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Bright Lights, Dark Nights

10 best books like Bright Lights, Dark Nights (Stephen Emond): Into the Dangerous World, Show and Prove, Grandma's Tiny House: A Counting Story!, This Side of Home, Infandous, Wesley James Ruined My Life, I Am Alfonso Jones, Young Widows Club, When We Wuz Famous, Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It

Into the Dangerous World
AuthorJulie Chibbaro
ISBN0803739109
*"This striking combination of story and illustration creates a powerful portrait of a budding artist." Publishers Weekly starred review

Raised on a Staten Island commune in the 1980s, Aurora has never attended a day of school, and has seen little of the outside world. What she knows best...
Show and Prove
AuthorSofia Quintero
ISBN0375897771
A poignant coming-of-age story about two boys finding their way in the South Bronx in the mid-1980s.

The summer of 1983 was the summer hip-hop proved its staying power. The South Bronx is steeped in Reaganomics, war in the Middle East, and the twin epidemics of crack and AIDS, but Raymond “Smiles”...
Grandma's Tiny House: A Counting Story!
AuthorJanay Brown-Wood
ISBN1580897126
This sweet, rhyming counting book introduces young readers to numbers one through fifteen as Grandma's family and friends fill her tiny house on Brown Street. Neighbors, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, and grandkids crowd into the house and pile it high with treats for a family feast.

But...
This Side of Home
AuthorRenée Watson
ISBN1599906686
Identical twins Nikki and Maya have been on the same page for everything—friends, school, boys and starting off their adult lives at a historically African-American college. But as their neighborhood goes from rough-and-tumble to up-and-coming, suddenly filled with pretty coffee shops and...
Infandous
AuthorElana K. Arnold
Sephora Golding lives in the shadow of her unbelievably beautiful mother. Even though they scrape by in the seedier part of Venice Beach, she's always felt lucky. As a child, she imagined she was a minor but beloved character in her mother's fairy tale. But now, at sixteen, the fairy tale is less Disney...
Wesley James Ruined My Life
AuthorJennifer Honeybourn
ISBN1250123739
Sixteen-year-old Quinn Hardwick’s having a rough summer. Her beloved grandmother has been put into a home, her dad’s gambling addiction has flared back up and now her worst enemy is back in town: Wesley James, former childhood friend—until he ruined her life, that is.

So when Wesley...
I Am Alfonso Jones
AuthorTony Medina
ISBN1620142635
Alfonso Jones can’t wait to play the role of Hamlet in his school’s hip-hop rendition of the classic Shakespearean play. He also wants to let his best friend, Danetta, know how he really feels about her. But as he is buying his first suit, an off-duty police officer mistakes a clothes hanger for a gun,...
Young Widows Club
AuthorAlexandra Coutts
ISBN0374301263
Seventeen-year-old Tamsen Baird didn’t set out to become a teenage widow. All she did was fall in love and get married. But when her nineteen-year-old husband, Noah, dies suddenly in the middle of the night, her whole life changes. Now Tam is forced to return to the existence she thought she’d left...
When We Wuz Famous
AuthorGreg Takoudes
ISBN0805094520
Francisco Ortiz, a handsome straight-A student and gifted basketball player from the barrio, wins a full scholarship to an elite boarding school. His future seems promising. But soon after Francisco moves into the dorm, his new classmates assume the worst of him: they pepper him with questions...
Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything in It
AuthorSundee T. Frazier
ISBN0385734395
Ten-year-old Tae Kwon Do blue belt and budding rock hound Brendan Buckley keeps a "Confidential" notebook for his top-secret scientific discoveries. And he's found something totally top secret. The grandpa he's never met, who his mom refuses to talk about or see, is an expert mineral collector and...
Fire in the Streets
AuthorKekla Magoon
ISBN1442422300
What means more, shared values or shared blood? Maxie’s choice changes everything in this acclaimed companion to The Rock and the River.

Bad things happen in the heat, they say.

Maxie knows all about how fire can erupt at a moment’s notice, especially now, in the sweltering Chicago...
Under the Bridge
AuthorMichael Harmon
ISBN0375966463
Tate's younger brother Indy is probably the best skateboarder in Spokane. He's also really smart though he couldn't care less about school. But when Indy clashes with his father one too many times and drops out of school, it's up to Tate to win his brother back from the seedier elements of Spokane. Can...
Caged Warrior
AuthorAlan Sitomer
ISBN1423171241
McCutcheon Daniels' life is full of bone-cracking violence. As a star fighter in the gritty underground Mixed Martial Arts circuit in the poorest section of Detroit, McCutcheon fights under the tutelage of his volatile and violent father, not so much for himself but to survive as protector of his beloved...
My Awesome/Awful Popularity Plan
AuthorSeth Rudetsky
ISBN0375869158
Justin has two goals for sophomore year: to date Chuck, the hottest boy in school, and to become the king of Cool U, the table in the cafeteria where the "in" crowd sits.

Unfortunately, he has the wrong look (short, plump, Brillo-pad curls), he has the wrong interests (Broadway, chorus violin),...
Awkward Silence, Volume 03
AuthorHinako Takanaga
ISBN1421543567
~4/5

[Read more at my blog, Geeky Reading!]

This volume had a lot of the second, not as important to me, couple in this series, Yuji and Kagami. They are fun to watch, though. Yuji is very distant, putting up a rude front, and Kagami is very forceful and pushy and flirty. Satoru is trying...
A Summer of Kings
AuthorHan Nolan
ISBN0152051082
It's 1963 and fourteen-year-old Esther Young is looking for excitement. Cursed with a lack of talent in a family filled with artistic types, Esther vows to get some attention by initiating a summer romance with a black teen accused of murdering a white man in Alabama.

King-Roy Johnson shows...
Bear on a Bike
AuthorStella Blackstone
ISBN1841483753
I love this book for the rhyming text and the colorful, detailed illustrations. Every two page spreads covers a single place. The first page spread is the question page “Bear on a .. Where are you going, bear?” The second page spread is the answer page “I’m going to an ”. The second page spread...
The Daisy Chain, Or, Aspirations: A Family Chronicle
AuthorCharlotte Mary Yonge
ISBN1893103226
I enjoyed this book from first to last page and found it very spirituality enriching. It was marketed for young as well as old and I so agree, being in my early 50's, it was a wonderful read. There are so many books I wished I read as a young person and this is one. I rarely read modern books, so I can't really comment...
See No Color
AuthorShannon Gibney
ISBN1467776823
For as long as she can remember, sixteen-year-old Alex Kirtridge has known two things:

1. She has always been Little Kirtridge, a stellar baseball player, just like her father.

2. She’s adopted.

These facts have always been part of Alex’s life. Despite some teasing,...
The Blossoming Universe of Violet Diamond
AuthorBrenda Woods
ISBN0399257144
Coretta Scott King Honor winner Brenda Woods’ moving, uplifting story of a girl finally meeting the African American side of her family explores racism and how it feels to be biracial, and celebrates families of all kinds.

Violet is a smart, funny, brown-eyed, brown-haired girl in a family...
Jumped In
AuthorPatrick Flores-Scott
ISBN0805095144
Sam has the rules of slackerhood down: Don't be late to class. Don't ever look the teacher in the eye. Develop your blank stare. Since his mom left, he has become an expert in the art of slacking, especially since no one at his new school gets his intense passion for the music of the Pacific Northwest—Nirvana,...
The August Five
AuthorJenna Helland
ISBN0374382646
In this debut novel, two worlds collide amid clashes of power, honor, and what it truly means to be brave.

Tommy Shore is the son of the most important man on Aeren—a high-ranking politician who wants nothing more than to take away all of the rights of the lower-class cottagers. Tamsin Henry...
Grendel's Guide to Love and War
AuthorA.E Kaplan
ISBN0399555544
The Perks of Being a Wallflower meets Revenge of the Nerds in this tale of a teen misfit who seeks to take down the bro next door, but ends up falling for his enemy’s sister and uncovering difficult truths about his family in the process.

Tom Grendel lives a quiet life—writing in his notebooks,...
After The Shot Drops
AuthorRandy Ribay
ISBN1328476871
A powerful novel about friendship, basketball, and one teen's mission to create a better life for his family in the tradition of Jason Reynolds, Matt de la Pena, and Walter Dean Myers.    

Bunny and Nasir have been best friends forever, but when Bunny accepts an athletic scholarship...
Scarlett Undercover
AuthorJennifer Latham
A voice-driven mystery perfect for fans of Veronica Mars.

Meet Scarlett, a smart, sarcastic, kick-butt, Muslim American heroine, ready to take on crime in her hometown of Las Almas. When a new case finds the private eye caught up in a centuries-old battle of evil genies and ancient curses,...
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