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Seeking Wonderful Young Adult Novels That Deal With Race

What books about race or culture would you recommend to a not-so-bookish teen?
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What books about race or culture would you recommend to a not-so-bookish teen?

At Code Switch, we receive a whole bunch of emails and messages from readers and listeners. And many times, folks ask questions that get us buzzing during our editorial discussions.

One Code Switch reader sent us a note seeking book recommendations for a multiracial teen. The emailer described the teen as not very "bookish" but still a good reader.

What books do you recommend that feature race in a way that a teen would find compelling? Nothing preachy or earnest or heavy. Shout us out in the comments, or holler at us on Twitter at @NPRCodeSwitch using #codeswitchbooks.

We turned to NPR's books team and contributors to the Backseat Book Club series for suggestions. Here's our list:

*Some of the language in the summaries above has been provided by publishers.

P.S. If you're looking for book suggestions in general, our friends over at NPR Books came up with this really neat, lovely, awesome tool that's essentially a genius book recommender of all the great work from 2013.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Kat Chow is a reporter with NPR and a founding member of the Code Switch team. She is currently on sabbatical, working on her first book (forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing/Hachette). It's a memoir that digs into the questions about grief, race and identity that her mother's sudden death triggered when Kat was young.
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