Welcome to the Bank Street Children's Book Committee's (CBC) Searchable Best Books List, a tool designed to help educators, families, librarians, and others access developmentally appropriate and engaging books for young readers (ages birth - 18).

Our online Searchable Best Books List draws from the committee's annual Best Children's Books of the Year-beginning with the list of books published in 2000-with each featuring more than 600 high-quality titles for young readers.

To share feedback about the tool, please feel free to email bookcom@bankstreet.edu. To learn more about the CBC, visit https://www.bankstreet.edu/cbc/.

How to Perform a Search and Save a List

When We Make It

Elisabet Velasquez

Ages: 14+

Published: 2021

Publisher: Dial Books for Young Readers/Penguin Random House

ISBN: 978-0-593-32448-6

Keywords: Poverty, Discrimination, Abuse, Family, Mental Illness, Teen pregnancy, Sisters, Puerto Ricans

Sarai, 14, struggles to overcome the problems of her single-parent family in gentrifying Brooklyn: poverty, housing insecurity, and mental illness. Written in verse by a Boricua author.