Here are 84 books that Talking Texts fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a screenwriter and novelist who loves writing stories for kids! (And long-suffering parents.) I mostly write and produce animated movies and TV shows, am currently executive producer of The Chicken Squad for Disney, and won an Emmy® Award for children’s TV writing in 2020. A few years ago, my nephew stopped me in my tracks with a question: “Uncle T, what’s the big deal about 9/11?” His confusion opened my eyes to the fact that many schools don’t teach about this momentous event. “Never forget” has been our national refrain, but how will future generations remember if we don’t tell them the story?
For those of us who lived through 9/11, it’s easy to forget that kids in school today weren’t even born in 2001; to them, the events of 9/11 are ancient history. I Survived is the kind of book that can jump-start their interest by dropping them right into the thick of the events of that day. Lucas is a football-obsessed teen who makes a series of completely relatable bad decisions that leave him right at Ground Zero just as the planes hit the towers. Told in age-appropriate but heart-stopping detail, this book captures a perfect snapshot of the confusion, fear, heroism, and resolve on display that extraordinary day.
On the day that shocks the world, one boy just wants to find his family. A powerful addition to the gripping I Survived series.
The only thing Lucas loves more than football is his Uncle Benny, his dad's best friend at the fire department where they both work. Benny taught Lucas everything about football. So when Lucas's parents decide the sport is too dangerous and he needs to quit, Lucas has to talk to his biggest fan.So the next morning, Lucas takes the train to the city instead of the bus to school. It's a bright, beautiful day in New…
I am the author of over fifty books for young readers including the Zapato Power series, the Sofia Martinez series, My Name is Hamburger, Never Say a Mean Word Again, and Tag Your Dreams: Poems of Play and Persistence. On September 11, 2001, I was living in Arlington, Virginia and working as a librarian. Like anyone else who lived through that tragic day, September 11th evokes strong memories for me. Yet I know that subsequent generations have little knowledge of that day, even those who live in Arlington, where the Pentagon is located. By recognizing the wounds of the past, we can help young readers understand the present.
This novel follows four adolescents in the 48 hours preceding September 11, 2001.
The characters are two girls and two boys living in different parts of the United States in very different families. By fully depicting the lives of each character before the world abruptly changed, Baskin shows us how a watershed event changes one’s perspective forever.
My favorite moment comes at the end when a character remembers “that day, a year ago, when nothing else was important to her except fitting in.” Without violence or direct loss to the main characters, Baskin brings home the point that September 11th affected Americans from all across the country.
In the face of tragedy, Baskin shows us how we are all interconnected.
From the critically acclaimed author of Anything But Typical comes a "tense...and thought-provoking" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) look at the days leading up to the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and how that day impacted the lives of four middle schoolers.
Ask anyone: September 11, 2001, was serene and lovely, a perfect day-until a plane struck the World Trade Center.
But right now it is a few days earlier, and four kids in different parts of the country are going about their lives. Sergio, who lives in Brooklyn, is struggling to come to terms with the absentee father he…
I’m a screenwriter and novelist who loves writing stories for kids! (And long-suffering parents.) I mostly write and produce animated movies and TV shows, am currently executive producer of The Chicken Squad for Disney, and won an Emmy® Award for children’s TV writing in 2020. A few years ago, my nephew stopped me in my tracks with a question: “Uncle T, what’s the big deal about 9/11?” His confusion opened my eyes to the fact that many schools don’t teach about this momentous event. “Never forget” has been our national refrain, but how will future generations remember if we don’t tell them the story?
As Nora Baskin’s book takes us backward in time, Kerry moves forward to capture the mood of the country after the attacks, as told through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy whose best friend becomes the target of anti-Muslim rage. Like Alex in my book, protagonist Jake Green grapples with intense feelings of anger, confusion, and frustration as he tries to figure out how to be a patriot and what it means to be a hero, when everything he thought he understood about how the world should work has been shattered. I struggled with the same things after 9/11—still do, to be honest—and enjoyed this page-turner for both its gripping plot and its challenging moral complexity.
Winner of the Crystal Kite Award, this touching story explores what it mean to be a good friend, how you should react to a bully, and makes the events of September 11th, 2001 personal.
In this story about growing up in a difficult part of America's history, Jake Green is introduced as a cross country runner who wants to be a soldier and an American hero when he grows up.
