Special Collections
United States of YA
Description: Go on a vacation this summer without ever leaving your couch. Whether you choose to visit the Alaskan wilderness, the beaches of Hawaii, or the cornfields in Kansas, adventure awaits in this collection of young adult novels. Ages 13 and up. #teens
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The Porcupine of Truth
by Bill KonigsbergStonewall Book Award winner. “Konigsberg weaves together a masterful tale of uncovering the past, finding wisdom, and accepting others as well as oneself.” —School Library Journal (starred review)Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Children’s/Young AdultA YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults SelectionCarson Smith is resigned to spending his summer in Billings, Montana, helping his mom take care of his father, a dying alcoholic he doesn’t really know. Then he meets Aisha Stinson, a beautiful girl who has run away from her difficult family, and discovers a secret regarding his grandfather, who disappeared without warning or explanation decades before. Together, Carson and Aisha embark on an epic road trip to try and save Carson’s dad, restore his fragmented family, and discover the “Porcupine of Truth” in all of their lives.“Words like ‘brilliant’ are so overused when praising novels—so I won’t use that word. I’ll just think it.” —Benjamin Alire Sáenz, author of Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe“Undeniably human and unforgettably wise, this book is a gift for us all.” —Andrew Smith, author of Grasshopper Jungle“Konigsberg . . . crafts fascinating, multidimensional teen and adult characters. A friendship between a straight boy and a lesbian is relatively rare in YA fiction and is, accordingly, exceedingly welcome.” —Booklist (starred review)“The story tackles questions about religion, family, and intimacy with depth and grace . . . Equal parts funny and profound.” —Kirkus Reviews
My Most Excellent Year
by Steve KlugerBest friends and unofficial brothers since they were six, ninth-graders T.C. and Augie have got the world figured out. But that all changes when both friends fall in love for the first time.
Enter Al . She's pretty, sassy, and on her way to Harvard.
T.C. falls hard, but Al is playing hard to get.
Meanwhile, Augie realizes that he's got a crush on a boy. It's not so clear to him, but to his family and friends, it's totally obvious!
Told in alternating perspectives, this is the hilarious and touching story of their most excellent year, where these three friends discover love, themselves, and how a little magic and Mary Poppins can go a long way.
Conversion
by Katherine HoweFrom the New York Times bestselling author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane comes a chilling mystery—Prep meets The Crucible.
It’s senior year at St. Joan’s Academy, and school is a pressure cooker. College applications, the battle for valedictorian, deciphering boys’ texts: Through it all, Colleen Rowley and her friends are expected to keep it together.
Until they can’t.
First it’s the school’s queen bee, Clara Rutherford, who suddenly falls into uncontrollable tics in the middle of class. Her mystery illness quickly spreads to her closest clique of friends, then more students and symptoms follow: seizures, hair loss, violent coughing fits. St. Joan’s buzzes with rumors that blossoms into full-blown panic.
Soon the media descends on Danvers, Massachusetts, as everyone scrambles to find something, or someone, to blame. Pollution? Stress? Or are the girls faking?
Only Colleen—who’s been reading The Crucible for extra credit—comes to realize what nobody else has: Danvers was once Salem Village, where another group of girls suffered from a similarly bizarre epidemic three centuries ago . . .
Inspired by true events—from seventeenth-century colonial life to the halls of a modern-day high school—Conversion casts a spell.
With her signature wit and passion, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Howe delivers an exciting and suspenseful novel, a chilling mystery that raises the question, what’s really happening to the girls at St. Joan’s?
Blindsided
by Priscilla CummingsIn many ways, Natalie O'Reilly is a typical fourteen year- old girl. But a routine visit to the eye doctor produces devastating news: Natalie will lose her sight within a few short months. Suddenly her world is turned upside down.
Natalie is sent to a school for the blind to learn skills such as Braille and how to use a cane. Outwardly, she does as she's told; inwardly, she hopes for a miracle that will free her from a dreaded life of blindness.
