are on their way back from the market when he spots “a small feathery hump” by the side of the road. It’s a pheasant, and Johnny insists that it is just sleeping, while Grandma suspects a more permanent state of rest. Minnema (Hungry Johnny), a member of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, gives the boy a sweetly inquisitive, playful disposition and an authentic voice, as when he exuberantly “hoot, hoot”s, anticipating the pheasant’s waking.

Firefly Season
By Cynthia Leitich Smith

Piper feels grateful for visits with her relatives, especially for the time spent with her cousins in Cherokee Nation and Muscogee Nation during summer vacations, fishing on misty mornings and playing on firefly-filled evenings. Piper’s family lives a road trip away in Kansas City. So when a neighbor named Sumi moves in next door, Piper is excited to share her stories and seasons with a new friend. 

And They Walk on
By Kevin Noble Maillard

A child remembers a late loved one in this emotionally centered picture book about the Indigenous concept of “walking on.” Contemplating where those who have walked on end up, the narrator wonders, “Did they go to the market to thump green melons and sail shopping carts in the sea of aisles?” 

Natsumi!
By Susan Lendroth

The festival of traditional Japanese arts is coming up, and little Natsumi’s big personality is too much for her family’s quieter traditions, until her grandfather introduces her to taiko drumming.

Dodsworth in Tokyo
By Tim Egan

Dodsworth’s duck companion is surprisingly well-behaved during a visit to Tokyo, although he does fall into the koi pond at the Imperial Palace and becomes the center of attention at a Sanja Festival.

1001 Cranes
By Naomi Hirahara

When 12-year-old Angela Kato arrives in L.A., the last thing she wants to do is spend the entire summer with her grandparents. But in the Kato family, one is never permitted to complain. Grandma Michi and Aunt Janet put Angela to work in their flower shop, folding origami and creating 1001 crane displays for newlyweds.

Jasmine Toguchi, Drummer Girl
By Florence, Debbi Michiko

Jasmine worries that she will be the only one with no talent to share in the school talent show until her mother brings out her taiko drum.

The Switch
By Beth O’Leary

Leena is too young to feel stuck. Eileen is too old to start over. It’s time for the switch. Ordered to take a two-month sabbatical after blowing a big presentation at work, Leena escapes to her grandmother Eileen’s house for some overdue rest. 

Tom Lake
By Ann Patchett

Recalling the past at her daughters’ request, Lara tells the story of a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance, which causes her daughters to examine their own lives and reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
By Mark Heddon

Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic, fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor’s dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.

Like Water for Chocolate
By Laura Esquivel

Despite the fact that she has fallen in love with a young man, Tita, the youngest of three daughters born to a tyrannical rancher, must obey tradition and remain single and at home to care for her mother.

Chocolat
By Joanne Harris

In tiny Lansquenet, where nothing much has changed in a hundred years, beautiful newcomer Vianne Rocher and her exquisite chocolate shop arrive and instantly begin to play havoc with Lenten vows. Each box of luscious bonbons comes with a free gift: Vianne’s uncanny perception of its buyer’s private discontents and a clever, caring cure for them.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
By Fanny Flagg

Mrs. Threadgoode’s tale of two high-spirited women of the 1930s, Idgie and Ruth, helps Evelyn, a 1980s woman in a sad slump of middle age, to begin to rejuvenate her own life.

He Is… I Say
By David Wild

He Is… I Say examines Neil Diamond’s singular place in the pantheon of popular music. David Wild–who’s interviewed Diamond for Rolling Stone, penned the liner notes to a number of Diamond’s anthologies, and produced Diamond’s scandal-free episode of Behind the Music –now dares to turn on his “Heartlight,” offering a moving and often hilarious salute to his own Jewish Elvis, one based on his interviews from over the years with the Solitary Man himself.

High Fidelity
By Nick Hornby

The romantic trials of the owner of a London record shop, after his girlfriend leaves him for another man.

Just Kids
By Patti Smith

New York locations vividly come to life where, as young artists, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe met and fell in love: a first apartment in Brooklyn, Times Square with John and Yoko’s iconic billboard, Max’s Kansas City, or the gritty fire escape of the Hotel Chelsea. Along with never-before-published photographs, drawings, and ephemera, this edition captures a moment in New York when everything was possible. And when two kids seized their destinies as artists and soul mates in this inspired story of love and friendship.

The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
By Oscar Hijuelos

It’s 1949, the era of the mambo, and two young Cuban musicians make their way from Havana to New York. The Castillo brothers, workers by day, become, by night, stars of the dance halls, where their orchestra plays the sensuous, pulsing music that earns them the title of the Mambo Kings.

Cuba and Its Music
By Ned Sublette

This entertaining history of Cuba and its music begins with the collision of Spain and Africa and continues through the era of Miguelito Valds, Arsenio Rodriguez, Benny Mor, and Prez Prado. It offers a behind-the-scenes examination of music from a Cuban point of view, unearthing surprising, provocative connections and making the case that Cuba was fundamental to the evolution of music in the New World.

Dreaming in Cuban
By Christina García

A vivid and funny first novel about three generations of a Cuban family divided by conflicting loyalties over the Cuban revolution, set in the world of Havana in the 1970s and ’80s and in an emigre neighborhood of Brooklyn. It is a story of immense charm about women and politics, women and witchcraft, women and their men.