Before he can work far towards these goals, September 11th happens, and it is discovered that one of the hijackers lives in Jake's town. The children in Jake's town try…
I’m a screenwriter and novelist who loves writing stories for kids! (And long-suffering parents.) I mostly write and produce animated movies and TV shows, am currently executive producer of The Chicken Squad for Disney, and won an Emmy® Award for children’s TV writing in 2020. A few years ago, my nephew stopped me in my tracks with a question: “Uncle T, what’s the big deal about 9/11?” His confusion opened my eyes to the fact that many schools don’t teach about this momentous event. “Never forget” has been our national refrain, but how will future generations remember if we don’t tell them the story?
Racing away from Ground Zero, 16-year-old Kyle encounters a bizarre sight: an angel, clinging to the Brooklyn Bridge. Kyle stops to help and discovers the “angel” is a teenage girl, her wings a costume from a school play. But the girl doesn’t remember anything about who she is. Thus begins a quest that pulls Kyle in conflicting directions: to find his dad (a first responder), to care for his uncle (a disabled cop), and to help this girl find her way home.
I love that the book begins with an act of kindness to a stranger, something we saw often after 9/11. And while we sometimes say we’d love to forget an event like 9/11, Gae’s book bears witness to the need to remember.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, sixteen year old Kyle Donohue watches the first twin tower come down from the window of Stuyvesant High School. Moments later, terrified and fleeing home to safety across the Brooklyn Bridge, he stumbles across a girl perched in the shadows. She is covered in ash and wearing a pair of costume wings. With his mother and sister in California and unable to reach his father, a New York City detective likely on his way to the disaster, Kyle makes the split second decision to bring the girl home. What follows is their story,…
I'm fascinated by the potential of teenagers. The teen years are full of passion and energy. It's a time of seeing injustice and recognizing inequality. For some young people, it becomes imperative to make the world a better place. My maternal grandparents joined the Communist Party when they were teenagers. They were deeply committed to making the world a better place, but it was a commitment that affected all of their decisions. They were saving the world—what happened with their children was of little consequence. Therefore the books on my list reflect my interest in teenage radicals, as well as the fate of children who grow up under a system of radical beliefs.
Cathy Wilkerson was one of The Weather Underground. She became notorious because The Weather Underground was using her father’s townhouse in Greenwich Village when a bomb was accidentally detonated, killing three people and destroyed the building.
What I love about this book is that it is by a woman in the movement. Most of the people who have written about The Weatherman and the various radical movements of the sixties are men and they are writing from a very different perspective. The women in the movement were dealing not only with their desire to end the war and overturn the government, but with pushing for a feminist revolution amongside their male comrades.
Wilkerson reflects on her radicalization as a teenager, on joining the movement, and on her struggles within the movement. The book makes dynamic reading for anyone interested in social change.
Flying Close to the Sun is the stunning memoir of a white middle-class girl from Connecticut who became a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most notorious groups of the 1960s. Cathy Wilkerson, who famously escaped the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, here wrestles with the legacy of the movement, at times finding contradictions that many others have avoided: the absence of women’s voices then, and in the retelling; the incompetence and the egos; the hundreds of bombs detonated in protest which caused little loss of life but which were also ineffective in fomenting revolution. In searching for new…
Let’s face it—kids’ anxiety has gone through the roof over the last two years since the start of the pandemic. Not being able to play with friends, participate on sports teams, or even have sleepovers has had an impact. For kids, play is one of their main ways to relieve stress. Here are my five go-to books for kids dealing with anxiety, worries, and stress.
I really like the title of this book because it captures why your brain reacts as it does to fear, anxiety, and stress. Because of the fight-or-flight reaction in response to danger, your brain revs your body up to get ready to fight a tiger or run away. But that reaction doesn’t help when your stress is about taking a test, introducing yourself to someone, or handling a rough situation at home. It’s like your brain is reacting to invisible tigers chasing you. Self-care for “tiger bites” is a fun way to think about ways to reduce the impact of stressful situations.
Fresh edition of a popular title offers teens straightforward advice on stress management, anxiety reduction, and digital well-being. Untempered stress among teens is approaching epidemic status. Prolonged and intense anxiety can feel like being stalked by a tiger, never knowing when it will strike. Helping adolescents cope with day-to-day stressors like school, friendships, family, and social media can help curb impulsivity and other risky behaviors. Now in its fourth edition, the revised and updated Fighting Invisible Tigers teaches teens proven techniques and stress management skills to face the rigors of growing up. Packed with useful information on how stress affects…
In 2011, I was a newly minted college professor who was trying to support my students’ interests (Greek life) in hopes that they would return the favor and support mine (medieval literature). Never in a million years would I have guessed that accepting an invitation to attend a Greek event on campus would snowball into receiving a bid to join a National Panhellenic Conference sorority and serve as its faculty advisor. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my perspective uniquely positioned me to shed new light on the longstanding controversies plaguing these organizations and provide a new lens through which to view their impact not only on campus culture but society at large.
