Dreamland by Sarah Dessen
After her older sister runs away, sixteen-year-old Caitlin decides that she needs to make a major change in her own life and begins an abusive relationship with a boy who is mysterious, brilliant, and dangerous.
Shades of Simon Gray by Joyce McDonald
Seventeen-year-old Simon lies in a coma, finding his space and time overlapping with that of a man who was lynched over 200 years ago, while a member of the cheating ring he has been helping wonders if their actions have caused the plagues assaulting their New Jersey town.
Swallowing Stones by Joyce McDonald
Dual perspectives reveal the aftermath of seventeen-year-old Michael MacKenzie's birthday celebration during which he discharges an antique Winchester rifle and unknowingly kills the father of high school classmate Jenna Ward.
Janey’s Girl by Gayle Friesen
When 14-year-old Claire travels to British Columbia with her mother to visit her grandmother, the last thing she expects on her trip is to meet her father and the half brother she never knew she had.
A Couple of Kooks by Cynthia Rylant
The Newbery Honor author demonstrates in these eight tales that love is indeed where--and when--you find it.
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes. The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional--but is it more true?
Deception Point by Dan Brown
An ancient meteorite is found buried within an Arctic glacier. Samples taken from this meteorite reveal that it contains fossils from life forms not previously seen on Earth. Could this discovery prove that we are not alone in the universe?
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
In a world decimated by alien attacks, the government trains young geniuses like Ender Wiggin in military strategy with increasingly complex computer games.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
Samuel Westing, an eccentric millionaire dies in bed after returning home from years of being missing. A strange assortment of his heirs are brought together for the reading of his will, and they are (somewhat unwillingly) drawn into a mystery. Who is Sam Westing’s murderer? What do the strange clues mean? And, most importantly, is Sam Westing really dead?
Straydog by Kathe Koja
Rachel, a teenager with a healthy dose of both aptitude and attitude, begins to feel at home volunteering at an animal shelter.
Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas
In hopes of graduating, Steve York agrees to complete a hundred-page writing assignment which helps him to sort out his relationship with his famous astronaut father and the events that changed him from promising student to troubled teen.
Ten Miles from Winnemucca by Thelma hatch Wyss
When his mother and her new husband take off on a long honeymoon and his new stepbrother throws his belongings out the window, sixteen-year-old Martin J. Miller takes off in his Jeep and settles in Red Rock, Idaho, where he finds a job, enrolls in school, and suffers from loneliness.
Cirque du Freak by Darren Shan
Two boys who are best friends visit an illegal freak show, where an encounter with a vampire and a deadly spider forces them to make life-changing choices.
Big Mouth & Ugly Girl by Joyce Carol Oates
When sixteen-year-old Matt is falsely accused of threatening to blow up his high school and his friends turn against him, an unlikely classmate comes to his aid.
Blind Sighted by Peter Moore
Kirk, a creative misfit who is in trouble at high school because he is bored with his classes, learns to deal with his alcoholic mother, new friends, and life with the help of a blind young woman who hires him to read to her.
Godless by Pete Hautmann
Sixteen-year-old Jason Bock decides to create his own religion to worship the town's water tower; he begins to recruit his friends into the religion, giving them callings of honor as First Keeper of the Text and First Acolyte Exaltus, but things quickly get out of hand -- overzealous worshippers, factions within the small congregation, illegal activities.
The Lives of Christopher Chant by Diana Wynne Jones
His father and uncles are enchanters, his mother a powerful sorceress, yet nothing seems magical about Christopher Chant except his dreams. Then Christopher discovers that he can bring real, solid things back from his dreams (which turn out not to be dreams at all, but adventures into other worlds). Soon, Christopher's uncle and others begin to recognize the extent of his powers, and try to use him for their own gains.
Ironman by Chris Crutcher
Ironman is a funny, sometimes heartbreaking story about growing up in the heart of struggle. It is about standing up, getting knocked down, and standing up again. It is about being heard--and learning to listen.
Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton
Anita Blake may be small and young, but vampires call her the Executioner. Anita is a necromancer and vampire hunter in a time when vampires are protected by law--as long as they don't get too nasty. Now someone's killing innocent vampires and Anita agrees--with a bit of vampiric arm-twisting--to help figure out who and why.
After the Rain by Norma Fox Mazer
At fifteen, Rachel is a worrier. She worries about whether her family understands her, whether her friends like her, and whether she'll get her first kiss before she turns sixteen. And she worries about whether she can handle having a real boyfriend if he does come along. But it takes a dying old man -- her grandfather -- who has never been easy for anyone to handle, to show Rachel she has very special abilities. With love and compassion, she reaches the heart of an old tyrant who has always been unreachable. And in so doing, she comes to a better understanding of her family, her friends, and herself.