The Phantom of the Opera
By Gaston Leroux

Erik has the voice of an angel, but the face of a monster. When he takes off his mask, people scream and run away! So he hides in the darkness below an opera house. There, he falls in love with a beautiful singer.

Rose Blood
By Anita Howard

Rune, whose voice has been compared to that of an angel, has a mysterious affliction linked to her talent that leaves her sick and drained at the end of every performance. Convinced creative direction will cure her, her mother ships her off to a French boarding school for the arts, rumored to have a haunted past. Shortly after arriving at RoseBlood conservatory, Rune starts to believe something otherworldly is indeed afoot.

The Secret History
By Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last — inexorably — into evil.

More Myself
By Alicia Keys

An intimate, revealing look at one artist’s journey from self-censorship to full expression. As one of the most celebrated musicians of our time, Alicia Keys has enraptured the nation with her heartfelt lyrics, extraordinary vocal range, and soul-stirring piano compositions. Yet away from the spotlight, Alicia has grappled with private heartache-over the challenging and complex relationship with her father, the people-pleasing nature that characterized her early career, the loss of privacy surrounding her romantic relationships, and the oppressive expectations of female perfection.

The New York Nobody Knows
By William B. Helmreich

An intimate portrait of the Big Apple. As a child growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father called “Last Stop.” They would pick a subway line, ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood. Decades later, his love for exploring the city was as strong as ever. Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs–an astonishing 6,000 miles. His journey took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

The Hate U Give
By Angie Thomas

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does or does not say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle
By Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson’s beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family’s dark secret takes readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

Horrorstör
By Grady Hendrix

After strange things start happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, three employees volunteer to work an overnight shift to investigate, but what they discover is more horrifying than they could have imagined.

The Ghost Bride
By Yangsze Choo

Li Lan, the daughter of a respectable Chinese family in colonial Malaysia, hopes for a favorable marriage, but her father has lost his fortune, and she has few suitors. Instead, the wealthy Lim family urges her to become a “ghost bride” for their son, who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. 

Water for Elephants
By Sara Gruen

A novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. 

The Night Circus
By Erin Morgenstern

Waging a fierce competition for which they have trained since childhood, circus magicians Celia and Marco unexpectedly fall in love with each other and share a fantastical romance that manifests in fateful ways.

The Grapes of Wrath
By John Steinbeck

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. 

A Wizard of Earthsea
By Ursula K. Le Guin

Ged was the greatest sorcerer in all Earthsea, but once he was called Sparrowhawk, a reckless youth, hungry for power and knowledge, who tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death’s threshold to restore the balance.

The Buried Giant
By Kazuo Ishiguro

An extraordinary new novel from the author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize winning The Remains of the Day. “You’ve long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it’s time now to think on it anew. There’s a journey we must go on, and no more delay. . .” The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years. 

Life After Life
By Kate Atkinson

What if you could live again and again, until you got it right? On a cold and snowy night in 1910, Ursula Todd is born to an English banker and his wife. She dies before she can draw her first breath. On that same cold and snowy night, Ursula Todd is born, lets out a lusty wail, and embarks upon a life that will be, to say the least, unusual. For as she grows, she also dies, repeatedly, in a variety of ways, while the young century marches on towards its second cataclysmic world war. Does Ursula’s apparently infinite number of lives give her the power to save the world from its inevitable destiny? And if she can — will she?

The Picture of Dorian Gray
By Oscar Wilde

The handsome appearance of dissolute, young Dorian Gray remains unchanged while the features in his portrait become distorted as his degeneration progresses.

The Stepford Wives
By Ira Levin

For Joanne, her husband Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town’s idyllic facade lies a terrible secret a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same.

The Devil Wears Prada
By Lauren Weisberger

Andrea Sachs, a small-town girl fresh out of college, lands the job “a million girls would die for.” Hired as the assistant to Miranda Priestly, the high-profile, fabulously successful editor of Runway magazine, Andrea finds herself in an office that shouts Prada! Armani! Versace! at every turn… With breathtaking ease, Miranda can turn each and every one of these hip sophisticates into a scared, whimpering child.

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal
By Christopher Moore

The birth of Jesus has been well chronicled, as have his glorious teachings, acts, and divine sacrifice after his thirtieth birthday. But no one knows about the early life of the Son of God, the missing years, except Biff, the Messiah’s best bud, who has been resurrected to tell the story. Verily, the story Biff has to tell is a miraculous one, filled with remarkable journeys, magic, healings, kung fu, corpse reanimations, demons, and hot babes.

The Book of Mormon Girl
By Joanna Brooks

Story about leaving behind the innocence of childhood belief and embracing the complications and heartbreaks that come to every adult life of faith. Explores the author’s journey through her faith, and the experience of being a Mormon.

The Poisonwood Bible
By Barbara Kingsolver

The drama of a U.S. missionary family in Africa during a war of decolonization. At its center is Nathan Price, a self-righteous Baptist minister who establishes a mission in a village in 1959 Belgian Congo. The resulting clash of cultures is seen through the eyes of his wife and his four daughters. By the author of Pigs in Heaven.