VSBA 2024-2025 -- High School Nominees

Perry Firekeeper-Birch is the laidback twin compared to her overachieving sister, Pauline, and that's just fine with Perry. But after she's involved in car accident, her aunt forces her to get an internship at the tribal museum to pay for the repairs. Perry soon learns about the museum's efforts to the repatriate human remains and cultural artifacts of her people, and she joins forces with some of the other interns to set things right. But when more...

"An interracial friendship between two teenaged girls goes tragically wrong in this powerful historical novel set in the Jim Crow South. For Lamb follows a family striving to better their lives in the late 1930s Jackson, Mississippi. Lamb's mother is a hard-working, creative seamstress who cannot reveal she is a lesbian. Lamb's brother has a brilliant mind and has even earned a college scholarship for a black college up north- if only he could curb...

Effie Galanos' goals for her senior year include her navigating her way through her high school that is not really wheelchair-friendly, getting into the perfect college, and getting her crush Wilder to accompany her to the prom--but by spring she is beginning to see herself entirely differently.

Life can change in an instant. When you're wrongfully accused of a crime. When a virus shuts everything down. When the girl you love moves on. Andre Jackson is determined to reclaim his identity. But returning from juvie doesn't feel like coming home. His Portland, Oregon, neighborhood is rapidly gentrifying, and COVID-19 shuts down school before he can return. And Andre's suspicions about his arrest for a crime he didn't commit even taint his friendships....

The extraordinary — and extraordinarily powerful — follow-up to Hey, Kiddo.

When Jarrett J. Krosoczka was in high school, he was part of a program that sent students to be counselors at a camp for seriously ill kids and their families. Going into it, Jarrett was worried: Wouldn't it be depressing, to be around kids facing such a serious struggle? Wouldn't it be grim?

But instead of the shadow of death,

...

Harriet Douglass lives with her historian father on an old plantation in Louisiana, which they have transformed into one of the South's few enslaved people's museums. Mother and daughter duo Claudia and Layla Hartwell plan to turn the property next door into a wedding venue, and host the offensively antebellum-themed wedding of two Hollywood stars. Harriet tried to convince them to change their plans. When her school announces that prom will be held...

"When two young rival journalists find love through a magical connection, they must face the depths of hell, in a war among gods, to seal their fate forever."--

"A deeply personal how-to book for aspiring writers, encouraging them to look inward and excavate their own memories in order to discover the authentic voices and compelling details that are waiting to be put on the page."--

Seventeen-year-old inseparable best friends Jia, Ariel, and Everett navigate first love, grief, racism, and Asian American consciousness during one life-changing summer apart.

Seventeen-year-old Lilah, who wears hearing aids, returns to a summer camp for the Deaf and Blind as a counselor, eager to improve her ASL and find her place in the community, but she did not expect to also find romance along the way.