Nashville Reads Hidden Figures | Young Adult Picks

Explores the fateful 2013 interaction between Sasha and Richard, two teens from Oakland, California, who never would have met if not for the 57 bus which they both were taking home from school one day. Richard, an African American boy, had a lighter; Sasha, a white agender teen, wore a skirt. A dare to use the lighter changed the teens' lives forever.

A freshman at MIT, seventeen-year-old Mei Lu tries to live up to her Taiwanese parents' expectations, but no amount of tradition, obligation, or guilt prevent her from hiding several truths--that she is a germaphobe who cannot become a doctor, she prefers dancing to biology, she decides to reconnect with her estranged older brother, and she is dating a Japanese boy. Can she find a way to be herself, before her web of lies unravels?

"When Hazel Johnson and Mari McCray met at church bingo in 1963, it was love at first sight. Forced apart by their families and society, Hazel and Mari both married young men and had families. Decades later, now in their mid-'60s, Hazel and Mari reunite again at a church bingo hall. Realizing their love for each other is still alive, what these grandmothers do next takes absolute strength and courage."--Amazon.com.

When the dead begin to walk again, America's future changes in an instance. Jane McKeene is being trained to be an Attendant, a woman who protects the well-to-do from zombies, but that is not the future that Jane wants for herself. Soon Jane finds herself in the middle of a dangerous conspiracy fighting for her life against some dangerous enemies.

In this debut YA friendship story set in Saudi Arabia, two girls navigate typical teen issues--crushes, college, family expectations, future hopes, and dreams. Sixteen-year-olds Leena and Mishie are best friends. They delight in small rebellions against the Saudi cultural police--secret Western clothing, forbidden music, flirtations. But Leena wants college, independence--she wants a different life. Though her story is specific to her world (a world...

When a cyberbully sends the entire high school a picture of basketball hero Bijan Majidi photo-shopped to look like a terrorist, the school administration promises to find and punish the culprit, but Bijan just wants to pretend the incident never happened and move on.

Amanda tries to fit in at her new school, to make friends and find her place. However, there is a secret reason she transferred to her new school, one which if others found out she doesn't know what would happen. Then she meets Grant, a boy unlike any other. She lets him into her life more and more, yearning to share her past--but worrying, if Grant finds out Amanda used to be Andrew, that he won't be able to see past it.

In a small Texas town where high school football reigns supreme, Viv, sixteen, starts a feminist revolution using anonymously-written zines. Vivian Carter is fed up with a high school administration that thinks the football team can do no wrong. Fed up with sexist dress codes, hallway harassment, and gross comments from guys during class. But most of all, Viv is fed up with always following the rules. Her mom was a tough-as-nails, punk rock Riot...

Xiomara Batista is a teenage girl living in Harlem who's learned to use her fists to send messages. When she's invited to join her school's poetry club, she knows her religious mother will never allow it. But Xiomara is determined to find a way because she has something to say that can only be shared through her poetry.

Meet Victorian London's most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage's plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing...