The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie
Y Fic She

Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

subjects: Spokane Indians, Indians of North America-Washington (State), Indian Reservations, Race Relations, Diary Fiction

Twisted
Laurie Halse Anderson
Y Fic And

After finally getting noticed by someone other than school bullies and his ever-angry father, seventeen-year-old Tyler enjoys his tough new reputation and the attentions of a popular girl, but when life starts to go bad again, he must choose between transforming himself or giving in to his destructive thoughts.

subjects: Interpersonal Relations, High Schools, Family Problems, Coming of Age, Ohio

Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood
Ibtisam Barakat
J 921 BA

In this groundbreaking memoir set in Ramallah during the aftermath of the 1967 Six-Day War, Ibtisam Barakat captures what it is like to be a child whose world is shattered by war. With candor and courage, she stitches together memories of her childhood: fear and confusion as bombs explode near her home and she is separated from her family; the harshness of life as a Palestinian refugee; her unexpected joy when she discovers Alef, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet. This is the beginning of her passionate connection to words, and as language becomes her refuge, allowing her to piece together the fragments of her world, it becomes her true home. Transcending the particulars of politics, this illuminating and timely book provides a telling glimpse into a little-known culture that has become an increasingly important part of the puzzle of world peace.

subjects: Children-Palestinian Arab, Arab-Israeli Conflict

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ishmael Beah
966.404 BE

This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he�d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts.

subjects: Child Soldiers, Sierra Leone

Shark Girl
Kelly Bingham
Y Fic Bin

After a shark attack causes the amputation of her right arm, fifteen-year-old Jane, an aspiring artist, struggles to come to terms with her loss and the changes it imposes on her day-to-day life and her plans for the future.

subjects: Amputees, Artists, People With Disabilities, Self-Acceptance, Interpersonal Relations, Novels in Verse

Being
Kevin Brooks
Y Fic Bro

It was just supposed to be a routine exam. But when the doctors snake the fiber-optic tube down Robert Smith's throat, what they discover doesn't make medical sense. Plastic casings. Silver filaments. Moving metal parts. In his naked, anesthetized state on the operating table, Robert hears the surgeons' shocked comments: 'What the hell is that?' 'It's me,' Robert thinks, 'and I've got to get out of here.' Armed with a stolen automatic and the videotape of his strange organs, he manages to escape, and to embark on an orphan's violent odyssey to find out exactly who--exactly what--he is

subjects: Identity (Psychology), Ontology, Human Beings-Design, Robots

Glass Houses: The Morgenville Vampires
Rachel Caine
Y Fic Cai

Welcome to Morganville, Texas. Just don't stay out after dark. College freshman Claire Danvers has had enough of her nightmarish dorm situation, where the popular girls never let her forget just where she ranks in the school's social scene: somewhere less than zero. When Claire heads off-campus, the imposing old house where she finds a room may not be much better. Her new roommates don't show many signs of life. But they'll have Claire's back when the town's deepest secrets come crawling out, hungry for fresh blood.

subjects: Vampires, University Towns, Texas

The Nature of Jade
Deb Caletti
Y Fic Cal

Seattle high school senior Jade's life is defined by her anxiety disorder and dysfunctional family, until she spies a mysterious boy with a baby who seems to share her fascination with the elephants at a nearby zoo.

subjects: Coming of Age, Elephants, Zoos, Family, Anxiety, Seattle (Wash.)

Beige
Cecil Castellucci
Y Fic Cas

Katy, a quiet French Canadian teenager, reluctantly leaves Montr�al to spend time with her estranged father, an aging Los Angeles punk rock legend.

subjects: Fathers and Daughters, Punk Rock Music, Musicians, Self-Perception, Los Angeles (Calif.)