But the miracle does not come, and Natalie ultimately must confront every blind person's dilemma. Will she go home to live scared? Or will she embrace the skills she needs to make it in a world without sight? .
Arise
by Tara HudsonNew Orleans
Saint Louis
Number One Cemetery
A night there can change a life . . . or a death.
Increasingly worried that dark spirits will carry out their threats and hurt the people she cares for most, Amelia is ready to try anything to protect them. And for his own very different reasons, Joshua has come to this cemetery at midnight to join her in a powerful ritual.
Both know that once Amelia steps inside the Voodoo circle and the beautiful girl from the Conjure Cafe begins the ceremony, everything will change.
Tara Hudson's enthralling sequel to Hereafter escalates the danger and excitement, bringing a new dimension to her already mesmerizing story of a haunted love.
Alligator Bayou
by Donna Jo NapoliTalullah, Louisiana. 1899.
Calogero, his uncles, and cousins are six Sicilian men living in the small town of Tallulah, Louisiana. They work hard, growing vegetables and selling them at their stand and in their grocery store.
To 14-year-old Calogero, newly arrived from Sicily, Tallulah is a lush world full of contradictions, hidden rules, and tension between the Negro and white communities.
He’s startled and thrilled by the danger of a ’gator hunt in the midnight bayou, and by his powerful feelings for Patricia, a sharpwitted, sweet-natured Negro girl.
Some people welcome the Sicilians. Most do not.
Calogero’s family is caught in the middle: the whites don’t see them as equal, but befriending Negroes is dangerous.
Every day brings Calogero and his family closer to a a terrifying, violent confrontation.
The Fault in Our Stars
by John GreenDespite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.
Insightful, bold, irreverent, and raw, The Fault in Our Stars is award-winning-author John Green's most ambitious and heartbreaking work yet, brilliantly exploring the funny, thrilling, and tragic business of being alive and in love.
Young Readers Choice Award Winner, 2015
All the Bright Places
by Jennifer NivenTheodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him.
Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister’s recent death.
When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it’s unclear who saves whom. And when they pair up on a project to discover the “natural wonders” of their state, both Finch and Violet make more important discoveries: It’s only with Violet that Finch can be himself—a weird, funny, live-out-loud guy who’s not such a freak after all. And it’s only with Finch that Violet can forget to count away the days and start living them. But as Violet’s world grows, Finch’s begins to shrink.
The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls
by Julie SchumacherI'm Adrienne Haus, survivor of a mother-daughter book club.
Most of us didn't want to join.
My mother signed me up because I was stuck at home all summer, with my knee in a brace.
CeeCee's parents forced her to join after cancelling her Paris trip because she bashed up their car.
The members of "The Unbearable Book Club," CeeCee, Jill, Wallis, and I, were all going into eleventh grade A.P. English.
But we weren't friends. We were literary prisoners, sweating, reading classics, and hanging out at the pool.
If you want to find out how membership in a book club can end up with a person being dead, you can probably look us up under mother-daughter literary catastrophe.
Or open this book and read my essay, which I'll turn in when I go back to school.
The Rock and the River
by Kekla MagoonCoretta Scott King - John Steptoe Award winnerIn this &“taut, eloquent first novel&” (Booklist, starred review), a young Black boy wrestles with conflicting notions of revolution and family loyalty as he becomes involved with the Black Panthers in 1968 Chicago.The Time: 1968 The Place: ChicagoFor thirteen-year-old Sam, it&’s not easy being the son of known civil rights activist Roland Childs. Especially when his older (and best friend), Stick, begins to drift away from him for no apparent reason. And then it happens: Sam finds something that changes everything forever.Sam has always had faith in his father, but when he finds literature about the Black Panthers under Stick&’s bed, he&’s not sure who to believe: his father or his best friend. Suddenly, nothing feels certain anymore.Sam wants to believe that his father is right: You can effect change without using violence. But as time goes on, Sam grows weary of standing by and watching as his friends and family suffer at the hands of racism in their own community. Sam beings to explore the Panthers with Stick, but soon he&’s involved in something far more serious—and more dangerous—than he could have ever predicted. Sam is faced with a difficult decision. Will he follow his father or his brother? His mind or his heart? The rock or the river?
