Kirby’s lessons for falling (in love)/ Laura Gao
After Kirby Tan breaks her arm at the rock-climbing invitationals she joins the newspaper club, where she meets and falls for astrology-obsessed Bex and then struggles to balance her queer identity with her obligations to family and community.
Meesh the bad demon / Michelle Lam
“Meesh is a bad demon. “Bad” in that she always sees the good in those around her–which isn’t how a demon is meant to feel or act. Bullied by the other demons, twelve-year-old Meesh is more likely to be found reading magazines from Plumeria City–the fairy realm–and fangirling about the fairy princesses. But when disaster strikes and all of demon-kind is threatened, Meesh must journey to other worlds in search of help. As luck would have it, she meets a fairy princess right away. Things in the fairy realm aren’t so perfect either, though. As Meesh makes surprising new friends and unites a band of outcasts, she learns there’s much more to being a demon than she ever realized. And learning to love herself might just uncover the secret to saving her home.”
Freestyle / Gale Galligan
“While preparing for the last major dance competition before they graduate from eighth grade and go to separate high schools in NYC, Cory must balance the expectations of his parents, school, crew and his new friend as pressure mounts from all sides”
Mabuhay!/ Zachary Sterling
“First-generation Filipino siblings, JJ and Althea, struggle to belong at school. JJ wants to fit in with the crowd, while Althea wants to be accepted as she is. But between the leftover Filipino food their mom packs for their lunches to having a last name that nobody can pronounce, any sense of belonging seems like a long shot. To make matters worse, they have to help their parents run the family food truck, dressing up as a dancing pig and passing out samples. Ugh! And their parents are always drawing parallels between their poor work ethic and lazy characters from Filipino folklore — stories they’ve heard again and again. But when witches, ogres, and other creatures from those same stories appear in their town and threaten their family, JJ and Althea realize that the myths their parents have always told them may be more real than they’d suspected. Can JJ and Althea embrace who they really are and save their family?”
Continental drifter / Kathy Macleod
“With a Thai mother and an American father, Kathy lives in two different worlds. She spends most of the year in Bangkok, where she’s secretly counting the days till summer vacation. That’s when her family travels for twenty-four hours straight to finally arrive in a tiny seaside town in Maine.”
Lion dancers / Cai Tse
“A boy feels his passion for lion dancing re-igniting after the death of his father, and so he decides to join the local junior team, where his ex-best friend becomes his new rival”
Messy roots: a graphic memoir of a Wuhanese American / Laura Gao
“Seamlessly toggling between past and present, this funny graphic memoir follows a queer Chinese American’s immigration to Texas where she just wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why she is attracted to girls.”
Strange bedfellows / by Ariel Slamet Ries
“In the not-too-distant future, most of humanity resides on its last-ditch effort at utopia: Meridian, a remote alien planet where you’re more likely to be born superhuman than left-handed. None of that is important to Oberon Afolayan. Since his mildly public breakdown, his whole life seems to be spiraling out of control–from dropping out of university to breaking up with his boyfriend, it seems like only a karmic inevitability when he wakes up one day with the ability to conjure his dreams in the real world. Oberon’s newfound powers come with a facsimile of his high school crush, Kon, who mysteriously dropped off the face of the planet almost three years ago and who is a little more infuriating (if not also infuriatingly hot) than Oberon remembers. Kon makes it his mission to turn Oberon’s life around, and while they struggle to get a handle on his powers and his disastrous personal life (not to mention the appearance of strange nightmare creatures), it turns out this dream version of Kon has secrets of his own–dangerous ones. Oberon might have more on his plate than he originally thought, but is giving up his dreams–even the one he might have accidentally fallen in love with–the only way to find happiness in reality?”
The magic fish / Trung Le Nguyen
“Real life isn’t a fairytale. But Tié̂n still enjoys reading his favorite stories with his parents from the books he borrows from the local library. It’s hard enough trying to communicate with your parents as a kid, but for Tié̂n, he doesn’t even have the right words because his parents are struggling with their English. Is there a Vietnamese word for what he’s going through? Is there a way to tell them he’s gay?”
The prince and the dressmaker / Jen Wang
“When Prince Sebastian confides in his dressmaker friend Frances that he loves to masquerade at night as the fashionable Lady Crystallia, Frances must decide if Sebastian’s secret is worth a lifetime of living in the shadows.”
The best we could do : an illustrated memoir / Thi Bui
“The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family’s move from their war-torn home to the United States in graphic novel format.”
The shadow hero / story by Gene Luen Yang
“Collects new stories of the Green Turtle, a masked hero in the 1940s whose alter-ego is Chinese-American.”
