The required summer reading for rising ninth graders at my son’s public high school in Brooklyn this year is a choice of the following: Unwind, a work of dystopian science-fiction by bestselling young-adult author Neal Shusterman; The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, a fantasy YA novel by F.C. Yee; and Punching the Air, a National Book Award finalist novel in verse, also YA, co-written by Ibi Zoboi, a Haitian-American author, and Yusef Salaam, a New York City councilman and one of the “Central P...