Where Things Come Back
by John Corey WhaleyIn the remarkable, bizarre, and heart-wrenching summer before Cullen Witter’s senior year of high school, he is forced to examine everything he thinks he understands about his small and painfully dull Arkansas town.
His cousin overdoses; his town becomes absurdly obsessed with the alleged reappearance of an extinct woodpecker; and most troubling of all, his sensitive, gifted fifteen-year-old brother, Gabriel, suddenly and inexplicably disappears.
Meanwhile, the crisis of faith spawned by a young missionary’s disillusion in Africa prompts a frantic search for meaning that has far-reaching consequences.
As distant as the two stories initially seem, they are woven together through masterful plotting and merge in a surprising and harrowing climax.
Winner of the Michael L. Printz award
Everybody Sees the Ants
by A. S. KingLucky Linderman didn't ask for his life. He didn't ask his grandfather not to come home from the Vietnam War. He didn't ask for a father who never got over it. He didn't ask for a mother who keeps pretending their dysfunctional family is fine. And he didn't ask to be the target of Nader McMillan's relentless bullying, which has finally gone too far.
But Lucky has a secret--one that helps him wade through the daily mundane torture of his life.
In his dreams, Lucky escapes to the war-ridden jungles of Laos--the prison his grandfather couldn't escape--where Lucky can be a real man, an adventurer, and a hero.
It's dangerous and wild, and it's a place where his life just might be worth living.
But how long can Lucky keep hiding in his dreams before reality forces its way inside?
Michael L. Printz Honor recipient A.S. King's smart, funny and boldly original writing shines in this powerful novel about learning to cope with the shrapnel life throws at you and taking a stand against it.
The Girls of No Return
by Erin SaldinCut meets Hatchet in this lacerating debut about girls, knives, and redemption.The Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness Area stretches across two million acres in northern Idaho. In its heart sits the Alice Marshall School, where fifty teenage girls come to escape their histories and themselves. Lida Wallace has tried to negate herself in every way possible. At Alice Marshall, she meets Elsa Boone, a fierce native Idahoan; Jules, who seems too healthy to belong at the school; and Gia Longchamps, whose glamour entrances the entire camp. As the girls prepare for a wilderness trek, Lida is both thrilled and terrified to be chosen as Gia's friend. But everyone has their secrets--their "Things" they try to protect; and when those come out, the knives do as well. The Girls of No Return is a bold and powerful debut.
The Sledding Hill
by Chris CrutcherBilly Bartholomew has an audacious soul, and he knows it. Why? Because it's all he has left. He's dead.
Eddie Proffit has an equally audacious soul, but he doesn't know it.
He's still alive.
These days, Billy and Eddie meet on the sledding hill, where they used to spend countless hours -- until Billy kicked a stack of Sheetrock over on himself, breaking his neck and effectively hitting tilt on his Earthgame. The two were inseparable friends. They still are. And Billy is not about to let a little thing like death stop him from hanging in there with Eddie in his epic struggle to get his life back on track.
The Islands at the End of the World
by Austin AslanIn this fast-paced survival story set in Hawaii, electronics fail worldwide, the islands become completely isolated, and a strange starscape fills the sky. Leilani and her father embark on a nightmare odyssey from Oahu to their home on the Big Island. Leilani's epilepsy holds a clue to the disaster, if only they can survive as the islands revert to earlier ways.
A powerful story enriched by fascinating elements of Hawaiian ecology, culture, and warfare, this captivating and dramatic debut from Austin Aslan is the first of two novels. The author has a master's degree in tropical conservation biology from the University of Hawaii at Hilo.
