2020 Summer Reading - Imagine Your Story: Home

At New Columbia Preparatory Academy in a near-future Washington, D.C., black market smuggler Prudence Wu and friends Anabel, Alex, and Cat become key players in a conflict with the United Continental Confederacy.

Blood calls to blood; charm calls to charm. It is the way of the world. Come close and tell us your dreams. Sanna is a mermaid -- but she is only half seavish. The night of her birth, a sea-witch cast a spell that made Sanna's people, including her landish mother, forget how and where she was born. Now Sanna is sixteen and an outsider in the seavish matriarchy, and she is determined to find her mother and learn who she is.

Years after the evil Snow Queen desolated the magical kingdom of Avalon, Prince Alexei, his friend Tala, and a ragtag band, inspired by the appearance of the Firebird, try to reclaim their land.

For Malik, the Solstasia festival is a chance to escape his war-stricken home and start a new life with his sisters in the prosperous desert city of Ziran. But when a vengeful spirit abducts Malik’s younger sister, Nadia, as payment into the city, Malik strikes a fatal deal—kill Karina, Crown Princess of Ziran, for Nadia’s freedom.

Sarah Dewhurst and her father, outcasts in their little town of Frome, Washington, are forced to hire a dragon to work their farm, something only the poorest of the poor ever have to resort to. The dragon, Kazimir, has more to him than meets the eye, though. He has arrived at the farm with a prophecy on his mind. A prophecy that involves a deadly assassin, a cult of dragon worshippers, two FBI agents in hot pursuit—and somehow, Sarah Dewhurst herself.

Welcome ​to 1876 and a rootin’-tootin’ America bursting with gunslingers, outlaws, and garou [werewolves]. JANE (a genuine hero-eene)
A HAIRY SITUATION After a garou hunt goes south and Jane finds a suspicious-like bite on her arm, she turns tail for Deadwood, where there’s been talk of a garou cure. But things ain’t always what they seem—meaning the gang better hightail it after her before they’re a day late and a Jane short.

"Bethany C. Morrow's A Song Below Water is the story for today's readers -- a captivating modern fantasy about black mermaids, friendship, and self-discovery set against the challenges of today's racism and sexism."--

Aboard the pirate ship Dove, Flora the girl takes on the identity of Florian the man to earn the respect and protection of the crew. For Flora, former starving urchin, the brutal life of a pirate is about survival: don’t trust, don’t stick out, and don’t feel. But on this voyage, as the pirates prepare to sell their unsuspecting passengers into slavery, Flora is drawn to the Lady Evelyn Hasegawa, who is en route to a dreaded arranged marriage with her own casket in tow. Soon the unlikely pair set in motion a wild escape.

In the magical kingdom of Orkena, a teenaged girl is chosen to be the human sacrifice in a deadly game between three heirs who will do anything for the crown.

Two siblings. Two brilliant talents. But only one Mozart. Desperate to be forever remembered for her music, Nannerl Mozart makes a dangerous pact with a mysterious stranger from a magical land, which may cost her everything.

Working as a wench ― i.e. waitress ― at a cheesy medieval-themed restaurant in the Chicago suburbs, Kit Sweetly dreams of being a knight. Company policy allows only guys to be knights. So when Kit takes her brother’s place and reveals her identity at the end of the show, she rockets into internet fame and a whole lot of trouble with the management. But the Girl Knight won’t go down without a fight. As other wenches join her quest, a protest forms. In a joust before Castle executives, they’ll prove that gender restrictions should stay medieval―if they don’t get fired first.

Rising high school senior Adelaide Buchwald grapples with a family catastrophe and romantic upheaval while confronting secrets she keeps, her ideas about love, and the weird grandiosity of the human mind.

It’s the summer of 1955. For Ethan Harper, a biracial kid raised mostly by his white father, race has always been a distant conversation. When he’s sent to spend the summer with his aunt and uncle in small-town Alabama, his Blackness is suddenly front and center, and no one is shy about making it known he’s not welcome there. Except for Juniper Jones [the town’s resident oddball]. As Ethan is confronted for the first time by what it means to be Black in America, Juniper tries to help him see the beauty in even the ugliest reality, and that even the darkest days can give rise to an invincible summer.