Far Away

Blue Like Friday

Crow

Two Tribes

My Especially Weird Week with Tess

Secret Service Saint

The Prince of Nowhere

Nicholas Cricket

The heartbreaking story of five generations of young people from a single African-and-American family pursuing an elusive dream of freedom.

The novel begins in suburban Minneapolis at the moment when seventeen-year-old Kollie Flomo begins to crack under the strain of his life as a Liberian refugee. He's exhausted by being at once too black and not black enough for his African American peers and worn down by the expectations of his own Liberian family and community. When his frustration finally spills into violence and his parents send him back to Monrovia to reform school, the story shifts. Like Kollie, readers travel back to Liberia, but also back in time, to the early twentieth-century and the point of view of Togar Somah, an eighteen-year-old indigenous Liberian on the run from government militias that would force him to work the plantations of the Congo people, descendants of the African-American slaves who colonized Liberia almost a century earlier. When Togar's section draws to a shocking close, the novel jumps again, back to America in 1827, to the children of Yasmine Wright, who leave a Virginia plantation with their mother for Liberia, where they're promised freedom and a chance at self-determination by the American Colonization Society. The Wrights begin their section by fleeing the whip and by its close, they are then ones who wield it. With each new section, the novel uncovers fresh hope and resonating heartbreak, all based on historical fact.

In Dream Country, Shannon Gibney spins a riveting tale of the nightmarish spiral of death and exile connecting America and Africa, and of how one determined young dreamer tries to break free and gain control of her destiny.

Discover Your Child's Next Read

Far Away

Lisa Graff, 2019

Blue Like Friday

Siobhán Parkinson, 2007

Crow

Marsha McIntosh, Kenneth Mcintosh, 2003

Two Tribes

Emily Bowen Cohen, 2023

My Especially Weird Week with Tess

Anna Woltz, 2013

Secret Service Saint

Eugene Ruble, Janet Ann Collins, 2009

The Prince of Nowhere

Rochelle Hassan, 2022

Nicholas Cricket

Joyce Maxner, William Joyce, 1989