Library of Congress Roadmap to Reading

"The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists...

"Will you, dear Shareholder, set Athena free? Athena Rao must reckon with the memory of her father, King Rao-literally. Through biotechnological innovation, he has given her his memories. His Dalit childhood on an Indian coconut plantation in the 1950s is as alive to her as her own existence in a prison cell, accused of her father's murder. Egocentric, brilliant, a little damaged, King Rao had a visionary idea: the personal computer known as the Coconut....

Ginny Beale is eighteen, irreverent, funny, and brave, with a brother she adores and a circle of friends for whom she would do anything. Because of one terrible night, she loses them all, and her adventurous spirit, seemingly forever. While the town cheers on the high school football team, someone sets the school's auditorium ablaze. Ginny's best friend Gray Marsden's father, a fire fighter, dies in the blaze. While many in the town believe a notoriously...

"David Grann meets Susan Orlean in this page-turning true story of an underground operation into the mysterious world of alligator poaching and its larger than life Floridian characters To catch a Florida Man, you have to become one, and that's what Officer Jeff Babauta did. As his ponytailed, whiskey-soaked alter ego, he established Sunshine Alligator Farm. His goal? Infiltrate the shady world of illegal poachers in the Florida Everglades in order...

"Daiyu never wanted to be like the tragic heroine for whom she was named, revered for her beauty and cursed with heartbreak. But when she is kidnapped and smuggled across an ocean from China to America, Daiyu must relinquish the home and future she imagined for herself. Over the years that follow, she is forced to keep reinventing herself to survive. From a calligraphy school, to a San Francisco brothel, to a shop tucked into the Idaho mountains,...

"A lyrical culinary journey that explores the hidden stories of Black Appalachians through powerful essays and forty comforting recipes from the Poet Laureate of Kentucky. Years ago, when O. Henry Prize-winning writer Crystal Wilkinson was baking a jam cake, she felt her late grandmother's presence. She soon realized that she was not the only cook in her kitchen; There were an abundance of ancestors stirring, measuring, and braising with her. These...

"A new novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore--from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich--shows lives which intersect across divides of class, generation and religion"--

"A Council of Dolls is the moving and unforgettable new novel from PEN Award-winning Sioux author Mona Susan Power, spanning four generations of Yanktonai Dakota women from the 19th century to the present day"--

"From the award-winning author of Perma Red comes a devastatingly beautiful novel that challenges prevailing historical narratives of Sacajewea"--

"When Darnell L. Moore was fourteen years old, three boys from his neighborhood tried to set him on fire as he was walking home from school. Darnell was tall and awkward and constantly bullied for being gay. That afternoon, one of the boys doused him with gasoline and tried lighting a match. It was too windy, and luckily Darnell's aunt arrived in time to grab Darnell and pull him to safety. It was not the last time he would face death. What happens...