Fort Worth ISD News

As a librarian at a CTE-heavy campus, Jana Hunt keeps the Trimble Tech High School library stocked with a wide variety of books. She has students studying graphic design looking for graphic novels, AP Literature students looking for classics, and students wanting to read fiction that covers their diverse interests.

This creates a library with books about almost anything, and here are some of her current favorites to recommend. 

1. “Swarm” by Jennifer D. Lyle starts with students sitting bored in a history class. Suddenly, one of the girls looks outside the window and she sees this gigantic butterfly. Next, everyone’s phones start going off with emergency alerts and the school’s lockdown drill starts sounding. Chaos breaks loose as the main character and her siblings make it home to barricade themselves. The science fiction novel is really fun, but with a tense side — anybody who gets bitten by the beasts is infected and they become zombie-like creatures. 
    
2. “Where You See Yourself” by Claire Forrest is another fiction novel with the main character as a high school senior who uses a wheelchair. The student is looking for colleges, and her top choice is one in New York City, but she has to take wheelchair accessibility into all her decision-making. The novel highlights how often disabled people face discrimination in day-to-day life, making the reader look at the discrimination against disabilities in their own life. It’s an eye-opening novel for students.
    
3. “The Reappearance of Rachel Price” by Holly Jackson is about a girl named Belle whose mother was abducted 16 years ago. She has little to no memories of her mother, but her father convinces her to participate in a documentary about the disappearance because they need the money. In the middle of documentary filming, her mom reappears.The more Belle digs into the disappearance, the more danger she uncovers as she tries to figure out what happened to her mother.
    
4. “Only She Came Back” by Margot Harrison is about a young girl with a true crime podcast who starts investigating two of her classmates. After a hike, only one of her classmates returns, with the other’s sweatshirt covered in blood. When the podcaster befriends her classmate, she has to decide if she will tell her listeners what really happened on the hike that day, or stay loyal to her friend.
    
5. “The Scarlet Alchemist” by Kylie Lee Baker is about Zilan, an orphan in China who illegally performs alchemy bringing the dead back to life. Her dream is to go to the capital and become a royal alchemist to create gold to help the wealthy live forever. When she gets there, she gets tangled up with the crown prince and royal politics. She uncovers secrets about the capital, and her own past, with big plot twists.