47
by Walter MosleyIn his first book for young adults, bestselling author Walter Mosley weaves historical and speculative fiction into a powerful narrative about the nature of freedom.
47 is a young slave boy living under the watchful eye of a brutal slave master. His life seems doomed until he meets a mysterious runaway slave, Tall John.
47 soon finds himself swept up in an otherworldly battle and a personal struggle for his own liberation.
Peaches
by Jodi Lynn AndersonThree Georgia peaches are in for one juicy summer . . .
. . . but Birdie would rather eat Thin Mints and sulk in the A/C.
Leeda would prefer to sneak off with her boyfriend, Rex.
And Murphy would much rather cause a little mischief.
Together these three very different girls will discover the secret to finding the right boy, making the truest of friends, and picking the perfect Georgia peach.
What I Saw and How I Lied
by Judy BlundellThis National Book Award winner set during the aftermath of WWII is now available in paperback!When Evie's father returned home from World War II, the family fell back into its normal life pretty quickly. But Joe Spooner brought more back with him than just good war stories. When movie-star handsome Peter Coleridge, a young ex-GI who served in Joe's company in postwar Austria, shows up, Evie is suddenly caught in a complicated web of lies that she only slowly recognizes. She finds herself falling for Peter, ignoring the secrets that surround him . . . until a tragedy occurs that shatters her family and breaks her life in two.
Rules of Attraction
by Simone ElkelesCarlos Fuentes doesn't want any part of the life his older brother, Alex, has laid out for him in Boulder, Colorado. He wants to keep living on the edge, and carve his own path-just like Alex did. Unfortunately, his ties to a Mexican gang aren't easy to break, and he soon finds himself being set up by a drug lord.
When Alex arranges for Carlos to live with his former professor and his family to keep him from being sent to jail, Carlos feels completely out of place. He's even more thrown by his strong feelings for the professor's daughter, Kiara, who is nothing like the girls he's usually drawn to. But Carlos and Kiara soon discover that in matters of the heart, the rules of attraction overpower the social differences that conspire to keep them apart.
As the danger grows for Carlos, he's shocked to discover that it's this seemingly All-American family who can save him. But is he willing to endanger their safety for a chance at the kind of life he's never even dreamed possible?
How to Save a Life
by Sara ZarrJill MacSweeny just wishes everything could go back to normal. But ever since her dad died, she's been isolating herself from her boyfriend, her best friends--everyone who wants to support her. And when her mom decides to adopt a baby, it feels like she's somehow trying to replace a lost family member with a new one.
Mandy Kalinowski understands what it's like to grow up unwanted--to be raised by a mother who never intended to have a child. So when Mandy becomes pregnant, one thing she's sure of is that she wants a better life for her baby. It's harder to be sure of herself. Will she ever find someone to care for her, too?
As their worlds change around them, Jill and Mandy must learn to both let go and hold on, and that nothing is as easy--or as difficult--as it seems.
Critically acclaimed author and National Book Award finalist Sara Zarr delivers a heart-wrenching story, told from dual perspectives, about the many roads that can lead us home.
The Port Chicago 50
by Steve Sheinkin and Christine BarcellonaAn astonishing civil rights story from Newbery Honor winner and National Book Award finalist Steve Sheinkin.
On July 17, 1944, a massive explosion rocked the segregated Navy base at Port Chicago, California, killing more than 300 sailors who were at the docks, critically injuring off-duty men in their bunks, and shattering windows up to a mile away.
On August 9th, 244 men refused to go back to work until unsafe and unfair conditions at the docks were addressed.
When the dust settled, fifty were charged with mutiny, facing decades in jail and even execution.
The Port Chicago 50 is a fascinating story of the prejudice and injustice that faced black men and women in America's armed forces during World War II, and a nuanced look at those who gave their lives in service of a country where they lacked the most basic rights.
