American Library Association



Related Reading ListThe following titles were selected by Nick Higgins, Director of Outreach Services for the Brooklyn Public Library, to offer additional support for the “Hack the Feed: Media, Resistance, Revolution” series. GSC program hosts are encouraged to recommend these titles for additional thematic exploration, plan supplemental programs using the list, or seek local funding to expand the series to include discussion of one or more additional titles. Little Brother by Cory DoctorowTor, 2008While skipping school, Marcus and his friends are caught up in the scene of a terrorist attack on San Francisco. Taken in for questioning by agents of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the group is accused of playing a role in the terrorist plot. Now the government will be monitoring their every move. For Marcus, this means war! Little Brother is unapologetically subversive, violent and paranoid – which in many ways is what makes it so much fun to read. The representation of brute political power through the lens of torture, surveillance and terrorism will resonate for readers with a passing familiarity of issues born from events following 9/11. Reality Boy by A.S. KingLittle, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2013When Gerald Faust was five years old, his family invited a TV crew into their home to film a reality series called Network Nanny. Millions of people tuned in to see Gerald, an already angry kid, get increasingly incensed by the demands made by a live-in “nanny” (and actor hired by the TV studio) to behave. Unfortunately for Gerald, whenever he was angered he would defecate – on the floor, in beds, on the kitchen table. Gerald became known to millions of viewers as “the Crapper,” a moniker he continues to struggle with 11 years later. Now 16, Gerald does his best to manage his anger, but time and time again he boils over into violent rages that further alienate him from everyone around him. When Gerald meets and falls in love with Hannah, a co-worker burdened by her own troubled past, Reality Boy becomes a tale of painful reinvention and a courageous refusal of the lives that are often created for us to live. The Knife and the Butterfly by Ashley Hope PerezCarolrhoda Books, 2012Fifteen-year-old Azael wakes up to find himself locked up after a fight against a rival gang. The cell he finds himself in seems familiar, similar to the countless other juvie cells he’s been locked in over the years. Yet something is definitely different this time around. No one visits him. No phone calls are granted. No lawyers come around. And no one is around to tell him what is happening to him. All Azael receives is a thick file full of newspaper articles about the crime he was involved in, with much of the text in the articles blacked out. On top of all this, he is required to spend his days observing another inmate, a girl called Lexi, through a one-way glass into an adjacent cell. Good Kings Bad Kings by Susan NussbaumAlgonquin Books, 2013Good Kings Bad Kings is about young people who have very little control over their own destinies. They are locked in an institution for juveniles with disabilities and watched over by adults who are at once human and monstrous, where the system of control breeds corruption and neglect. What is surprising is how similar some aspects of this world mirror our lives on the “outside.” The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. PearsonHenry Holt and Co., 2008All 17-year-old Jenna knows of her life before the coma is what she’s seen in home movies she watches with her family. But are these people really her family? Why doesn’t Jenna remember life before her coma? Why doesn’t she remember the accident that supposedly caused her to fall into the coma in the first place? There is something deeply sinister about the life Jenna woke up in, and Jenna’s curiosity about her past threatens to put her life in danger. Starters by Lissa PriceDelacorte Books for Young Readers, 2012Starters takes place in a futuristic, war-ravaged Los Angeles, where survivors over the age of 60 (Enders) pay to temporarily inhabit bodies of survivors under 20 (or Starters) via a neurochip implanted in Starters’ brains. Callie, a 16-year-old Starter, suddenly awakens after her neurochip goes on the fritz and finds herself living in high society. At first Callie loves living the life of luxury, but soon sees the darker side of the Enders’ intentions. The Wall by William SutcliffeWalker Childrens, 2013The wall lies outside of Joshua’s town and is an impenetrable mass of concrete and barbed wire guarded round the clock by armed soldiers. The wall is there to keep Joshua and his family safe from the ruthless enemy living on the other side. One step over the wall would surely lead to a horrific death. At least that’s what Joshua has been told, and what Joshua has always believed. One day he comes upon a tunnel that leads under the wall to the other side. What Joshua finds there completely shatters his notion of reality and reveals how lies are constructed to control the behavior of an entire city. Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb by Jonathan Fetter-VormHill and Wang, 2012Trinity is a graphic novel that tells the dramatic story of the development of the atomic bomb from the discovery of radioactivity in the late 19th century, to the advent of nuclear fission in the 1930s, to the culmination of the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The stark, often moving renderings of the human beings responsible for creating and exploiting this power, and of the innocent civilians on the business end of that power, provide multiple access points to broader themes of morality, interplay of technology and politics and the psychological effects of war. Uglies by Scott WesterfieldSimon Pulse, 2005Want to be pretty? Just wait till you turn 16. In Uglies, an operation is given to everyone on their 16th birthday that turns them from an ugly nobody to a gorgeous somebody, whose only function is to have fun. Tally’s new friend Shay isn’t so sure she wants to go under the knife. Her decision will turn Tally’s world inside out. The 5th Wave by Rick YancyPutnam Juvenile, 2013Welcome to the 5th wave: a decimated earth, all but destroyed by wave after wave of alien invasions with a decimated human population desperately trying to survive. In this barren landscape full of danger at every turn, can 16-year-old Cassie trust the mysterious fellow survivor Evan Walker? ................
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