Reviews+

Shelley Diaz returns to SLJ to become reviews editor.

Essential and exceptional titles reviewed in our August 2020 issue, including picture books, middle grade, YA, nonfiction, and graphic novels for children and teens.

Like other databases in Gale’s growing In Context suite, this one offers a simple, standardized search interface for a large set of Gale resources, including print articles from a variety of publications, as well as videos and more than 16,000 images.

Read-alouds are usually the domain of picture books, but teens also enjoy being read to, and audiobooks are popular among all ages. Here are some read-aloud videos of YA titles—classic, new, and upcoming books—from publishers, authors, and librarians.

The year 2020 marks a century since women gained voting rights in the United States. While all of the books in this list tackle voting rights, they do so in myriad ways, from biographies of radical individuals like Frederick Douglass to novels about young activists to works of nonfiction that shed light on lesser-known narratives, such as the racism of the suffragists.

#Fakenews is a growing epidemic. In an interview recorded for this year’s SLJTeen Live!, Peter Adams, the News Literacy Project’s senior vice president of education, said, “The belief that all information is somehow tactical—is out to manipulate us in some way, has an ulterior motive, is against us—is something we’re all vulnerable to.”  

This booklist for upper-elementary, middle, and high school students offers the tools to develop a critical eye and thoughtfully evaluate news sources.

Tune into talk about mind-bending concepts and fascinating figures, from googolplex and the Fibonacci Sequence to the mathematicians behind the first programming language.

The author duo behind This Is Just a Test talk about teen life in the 80s, what has (and hasn't) changed, and how to return to familiar characters with a fresh perspective in Not Your All-American Girl.

When the world feels heavy, when the days are full of restless energy, it feels great to sink into a book that can elicit some laughs. These teen titles explore complex topics with humor.