The Open Shelf Good Protocols
Reading settings

The teenager's shelf

For the young person becoming their own.

Language American Sign Language is a language here, not an accommodation.
Format
Borrow or buy

Please Don't Hug Me

Kay Kerr · The teenager's shelf · thirteen and up

An Australian young-adult novel, told in letters, about an autistic girl making her way through the last year of school and the exhaustion of masking her way through it.

Why it belongs By an autistic author, wry and honest about the cost of performing normal all day. For the teenager flying under every radar.

  • Difference honored
  • Belovedness and the secure base

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

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Diary of a Young Naturalist

Dara McAnulty · The teenager's shelf · thirteen and up

A year in nature written by a Northern Irish autistic teenager at fifteen and sixteen, in prose good enough to win the Wainwright Prize.

Why it belongs This is close attention practiced by a boy the library's teenagers can recognize. It cross-lists to the wider school as an own-voice.

  • Attention and wonder
  • The thread of years

In English audiobook

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

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Born on a Blue Day Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant

Daniel Tammet · The teenager's shelf · thirteen and up

A British autistic savant describes a mind that sees numbers as shapes and colors, and a life spent learning to translate that inner world for others.

Why it belongs One of the few authors on the shelf who crossed the language line outward, later writing in French. A different mind narrating itself from the inside.

  • Difference honored
  • Attention and wonder

In English audiobook

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

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Strong Female Character

Fern Brady · The teenager's shelf · older teens and up

A Scottish comedian's account of growing up autistic, working-class, and undiagnosed because she was a girl — funny and furious in equal measure.

Why it belongs For the parent of a daughter flying under every radar, and the older teen who has never seen herself in an autism book. Class and gender named out loud.

  • Difference honored
  • The thread of years

In English audiobook

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin · The teenager's shelf · about twelve and up

A gifted, proud young wizard looses a shadow into the world and must chase it until he learns that its name is his own.

Why it belongs Le Guin's core, made a rite of passage: the darkness you must turn and face is not outside you but yourself, integrated.

  • Difference honored
  • The thread of years

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

The Hobbit The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

J. R. R. Tolkien · The teenager's shelf · about eleven and up

A comfortable hobbit is pulled onto a long and perilous road and returns home changed, having found courage he never knew he carried.

Why it belongs Tolkien's eucatastrophe — the sudden turn from despair to grace — and the ordinary one who carries rather than conquers.

  • The thread of years
  • Making and repair

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

Long Way Down

Jason Reynolds · The teenager's shelf · about thirteen and up

In the sixty seconds of an elevator ride, a boy set on revenge meets the ghosts of everyone the same rule has already killed.

Why it belongs The voluntary confrontation with chaos held at a knife's edge: the whole book is the weight of a single choice.

  • The thread of years
  • Difference honored

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

The Poet X

Elizabeth Acevedo · The teenager's shelf · about thirteen and up

A Dominican-American girl in Harlem writes slam poetry to claim a voice her family, church, and neighborhood keep trying to name for her.

Why it belongs Making as survival and self-authorship: the girl who writes her way into being fully herself.

  • Difference honored
  • Making and repair

In English, Spanish

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

American Born Chinese

Gene Luen Yang · The teenager's shelf · about twelve and up

Three stories — a monkey king, a boy ashamed of his heritage, and a cruel caricature — braid into one reckoning with identity and shame.

Why it belongs Shadow integration in graphic form: the self you are ashamed of is the self you must turn and befriend.

  • Difference honored
  • The thread of years

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

Born a Crime It's Trevor Noah: Born a Crime (Adapted for Young Readers)

Trevor Noah · The teenager's shelf · about twelve and up

A boy whose very existence was illegal under apartheid survives by wit, language, and a fierce mother, and turns it all into sight.

Why it belongs Kaufman's post-traumatic growth as memoir: hardship metabolized into humor, agility, and a way of seeing others whole.

  • Difference honored
  • The thread of years

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ursula K. Le Guin · The teenager's shelf · older teens and up

An envoy on a frozen world where people are neither man nor woman learns trust across the widest difference there is.

Why it belongs Le Guin holding paradox at full strength: the slow, costly friendship that forms only when you release the categories.

  • Difference honored
  • The thread of years

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

The Hate U Give

Angie Thomas · The teenager's shelf · about fourteen and up

After she witnesses a police officer kill her unarmed friend, a girl finds the voice to testify to her whole life.