This thoroughly-researched and documented book can be worked into multiple aspects of the common core curriculum, including history and social studies.
Reaching Out
by Francisco Jiménez&“This sequel to Breaking Through and The Circuit again brings to the forefront the daily trials of poor immigrant families . . . compelling and honest.&”—School Library Journal From the perspective of the young adult he was then, Francisco Jiménez describes the challenges he faced in his efforts to continue his education. During his college years, the very family solidarity that allowed Francisco to survive as a child is tested. Not only must he leave his family behind when he goes to Santa Clara University, but while Francisco is there, his father abandons the family and returns to Mexico. This is the story of how Francisco coped with poverty, with his guilt over leaving his family financially strapped, with his self-doubt about succeeding academically, and with separation. Once again his telling is honest, true, and inspiring A Smithsonian Magazine Best Book of the Year &“Rooted in the past, Jiménez&’s story is also about the continuing struggle to make it in America, not only for immigrant kids but also for those in poor families. Never melodramatic or self-important, the spare episodes will draw readers with the quiet daily detail of work, anger, sorrow, and hope.&”—Booklist (starred review) &“In this eloquent, transfixing account, Jiménez again achieves a masterful addition to the literature of the memoir.&”—Smithsonian Magazine &“No one who reads these life stories will forget them. Jiménez reaches out to let us walk in his shoes, feel his pain and pride, joy and sorrow, regrets and hope.&”—Sacramento Bee
Fire from the Rock
by Sharon M. DraperSylvia is shocked and confused when she is asked to be one of the first black students to attend Central High School, which is scheduled to be integrated in the fall of 1957, whether people like it or not.
Before Sylvia makes her final decision, smoldering racial tension in the town ignites into flame.
When the smoke clears, she sees clearly that nothing is going to stop the change from coming.
It is up to her generation to make it happen, in as many different ways as there are colors in the world.
Stargirl
by Jerry SpinelliStargirl.
From the day she arrives at quiet Mica High in a burst of color and sound, the hallways hum with the murmur of "Stargirl, Stargirl."
She captures Leo Borlock' s heart with just one smile. She sparks a school-spirit revolution with just one cheer.
The students of Mica High are enchanted. At first.
Then they turn on her. Stargirl is suddenly shunned for everything that makes her different, and Leo, panicked and desperate with love, urges her to become the very thing that can destroy her: normal.
In this celebration of nonconformity, Newbery Medalist Jerry Spinelli weaves a tense, emotional tale about the perils of popularity and the thrill and inspiration of first love.Don't miss the sequel, Love, Stargirl, and Jerry Spinelli's latest novel, The Warden's Daughter, about another girl who can't help but stand out.
The Smell of Other People's Houses
by Bonnie-Sue HitchcockIn Alaska, 1970, being a teenager here isn't like being a teenager anywhere else.
Ruth has a secret that she can't hide forever.
Dora wonders if she can ever truly escape where she comes from, even when good luck strikes.
Alyce is trying to reconcile her desire to dance, with the life she's always known on her family's fishing boat.
Hank and his brothers decide it's safer to run away than to stay home--until one of them ends up in terrible danger.
Four very different lives are about to become entangled.
This unforgettable book is about people who try to save each other--and how sometimes, when they least expect it, they succeed.
Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock was born and raised in Alaska. She worked many years fishing commercially with her family and as a reporter for Alaska Public Radio stations around the state. She was also the host and producer of "Independent Native News," a daily newscast produced in Fairbanks, focusing on Alaska Natives, American Indians, and Canada's First Nations. Her writing is inspired by her family's four generations in Alaska. This deeply moving and authentic debut is for fans of Rainbow Rowell, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and Benjamin Alire Saenz.
Intertwining stories of love, tragedy, wild luck, and salvation on the edge of America's Last Frontier introduce a writer of rare talent.