Vespers by Jeff Rovin
Two giant bats and a whole mess of little ones attack Manhattan in a snappy, old-fashioned horror tale.
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
Susan was home-schooled until tenth grade. She has utter disregard for convention by the time she enters Mica High. Her hugely embarrassing behavior, such as playing the ukulele and singing "Happy Birthday" in the lunchroom appalls Leo, a junior. He is both attracted and repelled by this young woman who calls herself Stargirl.
The Tuesday Café by Don Trembath
Wise-guy high school outcast Harper Winslow embarrasses a local thug in his anonymous column in the school paper. The thug puts a bounty on his head.
You Don't Know Me by David Klass
Fourteen-year-old John creates alternative realities in his mind as he tries to deal with his mother's abusive boyfriend, his crush on a beautiful, but shallow classmate and other problems at school.
A Rose that Grew from Concrete by Tupac Shakur
Poetry written by the rapper between 1989 and 1991, before he became famous. The poems are passionate, sometimes angry, often compelling and embrace his spirit, his energy...and his ultimate message of hope. Selections are reproduced from the originals in Shakur's handwriting, personalized by distinctive spelling and the use of ideographs (a drawing of an eye for I, etc.), and complete with scratch outs and corrections.
Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream by H.G. Bissinger
Every Friday night from September to December, when the Permian High School Panthers play football, this West Texas town becomes a place where dreams can come true. With frankness and compassion, H.G. Bissinger chronicles a season in the life of Odessa and shows how single-minded devotion to the team shapes the community and inspires--and sometimes shatters--the teenagers who wear the Panthers' uniforms.
Necessary Noise: Stories About Our Families As They Really Are by Michael Cart
Once upon a time that was not so very long ago, a family was described as a man, a woman, and their offspring. That was what families were. These ten stories talk about families the way they really are.
Siblings coping with their younger brother's overdose. A girl terrified of her older sister's dual personality. A boy trying to adjust to his life with two mothers. A father visiting his son on death row. These are stories of today's families -- fractured, blended, at risk, non-traditional, and some that are even still nuclear.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich
Can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.
Sixteen : Short Stories by Outstanding Writers for Young Adults by Donald R. Gallo
Sixteen short stories, dealing with teenage concerns, written especially for this collection by well-known authors of young adult novels such as the Mazers, M.E. Kerr, Robert Cormier, Bette Greene, and Richard Peck.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Taking the reader from Afghanistan in the final days of the monarchy to the present, The Kite Runner is the unforgettable, beautifully told story of the friendship between two boys growing up in Kabul. Raised in the same household and sharing the same wet nurse, Amir and Hassan nonetheless grow up in different worlds: Amir is the son of a prominent and wealthy man, while Hassan , the son of Amir's father's servant, is a Hazara, member of a shunned ethnic minority. Their intertwined lives, and their fates, reflect the eventual tragedy of the world around them. When the Soviets invade and Amir and his father flee the country for a new life in California, Amir thinks that he has escaped his past. And yet he cannot leave the memory of Hassan behind him.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
The hero of the novel is 15-year-old Christopher Boone, an autistic math genius who has just discovered the dead body of his neighbor's poodle, Wellington. Wellington was killed with a garden fork, and Christopher decides that, like his idol Sherlock Holmes, he's going to find the killer.
Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho by Jon Katz
Geeks is the story of how Jesse and Eric—and others like them—used technology to try and change their lives and alter their destiny. They rode the Internet out of Idaho to Chicago, a city they had ever set foot in, seeking the American Dream, a better life. Geeks describes this brave and difficult journey, as two self-described social misfits use the resources of the Internet to try to construct a new future for themselves, escape the boundaries of their dead-end lives, and find a community they could belong to.
Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson
For John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, deep wreck diving was more than a sport. Testing themselves against treacherous currents, braving depths that induced hallucinatory effects, navigating through wreckage as perilous as a minefield, they pushed themselves to their limits and beyond, brushing against death more than once in the rusting hulks of sunken ships. But in the fall of 1991, not even these courageous divers were prepared for what they found 230 feet below the surface, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey: a World War II German U-boat, its ruined interior a macabre wasteland of twisted metal, tangled wires, and human bones–all buried under decades of accumulated sediment. No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts brought to the surface. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat and crew at that location. Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler, at first bitter rivals, would be drawn into a friendship that deepened to an almost mystical sense of brotherhood with each other and with the drowned U-boat sailors–former enemies of their country. As the men's marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting more than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless crew.
Candyfreak : A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond
Driven by his obsession, stubborn idealism, and the promise of free candy, self-confessed candyfreak Steve Almond takes off on a quest to discover candy's origins in America, to explore the little companies that continue to get by on guts and perseverance, and to witness the glorious excess of candy manufacturing.