The Plain Janes
Cecil Castellucci
GN Y Pla

When a transfer student named Jane is forced to move from the cool confines of Metro City to Suburbia, she thinks her life is over. But there in the lunch room at the reject table she finds her tribe: three other girls named Jane. Main Jane encourages them to form a secret art gang and paint the town P.L.A.I.N. --People Loving Art In Neighborhoods. But can art attacks really save the hell that is high school?

subjects: Street Art, Graphic Novels

Thieves Like Us
Stephen Cole
Y Fic Col

A mysterious benefactor hand-picks a group of teen geniuses to follow a set of clues leading to the secrets of everlasting life, secrets which they must steal and for which they risk being killed.

subjects: Adventure and Adventurers, Interpersonal Relations

Star-Crossed
Linda Collison
Y Fic Col

Having been discovered as a stowaway as she tries to reach Barbados in 1760 to claim her father's estate, teenaged English orphan Patricia Kelley struggles to survive by learning to be a ship's doctor and by disguising herself as a man when necessary. Includes glossary of nautical terms.

subjects: Seafaring Life, Sex Role, Survival Skills, Orphans, West Indies-History-16th Century

Revolution is Not a Dinner Party
Ying Chang Compestine
Y Fic Com

Starting in 1972 when she is nine years old, Ling, the daughter of two doctors, struggles to make sense of the communists' Cultural Revolution, which empties stores of food, homes of appliances deemed "bourgeois," and people of laughter.

subjects: Persecution, Family Life, Physicians, Communism, China-History-Cultural Revolution

Enter Three Witches: A Story of Macbeth
Caroline B. Cooney
Y Fic Coo

When her father betrays the Scottish king and is hung as a traitor, Lady Mary's future is bleak after she loses her only true protector and ends up locked away in the tower by the powerful and deadly Lord and Lady Macbeth.

subjects: Macbeth-King of Scotland, Regicides, Witches, Magic, Scotland

Deadline
Chris Crutcher
Y Fic Cru

iven the medical diagnosis of one year to live, high school senior Ben Wolf decides to fulfill his greatest fantasies, ponders his life's purpose and legacy, and converses through dreams with a spiritual guide known as "Hey-Soos."

subjects: Terminally Ill, Self-Perception, High School

Not Like You
Deborah Davis
Y Fic Dav

When she and her mother move once again in order to make a new start, fifteen-year-old Kayla is hopeful that her mother will be able to stop drinking and begin a better life, as she has been promising for years.

subjects: Mothers and Daughters, Alcoholism, Single Parent Families

The Silenced
James DeVita
Y Fic Dev

Consigned to a prison-like Youth Training Facility because of her parents' political activities, Marena organizes a resistance movement to combat the restrictive policies of the ruling Zero Tolerance party.

subjects: Fantasy

In Search of Mockingbird
Loretta Ellsworth
Y Fic Ell

On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, Erin receives her long-dead mother's diary, which reveals that she too revered Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" and wanted to be a writer, and Erin impulsively decides to take the Greyhound bus from St. Paul, Minnesota to Monroeville, Alabama, to visit the reclusive author.

subjects: Harper Lee, Buses, Mothers, Authorship, Coming of Age, Diaries

The Braid
Helen Frost
Y Fic Fro

Two Scottish sisters, living on the western island of Barra in the 1850s, relate, in alternate voices and linked narrative poems, their experiences after their family is forcibly evicted and separated with one sister accompanying their parents and younger siblings to Cape Breton, Canada, and the other staying behind with other family on the small island of Mingulay.

subjects: Sisters, Family, Islands, Emigration and Immigration, Mingulay (Scotland), Cape Breton Island, Scotland-History, Canada-History

Dark Water Rising
Marian Hale
Y Fic Hal

While salvaging and rebuilding in the aftermath of the Galveston flood of 1900, sixteen-year-old Seth proves himself in a way that his previous efforts never could, but he still must face his father man-to-man.

subjects: Hurricanes-Texas-Galveston, Fathers and Sons, Race Relations, Family, Carpentry, Galveston (Tex.)

Blood Brothers
S.A. Harazin

ON ORDER

Without his job at the hospital, Clay would be lost. The hard work, the struggles of the patients, the drama in the ER�it makes his days worth something, and gives focus to his dream of someday becoming a doctor. Clay can't afford to go away to college like the rest of his graduating senior class, but what other 17-year-old has delivered a baby or helped save a life? Still, Clay wishes his life could be more like his best friend Joey's. Joey has it all�a great family, a good college waiting for him at the end of the summer, money, a car. Clay has to bike everywhere, and the miles are starting to wear him down. But Joey's golden future shatters one day when he overdoses at a party. Now he's clinging to life at the hospital where Clay works, and Clay may even be implicated in Joey's injuries. Tension and emotion rise as those who love Joey gather and wait. Clay will do whatever he can to find out what happened at the party, and to help Joey recover. But to survive this ordeal Clay must draw on a strength he never knew he had.