I’ve long had a professional crush on sociologist Lisa Wade as her work is a deadly combination of brilliant and compulsively readable.
Her study was published while I was writing my book and serves as a companion piece to understanding how hookup culture operates on American college campuses. As de facto speakeasies, fraternity houses serve as the campus party and, by extension, hookup headquarters.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not always a good thing either.
The hookup is now part of college life. Yet the drunken encounter we always hear about tells only a fraction of the story. Lisa Wade offers the definitive account of this new sexual culture and demonstrates that the truth is both more heartening and disturbing than we thought. Offering invaluable insights for parents, educators and students, Wade situates hookup culture within the history of sexuality, the evolution of higher education and the unfinished feminist revolution. Using new research, she maps out a challenging emotional landscape marked by unequal pleasures, competition for status and sexual violence. Accessible and open-minded, compassionate and…
Horror is my passion and most things I read and everything I write fits neatly into the genre. But I am also passionate about telling stories from a unique perspective, or if not entirely unique then at least one that is underused. My novella A Man in Winter is told from the perspective of an elderly chap with dementia for instance. I have also found that many people think books with child protagonists must be children’s books and it makes me sad to think of all the wonderful work is being missed out on, I hope that my list has convinced you to try one of the above books.
Another vampire one I’m afraid. But trust me this is so worth your time.
I read this for the first time when I was in college and well into my Goth phase, this book became my aesthetic afterwards. It’s a different take on vampires, explored through a few different groups of vampires. The characters are wonderfully portrayed and unique but what really hooked me into this book was the setting. It's got depth and feels like you could walk through the book and be in Missing Mile.
Abandoned as an infant, Nothing reads his true name on the handwritten note that was pinned to his baby blanket eighteen years earlier, and discovers that he is the son of a vampire
I grew up feeling invisible in media, and absent in history. My Iranian history was hidden from me by a culture that believed shielding young people from trauma was the right thing to do, and my queer history was hidden from me by a homophobic time. I’m passionate about the power of seeing yourself represented in storytelling and in history, and have devoted much of my life to telling queer stories, and queer historical stories. As a parent, as a queer Iranian storyteller, as a passionate believer in art as a tool for empathy, these are books I think will both entertain readers and inspire them to love their fellow humans a little more.
When I was growing up, there was zero queer Iranian representation to inspire me or guide me.
I felt quite literally invisible in the world, and my own mission has been to flood the world with queer Iranian stories to fill this void. Thankfully, a number of other authors are now doing the same, including Sara Farizan, Arvin Ahmadi, and Adib Khorram.
I chose the sequel to Adib’s masterful Darius the Great Deserves Better because I love how it leans into intergenerational family dynamics, which are a particular passion of mine (and of most immigrants who must work to unite the disparate parts of our histories).
Darius Kellner is having a bit of a year. Since his trip to Iran this past spring, a lot has changed. He's getting along with his dad, and his best friend Sohrab is only a Skype call away. Between his first boyfriend, Landon, his varsity soccer practices, and his internship at his favourite tea shop, Darius is feeling pretty okay. Like he finally knows what it means to be Darius Kellner. Then, of course, everything changes. Darius's grandmothers are in town for a long visit while his dad is gone on business, and Darius isn't sure whether they even like…
I have spent 20+ years working on the question of how social and environmental change happens, from my long-time career in progressive politics to my current work writing about the most pressing issues of our time through an economic lens, and occasionally talking about them on my podcast, also called Wallet Activism. So I know well how intimidating it can feel to get involved, whether it’s worrying your voice isn’t needed (trust me, it is!) or not knowing the nuts and bolts of where to start. But we have so much power when we act collectively, and I want you to feel personally invited to take action.
Ignore the word “youth” in the title, because this is not just a book for kids and teens! Jamie is a young, queer activist who has achieved some impressive activism victories at a young age, but best of all, she combines real activist know-how with a sense of hope and optimism that’s hard to find in older activists. This book is an excellent guide to getting involved and staying involved anywhere from the local level up to a global scale. This is a must-read for people who are fired up to take action but don’t know where to start.
The 1963 Children's March in Birmingham, Alabama. Tiananmen Square, 1989. The 2016 Dakota Access Pipeline protests. March for Our Lives, and School Strike for Climate. What do all these social justice movements have in common? They were led by passionate, informed, engaged young people. Jamie Margolin has been organizing and protesting since she was fourteen years old. Now the co-leader of a global climate action movement, she knows better than most how powerful a young person can be. You don't have to be able to vote or hold positions of power to change the world.