Why it belongs Difference honored and voice claimed: the making of a witness out of a grieving girl.

  • Difference honored
  • The thread of years

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

Erika L. Sánchez · The teenager's shelf · about fourteen and up

After her 'perfect' sister dies, a Mexican-American girl grieves, rebels, and pieces together who her family really was.

Why it belongs The long arc through grief and expectation: becoming yourself against the daughter you were supposed to be.

  • Difference honored
  • The thread of years

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

Darius the Great Is Not Okay

Adib Khorram · The teenager's shelf · about thirteen and up

A Persian-American teen with depression visits Iran for the first time and finds, in a friendship there, a way to belong.

Why it belongs Belovedness and difference: a boy who fits nowhere learning he is not too much, and not alone.

  • Belovedness and the secure base
  • Difference honored

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

The Sun Is Also a Star

Nicola Yoon · The teenager's shelf · about thirteen and up

On the day she is to be deported, a Jamaican girl and a Korean-American boy fall into one improbable New York day.

Why it belongs The undocumented thread carried into young adulthood — beside The Table They Cannot Take.

  • The thread of years
  • The table and the gathering

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

We Are Not Free

Traci Chee · The teenager's shelf · about fourteen and up

Fourteen Japanese-American teenagers move through wartime incarceration, each voice a facet of one injustice.

Why it belongs The thread of years and difference: a people held by category, and the young who refuse to be erased.

  • The thread of years
  • Difference honored

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

Benjamin Alire Sáenz · The teenager's shelf · about fourteen and up

Two Mexican-American boys in 1980s Texas grow, over years, from friendship into love, and into themselves.

Why it belongs Belovedness and the grain honored: two boys becoming who they are, slowly, together.

  • Belovedness and the secure base
  • Difference honored

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

Clap When You Land

Elizabeth Acevedo · The teenager's shelf · about fourteen and up

Two sisters — one in New York, one in the Dominican Republic — discover each other through the father's death that connects them.

Why it belongs The thread of years and the table remade: grief that widens a family instead of ending it.

  • The thread of years
  • The table and the gathering

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin · The teenager's shelf · fifteen and up

Two essays, the first a letter to his fourteen-year-old nephew: you can only be destroyed by believing what the world says you are. Written in 1963; not finished with us yet.

Why it belongs The counter-voice at maximum intensity — the finest model in American letters of speaking a future over a young person against the assigned name. Beside Douglass, already seated.

  • Belovedness and the secure base
  • Difference honored

In English audiobook

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

The Way to Rainy Mountain

N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) · The teenager's shelf · fifteen and up

Momaday returns to Kiowa country along his grandmother's road, telling the journey three ways at once — the legend, the record, and his own memory — in one braided book.

Why it belongs We are what we imagine. The strongest companion to our two-windows discipline: hold the tradition, the record, and your own telling in one cloth.

  • The thread of years
  • Attention and wonder

In English

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

Indian Horse

Richard Wagamese (Ojibwe) · The teenager's shelf · fifteen and up

Saul Indian Horse, taken to residential school, finds a way through on the ice — a novel of the stripped heritage, the game that both saves and wounds, and the long way back.

Why it belongs The authoring-years novel of survivance: what was taken, what survived, and the coming-home turn our letters call the second window. Heavy, and worth it — best read accompanied.

  • Difference honored
  • The thread of years

In English audiobook

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

Borrow or buy

Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Robin Wall Kimmerer (Citizen Potawatomi), adapted by Monique Gray Smith, ill. Nicole Neidhardt · The teenager's shelf · thirteen and up

Kimmerer's braid of Indigenous knowledge and botany, adapted for young readers — the grammar of animacy, the Honorable Harvest, and gratitude as a way of paying attention.

Why it belongs Puts the canon's own engine directly into young hands: reciprocity as a life practice, not a unit. Beside the grown-ups' edition already on the parent's shelf.

  • Attention and wonder
  • Making and repair

In English audiobook

Borrow · Libby · borrow — opens Seattle Public's Libby; switch to your own library inside the appSeattle Public Library · Seattle Public LibraryKing County Library · King County LibraryFind a library · WorldCatBARD · available through BARD for eligible readersBookshare · available through BookshareWA Talking Book & Braille · ask the Washington Talking Book & Braille LibraryBuy · Bookshop.org · buy — supports the sourcing map

Buying may earn a small commission; all of it funds the sourcing of home-language editions.

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