Celebrating the Freedom to Read: Adults

Challenges or questions regarding the content in children's books are very common, but rarely do they result in book banning. No public or school library is immune to those who want to deny children's access to certain books and materials. Scales has compiled a tool to help librarians, teachers, and young readers become aware of the social issues that are most often at the center of the majority of book challenges for children.

Banned from selling anything written this century, bookstore manager Maggie Banks, to keep the business afloat, starts an underground book club that unexpectedly unearths a town secret that could upend everything, forcing her to choose between the books that formed a small town's history or the stories poised to change it all.

"Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, Habibi tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, by circumstance, and by the love that grows between them. We follow them as their lives unfold together and apart; as they struggle to make a place for themselves in a world (not unlike our own) fueled by fear, lust, and greed; and as they discover the extraordinary depth--...

Amir, haunted by his betrayal of Hassan, the son of his father's servant and a childhood friend, returns to Kabul as an adult after he learns Hassan has been killed, in an attempt to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son from a life of slavery to a Taliban official. An epic tale of fathers and sons, of friendship and betrayal, that takes us from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the atrocities of the present. The unforgettable, heartbreaking...

"'Country of Origin' is a multigenerational family saga that cuts between political revolution in 1950s Egypt and the personal revolutions of four family members whose lives intersect around the disappearance of one of their own"-- Provided by OCLC. "Seventeen-year-old Halah Ibrahim has always known a privileged life and never had cause to question it until Cairo goes up in flames. Not only does she start to doubt her father and his role in the new...

"Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach, her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. Her coach will be kind to her. She will have a good life. But these are human concerns. These are the concerns of those confined to land, those with legs. Ren grew up on stories of creatures of the deep,...

"We Are a Haunting is a debut, coming-of-age novel that mixes magical realism and the Southern Gothic and follows three generations of East New Yorkers struggling to maintain a connection to their history"-- Provided by publisher.

"When his father falls ill, Andrés, a professor of public health, returns to his suburban hometown to tend to his father's recovery. Reevaluating his rocky marriage in the wake of his husband's infidelity and with little else to do, he decides to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, where he runs into the long-lost characters of his youth. Jeremy, his first love, is now married with two children after having been incarcerated and recovering...

"A spellbinding new novel from New York Times Notable Author and Caine Prize winner Leila Aboulela about an embattled young woman's coming of age during the Mahdist War in nineteenth-century Sudan. The latest novel by "versatile prose stylist" (New York Times) Leila Aboulela is an enchanting story of the years leading up to the British conquest of Sudan in 1898, and a deeply human look at the tensions between Britain and Sudan, Christianity and Islam,...

"Antonio works making spreadsheets for Bank of America, but not-so-secretly wants to be a great writer-or indeed to do anything that will help him avoid thinking about his sister, a paranoid schizophrenic on the run from the police. Antonio's attempts to write a novel become an ekphrastic performance of avoidance and evasion, darting between the past and the present to consider relationships erotic and familial, the worlds of architecture and literature,...