Staff Picks - LibGuides at Boulder Public Library

Julian recommends Dear Wendy by Ann Zhao

06/18/2025

Boulder Library

teen fiction, .Julian's reviews, aromantic, BIPOC, genderqueer, LGBTQIA+, queer

A fun and genuine early college story featuring two A-spec characters! The library's LGBTQIA book club for teens, Book Queeries, read and discussed this book with positive reviews from teen attendees who loved the story because it featured aromantic and asexual characters. Author Ann Zhao captures the undergrad anxiety well, while sprinkling multimedia dialogue throughout. Recommend to fans of Alice Oseman and Becky Albertalli.

Publisher description:

Sophie Chi is in her first year at Wellesley College (despite her parents’ wishes that she attend a 'real' university, rather than a liberal arts school) and has long accepted her aromantic and asexual identities. Despite knowing she’ll never fall in love, she enjoys running an Instagram account that offers relationship advice to students at Wellesley. No one except her roommate knows that she’s behind the incredibly popular 'Dear Wendy' account. When Joanna 'Jo' Ephron -- also a first-year student at Wellesley -- created their 'Sincerely Wanda' account, it wasn't at all meant to be serious or take off like it does -- not like Dear Wendy’s. But now they might have a rivalry of sorts with Dear Wendy? Oops. As if Jo’s not busy enough having existential crises over gender, the fact that she’ll never truly be loved or be enough, or her few friends finding The One and forgetting her! While tensions are rising online, Sophie and Jo are getting closer in real life, bonding over their shared aroace identities. As their friendship develops and they work together to start a campus organization for other a-spec students, can their growing bond survive if they learn just who’s behind the Wendy and Wanda accounts?

Find Dear Wendy in our online catalog

Celine recommends The Deep Dark by Molly Ostertag

06/11/2025

Boulder Library

graphic novels, .Celine's reviews, BIPOC, Latinx, LGBTQIA+, transgender

Immerse yourself in this beautifully illustrated graphic novel that follows the story of Mags and Nessa as they navigate queer love, heartache, secrets, and power.

Publisher description:

Everyone has secrets. Mags's has teeth. Magdalena Herrera is about to graduate high school, but she already feels like an adult with serious responsibilities: caring for her ailing grandmother; working a part-time job; clandestine makeouts with a girl who has a boyfriend. And then there's her secret, which pulls her into the basement each night, drains her of energy, and leaves her bleeding. A secret that could hurt and even kill if it ever got out — like it did once before. So Mags keeps her head down, isolated in her small desert community. That is, until her childhood friend Nessa comes back to town, bringing vivid memories of the past, an intoxicating glimpse of the future, and a secret of her own. Mags won't get attached, of course. She's always been strong enough to survive without anyone's help. But when the darkness starts to close in on them both, Mags will have to drag her secret into the daylight and choose between risking everything... or having nothing left to lose.

Find The Deep Dark in our online catalog

Kaley S. recommends Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley

04/12/2025

Boulder Library

adult fiction, lived experiences, BIPOC, .Kaley S.'s reviews, mental health

This book was an excellent depiction of the complexities of life when you are working to provide for yourself and those you love and how that can be exploited. Written with such distinct voice that allows you to deeply empathize with the characters, Mottley has created a wonderfully insightful read.

Publisher's description:

Kiara Johnson and her brother Marcus are barely scraping by in a squalid East Oakland apartment complex that calls itself, optimistically, the Royal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent-which has now more than doubled-and to keep the 9-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. What begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger one night soon becomes the job Kiara never wanted but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. And her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland police department.

Find Nightcrawling in our online catalog

Ilan recommends Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom

03/15/2025

Boulder Library

adult fiction, Asian, BIPOC, body diverse, LGBTQIA+, transgender, .Ilan's reviews

Magical realism meets radical trans liberation meets rock 'em sock 'em New York, a big city tumultuous ride to freedom and self actualization. A fun, heart-breaking romp through Kai Cheng Thom's take on what it takes to be trans in America.

Publisher's description:

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir is a coming-of-age story about a young Asian trans girl, pathological liar, and kung-fu expert who runs away from her parents' abusive home in a rainy city called Gloom. Striking off on her own, she finds her true family in a group of larger-than-life trans femmes who make their home in a mysterious pleasure district known only as the Street of Miracles. Under the wings of this fierce and fabulous flock, she blossoms into the woman she has always dreamed of being, with a little help from the unscrupulous Doctor Crocodile. When one of their number is brutally murdered, our protagonist joins her sisters in forming a vigilante gang to fight back against the transphobes, violent johns, and cops that stalk the Street of Miracles. But when things go terribly wrong, she must find the truth within herself in order to stop the violence and discover what it really means to grow up and find your family.

