In Predicting the President: The Keys to the White House (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), historian Allan Lichtman lays out the historical reasons the presidents won their elections in history since the 1800s, using his own system of “keys” to predict which candidate or political party will win for the upcoming election. Even after reading the

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Louder Than Hunger by John Schu (Candlewick, 2024) is a novel-in-verse about a boy overcoming an eating disorder within the walls of a mental health clinic. Sometimes the novel-in-verse format is a forced one for a story. For this book, it is an essential and masterfully done format. Because of the novel-in-verse narration, the reader

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In The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly (Greenwillow Books, March 2024), Michael is a lonely celebrating his 12th birthday in the summer of 1999 when his life is changed by the appearance of strange kid in his apartment complex. Michael is an awkward kid obsessed with Y2K (yes, that moment when computers

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With alternating stories, Just Like That by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion Books, 2021) tells the story of two 14-year-olds in 1968 who are coming to terms with something big that happened, which changed their lives completely “just like that.” Meryl Lee Kowalski (a name familiar to those who have read The Wednesday Wars) has been

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Front Desk by Kelly Yang (Scholastic, 2018) is a story about a family of immigrants from China who are trying to achieve the American dream, but they haven’t been having much success. In this first novel of a middle-grade series, Mia begins to see just how she can help her family with her skills and

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