Incantation
Alice Hoffman
Y Fic Hof

During the Spanish Inquisition, sixteen-year-old Estrella, brought up a Catholic, discovers her family's true Jewish identity, and when their secret is betrayed by Estrella's best friend, the consequences are tragic.

subjects: Prejudices, Identity (Philosophical Concept), Marranos, Inquisition

A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Fic Hos

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.

subjects: Family, Afghanistan

Over a Thousand Hills I Walk With You
Hanna Jansen
Y Fic Jan

Before one fateful April day, Jeanne lived the life of a typical Rwandan girl. She fought with her little sister, went to school, and teased her brother. Then, in one horrifying night, everything changed. Political troubles unleashed a torrent of violence upon the Tutsi ethnic group. Jeanne's family, all Tutsis, fled their home and tried desperately to reach safety. They--along with nearly 1 million others--did not survive. The only survivor of her family's massacre, Jeanne witnessed unspeakable acts. But through courage, wits, and sheer force of will, she survived. Based on a true story, this haunting novel by Jeanne's adoptive mother makes unforgettably real the events of the 1994 Rwandan genocide as one family experienced it. Jeanne's story is a tribute to the human spirit and its capacity to heal.

subjects: Genocide-Rwanda

Accidents of Nature
Harriet McBryde Johnson
Y Fic Joh

Having always prided herself on blending in with "normal" people despite her cerebral palsy, seventeen-year-old Jean begins to question her role in the world while attending a summer camp for children with disabilities.

subjects: People With Disabilities, Camps, Cerebral Palsy, North Carolina

Devilish
Maureen Johnson
Y Fic Joh

Jane Jarvis, a senior at a Catholic girl's school in Providence, Rhode Island, tries to save her best friend by making a pact with a demon--in the form of a cupcake-eating, very friendly teenage girl.

subjects: Demonology, Supernatural, Best Friends, Friendship, Catholic Schools, High Schools, Providence (R.I.)

The Breakup Bible
Melissa Kantor
Y Fic Kan

Jennifer thinks she and Max are the perfect couple, until he decides he just wants to be friends.

subjects: Man-Woman Relationships

Ophelia: A Novel
Lisa Klein
Y Fic Kle

In a story based on Shakespeare's Hamlet, Ophelia tells of her life in the court at Elsinore, her love for Prince Hamlet, and her escape from the violence in Denmark.

subjects: Revenge, Murder, Princes, William Shakespeare

The Miner's Daughter
Gretchen Moran Laskas
Y Fic Las

Sixteen-year-old Willa, living in a Depression-era West Virginia mining town, works hard to help her family. She experiences love and friendship, and finds an outlet for her writing when her family becomes part of the Arthurdale, West Virginia, community supported by Eleanor Roosevelt.

subjects: Coal Mines and Mining, Depressions-1929-West Virginia, Arthurdayle (W. Va.), West Virginia-History-20th Century

Keturah and Lord Death
Martine Leavitt
Y Fic Lea

When Lord Death comes to claim sixteen-year-old Keturah while she is lost in the King's Forest, she charms him with her story and is granted a twenty-four hour reprieve in which to seek her one true love.

subjects: Death, Interpersonal Relations, Love, Grandmothers

Raider's Night
Robert Lipsyte
Y Fic Lip

Matt Rydeck, co-captain of his high school football team, endures a traumatic season as he witnesses the rape of a rookie player by teammates and grapples with his own use of performance-enhancing drugs.

subjects: Steroids, Drug Abuse, Rape, Football

The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl
Barry Lyga
Y Fic Lyg

A fifteen-year-old "geek" who keeps a list of the high school jocks and others who torment him, and pours his energy into creating a great graphic novel, encounters Kyra, Goth Girl, who helps change his outlook on almost everything, including himself.

subjects: Self-Perception, Cartoons and Comics, Geeks (Computer Enthusiasts), Interpersonal Relations, High Schools