Find Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars in our online catalog

Brandon recommends There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib

02/28/2025

Boulder Library

adult nonfiction, autobiography, history, teen, sociology, sports, lived experiences, BIPOC, Black, mental health, .Brandon's reviews

Abdurraqib's writing is passionate, jumps off the page at times, and has rhythm and meaning for every word and at the corners of every sentence. He articulates what it means to be a true fan, how that fandom is intertwined with the city you're from, and how a lot of times that city lets you down but you keep showing up, because you've always dreamed of the day your team, your city, can rise above it and get national recognition for redemption, even if it's just for that moment.

Publisher's description:

While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't. His lifelong love of the game leads Abdurraqib into a lyrical, historical, and emotionally rich exploration of what it means to make it, who we think deserves success, the tensions between excellence and expectation, and the very notion of role-models, all of which he expertly weaves together with memoir: "Here is where I would like to tell you about the form on my father's jumpshot," Abdurraqib writes. "The truth, though, is that I saw my father shoot a basketball only one time.

Find There's Always This Year in our online catalog.

Claire recommends Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People by Tiya Miles

02/26/2025

Boulder Library

lived experiences, ability diverse, BIPOC, Black, multicultural, multiracial, religiously diverse, .Claire's reviews

A luminous and lyrical account of the life of Harriet Tubman. Night Flyer draws from spiritual biographies in the late 1800s, reflections on Tubman’s ecological awareness of the natural world and the imperfect sources we have from those who interviewed her in old age. The portrait that emerges attempts to grasp so many mysteries and complexities of Tubman’s life—from her faith, mysticism, and dreams, to her family relationships. A powerful and riveting read and a finalist for a NBCC Award.

Publisher's description:
From the National-Book-Award-winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand. Harriet Tubman is, if surveys are to be trusted, one of the ten most famous Americans ever born, and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she's a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero-the woman who, despite being barely five-feet tall, illiterate, and suffering from a brain injury, managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others North to freedom, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some 750 people without loss of life. You could almost say she's America's Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles's extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman's life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman's surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes the more palpable the more we understand it-a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path.

Find Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People in our online catalog

Grace recommends Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

02/24/2025

Boulder Library

teen fiction, lived experiences, BIPOC, Black, .Grace's reviews

Reynolds explores "the rules" that have been passed down to Will by generations before him: no crying, no snitching, and always get revenge. Written in verse, this work considers the troubling emotions often suppressed in a neighborhood where stoicism is respected and forgiveness is rare. Being immersed in a story about the cycle of violence, Long Way Down fosters empathy for people who have different lived experiences from their own.

Publisher's description:
As Will, fifteen, sets out to avenge his brother Shawn's fatal shooting, seven ghosts who knew Shawn board the elevator and reveal truths Will needs to know.

Find Long Way Down in our online catalog

Krissy recommends Jimmy's Rhythm & Blues: The Extraordinary Life of James Baldwin by Michelle Meadows

11/11/2024

Boulder Library

biography, children's, .Krissy's reviews, juvenile fiction, BIPOC, Black

Cover Art From its concise yet deep narrative of Baldwin's experience to the powerful, evocative illustrations, this picture book celebrates the complex life of a great author. Be sure to spend some time enjoying the delightful photos that bookend this marvelous middle grade biography.

Publisher's description:
Celebrate James Baldwin's one-hundredth birthday anniversary with the first-ever illustrated biography of this legendary writer, orator, activist, and intellectual. Before he became a writer, James 'Jimmy' Baldwin was a young boy from Harlem, New York, who loved stories.

Find Jimmy's Rhythm & Blues: The Extraordinary Life of James Baldwin in our online catalog

Britt-Marie recommends Roll, Roll, Little Pea by Cécile Bergame

10/28/2024

Boulder Library

children's, nature, cooking, animals, picture books, juvenile fiction, BIPOC, Black, .Britt-Marie's reviews

This simple story with bright illustrations by Togolese-French artist, Magali Attiogbé, captivates with the beauty of animals, nature, and repetition.

Publisher's description:
When a little pea escapes a girl who is shelling peas, it rolls off the kitchen table, onto the floor, and an adventure begins. The runaway pea rolls passed several hungry animals. It manages to evade a mouse, a cat, a rabbit, a hen, a pig, and a wolf, finally resting in the perfect place. The girl will find it again after some time has passed for a surprise conclusion.

Find Roll, Roll, Little Pea in our online catalog

Ignacio recommends The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan

10/12/2024

Boulder Library

adult nonfiction, lived experiences, BIPOC, .Ignacio's reviews

I found this book to be a thought-provoking exploration of sexuality and power. The author's nuanced analysis challenged my preconceived notions, encouraging me to think critically about my own assumptions. I recommend this book to those wanting a deeper understanding of sexuality in contemporary society.

Publisher's description:

How should we think about sex? It is a thing we have and also a thing we do; a supposedly private act laden with public meaning; a personal preference shaped by outside forces; a place where pleasure and ethics can pull wildly apart. How should we talk about sex? Since #MeToo many have fixed on consent as the key framework for achieving sexual justice. Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted. We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.

Find The Right to Sex in our online catalog