THE POET X by Elizabeth Acevedo

THE POET X by Elizabeth Acevedo is a National Book Award winning novel-in-verse. Written from the perspective of Xiomara, an Afro-Latina teenager in Harlem who notices her world changing as her body does. She pours her frustrations, passions and feelings about life and a boy named Aman into a notebook, ‘reciting the words to herself like prayers.’ But when she’s asked to join her school’s slam poetry club, she knows her strict Catholic mami can never find out.

This book was so compelling, that I would say that I flew through it, but it was more like the book flew through me. Even though my world at the age of fifteen was so different than Xiomara’s, it encapsulates so much of the raw fear and emotion when a girl comes of age, and gave me a window to a life much different than my own. Love, family, feminism, religious questioning and the discovery of one's own voice, this beautiful and powerful book has it all.

—Recommended by Tess