Wicked Lovely
Melissa Marr
Y Fic Mar

Seventeen-year-old Aislinn, who has the rare ability to see faeries, is drawn against her will into a centuries-old battle between the Summer King and Winter Queen, and the survival of her life, her love, and summer all hang in the balance.

subjects: Fairies, Kings-Queens-Rulers-Etc., Secrets

The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Fic Mac

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-�and each other.

subjects: Fathers and Sons, Voyages and Travels, Regression (Civilization), Survival Skills

The Decoding of Lana Morris
Laura & Tom McNeal
Y Fic Mac

For sixteen-year-old Lana life is often difficult, with a flirtatious foster father, an ice queen foster mother, a houseful of special needs children to care for, and bullies harrassing her, until the day she ventures into an antique shop and buys a drawing set that may change her life.

subjects: Foster Home Care, People With Disabilities, Drawing, Supernatural, Nebraska

Hero: A Novel
Perry Moore

ON ORDER

Perry Moore, the executive producer of Disney and Walden Medias film adaptation of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," now tells an unforgettable story about the coming of age of a young superhero. Thom Creed must come to terms with his fathers past and discover the kind of hero he really wants to be, in this groundbreaking novel of love, loss, and redemption.

Echo
Kate Morgenroth
Y Fic Mor

After Justin witnesses his brother's accidental shooting death, he must live with the repercussions, as the same horrific day seems to happen over and over.

subjects: Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie
Jaclyn Moriarty
Y Fic Mor

Class brain Bindy Mackenzie has alienated her entire high school but when she realizes someone is trying to kill her, she has to make friends in order to get help.

subjects: Interpersonal Relations, High Schools, Australia

Wait For Me
An Na
Y Fic Na

As her senior year in high school approaches, Mina yearns to find her own path in life but working at the family business, taking care of her little sister, and dealing with her mother's impossible expectations are as stifling as the southern California heat, until she falls in love with a man who offers a way out.

subjects: Self-Actualization(Psychology), Mothers and Daughters, Sisters, Korean Americans, Hearing Impaired, California

Set in Stone
Linda Newberry
Y Fic New

The alternating narratives of art tutor Samuel Godwin and governess Charlotte Agnew, who work for the wealthy Farrow family in 1898 England, reveal the secrets that almost everyone in the household is hiding.

subjects: Domestics, Incest, Identity (Psychology), Family, Secrets, Household Employees, Family Problems, Great Britain-History

Tamar: A Novel of Espionage, Passion, and Betrayal
Mal Peet
Y Fic Pee

In England in 1995, fifteen-year-old Tamar, grief-stricken by the puzzling death of her beloved grandfather, slowly begins to uncover the secrets of his life in the Dutch resistance during the last year of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and the climactic events that forever cast a shadow on his life and that of his family.

subjects: Grandfathers, Guilt, World War-1939-1945, Netherlands, England

Nineteen Minutes
Jodi Picoult
Fic Pic

In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five....In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it. In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge. Sterling is a small, ordinary New Hampshire town where nothing ever happens -- until the day its complacency is shattered by a shocking act of violence.

subjects: School Shootings, High School Students, Woman Judges, New Hampshire

Cures for Heartbreak
Margo Rabb
Y Fic Rab

As she navigates adolescence, ninth-grader Mia must deal with her mother' s recent death and her father's illness while she searches for friendship and love in the world around her.

subjects: Parent and Child, Death, Interpersonal Relations, New York (N.Y.)

Red Glass
Laura Resau
Y Fic Res

Sixteen-year-old Sophie has been frail and delicate since her premature birth, but discovers her true strength during a journey through Mexico, where the six-year-old orphan her family hopes to adopt was born, and to Guatemala, where her would-be boyfriend hopes to find his mother and plans to remain.

subjects: Self-Confidence, Automobile Travel, Orphans, Family, Illegal Aliens, Mexico, Guatamala

Song of the Sparrow
Lisa Ann Sandell
Y Fic San

In fifth-century Britain, nine years after the destruction of their home on the island of Shalott brings her to live with her father and brothers in the military encampments of Arthur's army, seventeen-year-old Elaine describes her changing perceptions of war and the people around her as she becomes increasingly involved in the bitter struggle against the invading Saxons.

subjects: King Arthur, Coming of Age, War, Knights and Knighthood, Novels in Verse, Great Britain-History

The Weight of the Sky
Lisa Ann Sandell

ON ORDER

Sarah's parents have her life mapped out. She's to graduate at the top of her class and to go on to an Ivy League school. Sarah isn't sure what she wants, but she definitely knows she's sick of being a band geek and one of the only Jewish students in her school. When the opportunity arises for her to spend the summer in Israel, Sarah jumps at the chance and hopes that new experiences will change her life.

