Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

Pregnant and desperately poor, fifteen-year-old Esch lives with her two older brothers, high school basketball star Randall and pitbull-raising Skeetah, her baby brother Junior, and her widowed, underemployed, and alcoholic father in rural Louisiana.  Set during the week before Hurricane Katrina descends, Salvage the Bones heart-wrenchingly depicts Esch’s scorching love for her brother’s friend, Skeetah’s Greek tragedy-like devotion to his pitbull and her litter of puppies, Randall’s hopes of attending basketball camp where he’s sure to be noticed by college scouts, Junior’s search for a connection to the mother who died giving birth to him, and their father’s futile attempts to prepare for the unimaginable.  Themes of love, family, friendship, loyalty, and betrayal are thick throughout this many-layered story.  A modern classic for a strong reader.  --Anne Lotito-Schuh

Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print.

Drowned City: Hurricane Katrina & New Orleans by Don Brown

“What happened at the N’awlins?”

Teen readers are too young to remember Hurricane Katrina, but Beyonce may have just inspired their curiosity with this weekend’s release of her new video “Formation.”  For adolescent readers wondering why the pop star depicts herself atop a submerged police car, and, later, drowning atop that car, or those struggling to connect the dots between the drowning imagery and the video’s juxtaposition of graffiti that reads “Stop shooting us” at 4:26, Don Brown has written and illustrated a compelling, grave, illuminating and now award-winning volume.  In full color with shades and tones of sadness, this text is less than 100 pages long and most pages contain a maximum of two sentences of text, making this highly recommended for reluctant teen readers with a taste for graphic novels and teachers looking for a hybrid non-fiction text.  This book concludes with a thorough listing of source notes, a bibliography, and a closing dedication.--Jessica Fenster-Sparber

Brown, Don.  Drowned City:  Hurricane Katrina & New Orleans.  Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 2015.  Print.

Hurricane Song by Paul Volponi

If you and your students happened to not be down in New Orleans this week five years ago, it might feel a bit faraway. I might very well recommend Hurricane Song to a young adult reader looking for a realistic fiction as the five-year anniversary reports cover the fronts of news media. Author Paul Volponi (Rooftop, Black and White, Rikers High) invites the reader to step into the shoes of a young man encountering Hurricane Katrina. Volponi's writing strikes this reader as fairly wooden, but there are bright moments of fresh language that make it bearable. His talents as a writer center on his selection of subject matter, his ability to help his reader think into things like power on a variety of simple and complicated levels, and his knack for weaving disparate plots, sub-plots, and characters together and apart to a satisfying conclusion. Recommended for middle and high school boys. Pair with Spike Lee's documentary on the same subject, When the Levees Broke (at Summit) and memoirs like Soft Skull's Neighborhood Story Project (at Bridges) for a non-fiction counterpoint.

Volponi, Paul. Hurricane Song. New York: Penguin, 2008.