100 books like See No Color

This novel is extra special because it’s written by two author friends, one Black, one white, and shows the complexity of racial inequality and police violence firsthand with basketball as the backdrop. This moving story encourages discussion and will make you reflect. It’s also a great introduction to the two authors’ work, and especially interesting to see how Jason Reynolds has since grown into his role as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. 

This anthology is full of heart and features a wide field of sports and experiences and identities. The poems are a mix of serious, moving, and funny moments, but most of all they’re relatable and accessible. I’ve read many of the poems several times, making new discoveries with each read, and other poems beg to be read aloud in a spoken word performance. This is a great collection for teens to enjoy by themselves, or for teachers to share in the classroom. It might even inspire you to write your own sports poem.

Welcome to the sweet romance of Isa, a dancer, and Alex, a baseball player, teenagers in New York with very different upbringings. Isa is a blonde, half-Cuban/half white, private school girl from a well-off family that’s falling apart behind the scenes. Alex is Dominican, attends public school, and divides his time between his divorced parents. He’s also a secret poet and leaves his poems for Isa to find on the subway train where they first met. Both have professional sports potential, but the reality is more complicated. The couple navigates challenges with their families and neighborhoods, including mental health and gangs, and you’ll be rooting for them the entire time. The author has a beautiful poem in the Rhyme and Rhythm anthology that I mentioned above.

Mountain towns, skiing, snowboarding, and sweet romance – this story is the perfect winter entertainment. A twist of fate lands Cally and Blake in the same high school after their vacation romance ends, but why is he acting like he wants nothing to do with her? The story complications grow as Cally navigates old and new friendships and lands a spot on the ski team, and then there’s the mystery of what Blake is hiding. This is book one of three in The Rules series and more adventures await, on and off the ski slopes. 

Imani is thirteen and approaching her Bat Mitzvah. She is also an African-American adopted by a white Jewish family.

She has many questions about her birthparents and her own place in the world. When she has the opportunity to read the diary of her adopted mother’s grandmother who fled Europe as a Jewish refugee during World War II, Imani learns why sometimes mothers make impossible choices to save their children’s lives.

This novel is a riveting mix of history and coming of age. 

Half Mexican baseball athlete, Danny is trying to find his place between cultural identities. The writing is straight forward and the relationships and slang are real. This book deals with friendships, family, cultural identity, and dreams. An identifiable story for readers trying to find their place in a diverse world. I loved it!

It is rare to find the view of a birth father in a story or online, so I was keen to read this to help widen my perspectives. This insightful, reflective autobiography helped me to imagine how my son’s birth father may be affected by the adoption. Andrew shares how the loss of his son to adoption has affected so many of his choices throughout the rest of his life. I read this around the time that I was due to write a contact letter to my son’s birth parents, and I feel that it helped me to write something that I hope his birth parents will find supportive and reassuring, rather than a superficial update to “tick the box.”

Aside from the fun coincidence that I share my surname with the lake in this book, I fell in love on page one because one of the narrators is actually the lake! Chapters alternate between Renn Lake and 12-year-old Annalise, whose family owns lakeside cabins. Annalise has always felt a special connection to this water. When a toxic algae bloom threatens Renn Lake, she and her friends fight to save it. I grew up on a lake in Washington State that became clogged with Eurasian Milfoil, a highly invasive plant affecting water quality, fish, and other things. Remembering what it felt like to see my local lake transform, and how powerless I felt to help it, I rooted for Annalise and her friends and felt hope for this new generation of activists.

This novel’s protagonist, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two Lesbian mothers, who found her as a newborn on the doorstep of their vet practice.

But at 36, Pepper is still trying to find her footing in the world and understand things about herself, like her habit of imagining she’s living in different worlds, based on different choices she might have made.
Without being shown exactly why, the reader soon grasps that this has something to do with the fact that her birth mother is Ula Frost - a very famous portrait painter about whom fantastic claims are being made.

These come primarily from the models in her portraits, these are her clients, who say that her painting them brought forth their mirror selves from other universes, often with disastrous consequences. Outrageous as this claim seems, many in the art world believe it, and Ula's paintings sell for millions of dollars.… show more.

Spare and poetic, this beautiful debut novel explores teenage pregnancy, adoption, and secrets. Addie Lockwood knows Roland Rhodes during high school. They live in a small Southern town and develop a friendship over an appreciation of blues music. But later, in their thirties, when they reconnect in California, Addie falls in love with Roland. When she later realizes she’s pregnant, she makes a critical and heartbreaking decision: she doesn’t tell Roland about the baby, whom she names Byrd, and she gives the child up for adoption. But Addie never stops thinking about Byrd, wondering, hoping one day he will fly back her way. This novel is gorgeously written and what an ending.