The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield
Fic Set

Reclusive author Vida Winter, famous for her collection of twelve enchanting stories, has spent the past six decades penning a series of alternate lives for herself. Now old and ailing, she is ready to reveal the truth about her extraordinary existence and the violent and tragic past she has kept secret for so long. Calling on Margaret Lea, a young biographer troubled by her own painful history, Vida disinters the life she meant to bury for good. Margaret is mesmerized by the author's tale of gothic strangeness -- featuring the beautiful and willful Isabelle, the feral twins Adeline and Emmeline, a ghost, a governess,a topiary garden and a devastating fire. Together, Margaret and Vida confront the ghosts that have haunted them while becoming, finally, transformed by the truth themselves.

subjects: Recluses as Authors, Women Authors, Female Friendship

Inside Out: Portrait of an Eating Disorder
Nadia Shivack
J 616.852 SH

In this book the author gives readers a harrowing look inside her battle with anorexia and bulimia through pictures and captions.

subjects: Bulmia

Tantalize
Cynthia Leitich Smith
Y Fic Smi

When multiple murders in Austin, Texas, threaten the grand re-opening of her family's vampire-themed restaurant, seventeen-year-old, orphaned Quincie worries that her best friend-turned-love interest, Keiren, a werewolf-in-training, may be the prime suspect.

subjects: Supernatural, Restaurants, Vampires, Werewolves, Orphans, Austin (Tex.)

Notes From the Midnight Driver
Jordan Sonnenblick
Y Fic Son

After being assigned to perform community service at a nursing home, sixteen-year-old Alex befriends a cantankerous old man who has some lessons to impart about jazz guitar playing, love, and forgiveness.

subjects: Self-Perception, Friendship, Nursing Homes, Guitar, Musicians, Family Problems

Knights of the Hill Country
Tim Tharp
Y Fic Tha

In his senior year, high school star linebacker Hampton Greene finally begins to think for himself and discovers that he might be interested in more than just football.

subjects: Football, Identity, High Schools, Coming of Age, Oklahoma

Rucker Park Setup
Paul Volponi
Y Fic Vol

While playing in a crucial basketball game on the very court where his best friend was murdered, Mackey tries to come to terms with his own part in that murder and decide whether to maintain his silence or tell J.R.'s father and the police what really happened.

subjects: Basketball, Conduct of Life, Best Friends, Friendship, Murder, African Americans, Harlem (New York, N.Y.)

Skin
Adrienne Maria Vrettos
Y Fic Vre

When his parents decide to separate, eighth-grader Donnie watches with horror as the physical condition of his sixteen-year old sister, Karen, deteriorates due to an eating disorder.

subjects: Brothers and Sisters, Anorexia Nervosa, Family Problems, Self-Perception

Rubber Houses
Ellen Yeomans
Y Fic Yeo

A novel in verse that relates seventeen-year-old Kit's experiences as her younger brother is diagnosed with and dies of cancer and as she withdraws into and gradually emerges from her grief.

subjects: Grief, Death, Brothers and Sisters, Family Life

Story of a Girl
Sara Zarr
Y Fic Zar

In the three years since her father caught her in the back seat of a car with an older boy, sixteen-year-old Deanna's life at home and school has been a nightmare, but while dreaming of escaping with her brother and his family, she discovers the power of forgiveness.

subjects: Self-Esteem, Forgiveness, Interpersonal Relations, Sex, Self-Esteem, California

Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac
Gabrielle Zevin
Y Fic Zev

After a nasty fall, Naomi realizes that she has no memory of the last four years and finds herself reassessing every aspect of her life.

subjects: Amnesia, Friendship, High Schools