Upstate

Book cover image: http://ebookstore.sony.com/ebook/kalisha-buckhanon/upstate

Buckhanon, Kalisha. Upstate. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005. Print.
      ISBN: 9780312332686


Awards/Honors:
American Library Association Alex Award
Hurston/Wright Legacy Award

Annotation:
Written as letter correspondence, Natasha and Antonio find themselves in a difficult situation. Being separated for more than a decade, will the couple's love really test the brink of time?

Book Talk:
Sixteen-year-old Natasha and seventeen-year-old Antonio's young love is separated when Antonio is sent to prison for the murder of his father. Letter-after-letter and year-after-year, the two young lovers relationship slowly grows apart. From Antonio's trial to Natasha taking a school trip to France, the teen's grow in unexpected ways but continue a friendship through written words. As each teen experiences two different lives, oftentimes they learn that they only have each other to rely on and wonder if they will truly find each other again. An age old question, does absences truly make the heart grow fonder?

Monster

 Book Cover Image: http://www.barnesandnoble.com

Myers, Walter Dean. Monster.  New York: Harper Collins, 1999. Print.
             ISBN: 0060280778

Awards/Honors: 
2000 Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Literature for Young Adults
2000 Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book
2000 Edgar Allan Poe Award nominee, Best Young Adult
2000 ALA Best Books for Young Adults
1999 National Book Award finalist

Annotation:
Steven has been placed in jail for the murder of an innocence man. Scene-by-scene he shares his fears, emotions, and anticipation of his time in jail and the murder trial that could be the fate of the rest of his life.

Booktalk:

“The best time to cry is at night, when the lights are out and someone is being beaten up and screaming for help.” Sixteen-year-old Steven Harmon is in the last place he wants to be, jail. Steven has a strong passion for writing movies, so he keeps a detailed notebook of his experience as a movie script. Throughout the trail, Steven sees witness-after-witness give more and more evidence to convict Steven and another man of this heinous crime. He believes that he is innocent because he wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger; he was only assigned to give the signal for the all clear. But he didn’t even do that. What happens if he is sentence to death or even 25-to-life? What does his little brother, mother, and father think of him? How can he convince the jury he’s innocent? Is he really what the prosecutor calls him… a Monster?