Burn Baby Burn (National Book Awards Longlist)

While violence runs rampant throughout New York, a teenage girl faces danger within her own home in Meg Medina's riveting coming-of-age novel.

Nora Lopez is seventeen during the infamous New York summer of 1977, when the city is besieged by arson, a massive blackout, and a serial killer named Son of Sam who shoots young women on the streets. Nora’s family life isn’t going so well either: her bullying brother, Hector, is growing more threatening by the day, her mother is helpless and falling behind on the rent, and her father calls only on holidays. All Nora wants is to turn eighteen and be on her own. And while there is a cute new guy who started working with her at the deli, is dating even worth the risk when the killer likes picking off couples who stay out too late? Award-winning author Meg Medina transports us to a time when New York seemed balanced on a knife-edge, with tempers and temperatures running high, to share the story of a young woman who discovers that the greatest dangers are often closer than we like to admit — and the hardest to accept.

Meg Medina is the author of YA novels Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, which received the Pura Belpré Author Award, and The Girl Who Could Silence the Wind, as well as the picture books Mango, Abuela, and Me and Tía Isa Wants a Car, winner of an Ezra Jack Keats New Writer Award. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.