"High school senior Tyler Miller used to be the kind of guy who faded into the background—average student, average looks, average dysfunctional family. But since he got busted for doing graffiti on the school, and spent the summer doing outdoor work to pay for it, he stands out like you wouldn’t believe. His new physique attracts the attention of queen bee Bethany Milbury, who just so happens to be his father’s boss’s daughter, the sister of his biggest enemy—and Tyler’s secret crush. And that sets off a string of events and changes that have Tyler questioning his place in the school, in his family, and in the world.
In Twisted, Laurie Halse Anderson tackles a very controversial subject: what it means to be a man today. Fans and new listeners alike will be captured by Tyler’s pitchperfect, funny voice, the surprising narrative arc, and the thoughtful moral dilemmas that are at the heart of all of the author’s award-winning work."
"BONUS FEATURE: Exclusive interview with the author!
When his mother leaves with the father of his worst enemy at school, nine-year-old Jeremy seeks to make sense of her abandonment. He throws himself into recreating the Book of Birds, a collection of drawings that his mother took with her on the day she left. While his father fights his own depression and his sister distances herself from their lives, Jeremy turns wholeheartedly to nature, and finds solace in the quiet comfort of drawing."
"Tokyo, 1890. High school can be brutal, even in turn-of-the-century Japan.
From his first day at boarding school, Toyo Shimada sees how upperclassmen make a sport out of terrorizing the first-years. Still, he’s taken aback when the seniors keep him from trying out for the baseball team–especially after he sees their current shortstop. Toyo isn’t afraid to prove himself; He’s more troubled by his uncle’s recent suicide. Although Uncle Koji’s defiant death was supposedly heroic, it has made Toyo question many things about his family’s samurai background. And worse, Toyo fears that his father may be next.
It all has something to do with –the way of the warrior–but Toyo doesn’t understand even after his father agrees to teach it to him. As the gulf between them grows wider, Toyo searches desperately for a way to prove there is a place for his family’s samurai values in modern Japan. Baseball might just be the answer, but will his father ever accept a “Western” game that stands for everything he despises?"
"When Miranda first hears the warnings that a meteor is headed on a collision path with the moon, they just sound like an excuse for extra homework assignments. But her disbelief turns to fear in a split second as the entire world witnesses a lunar impact that knocks the moon closer in orbit, catastrophically altering the earth’s climate.
Everything else in Miranda’s life fades away as supermarkets run out of food, gas goes up to more than ten dollars a gallon, and school is closed indefinitely. But what Miranda and her family don’t realize is that the worst is yet to come.
Told in Miranda’s diary entries, this is a heart-pounding account of her struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all–hope–in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar time."
"Martin Conway comes from a family filled with heroes and disgraces. His grandfather was a statesman who worked at the US Embassy in London during WWII. His father is an alcoholic who left his family. His sister is an overachieving Ivy League graduate. And Martin? Martin is stuck in between--floundering.
But during the summer after 7th grade, Martin meets a boy who will change his life forever. Jimmy Harker appears one night with a deceptively simple question: Will you help?
Where did this boy come from, with his strange accent and urgent request? Is he a dream? It's the most vivid dream Martin's ever had. And he meets Jimmy again and again--but how can his dreams be set in London during the Blitz? How can he see his own grandather, standing outside the Embassy? How can he wake up with a head full of people and facts and events that he certainly didn't know when he went to sleep--but which turn out to be verifiably real?
The people and the scenes Martin witnesses have a profound effect on him. They become almost more real to him than his waking companions. And he begins to believe that maybe he can help Jimmy. Or maybe that he must help Jimmy, precisely because all logic and reason argue against it.
This is a truly remarkable and deeply affecting novel about fathers and sons, heroes and scapegoats. About finding a way to live with faith and honor and integrity. And about having an answer to the question: What did you do to help?"
"Nick is one of the chosen few at his high school: intelligent, popular, wealthy. People think his life is pretty easy. Except for one thing. Nick has never told anyone about his father’s violent temper.
When Nick meets Caitlin, he thinks that she is the answer to all his problems. Caitlin is everything Nick has ever wanted–beautiful, talented, and in love with him. But then it all changes. And Nick must face the fact that he’s gotten more from his gather than green eyes and money.
In a harrowing journey of self-recovery, Nick learns the truth about himself and that the phrase “like father, like son” can carry terrifying possibilities."
"When Lissy James moves from California to Oklahoma, she finds herself in the middle of a teenage nightmare: a social scene to rival a Hollywood movie. And if understanding the hierarchy of the Goldens vs. the Nons isn't hard enough, Lissy's ever growing Aura Vision is getting harder and harder to hide, and if she's not careful, she's going to become a Non faster than you can say 'freak.'
But it's becoming clear that Emory High has a few secrets of its own. Around the halls, the term 'special powers' goes way beyond one's ability to attract the opposite sex, and there may be something more evil than the A-crowd lurking in the classrooms. Lissy can see a lot more than the average girl, but she's about to learn the hard way that things aren't always as they appear and you can't always judge a girl by her lip gloss."
"When seventeen-year-old Valerie Russell runs away to New York City, she’s trying to escape a life that has utterly betrayed her. Sporting a new identity, she takes up with a gang of squatters who live in the city’s labyrinthine subway system.
But there’s something eerily beguiling about Val’s new friends. Impulsive Lolli talks of monsters in the subway tunnels they call home and shoots up a shimmery amber-colored powder that makes the shadows around her dance. Severe Luis claims he can make deals with creatures that no one else can see. And then there’s Luis’s brother, timid and sensitive Dave, who makes the mistake of letting Val tag along as he makes a delivery to a woman who turns out to have goat hooves instead of feet.
When a bewildered Val allows Lolli to talk her into tracking down the hidden lair of the creature for whom Luis and Dave have been dealing, Val finds herself bound into service by a troll named Ravus. He is as hideous as he is honorable. And as Val grows to know him, she finds herself torn between her affection for an honorable monster and her fear of what her new friends are becoming."
"Mina is the perfect daughter. Bound for Harvard, president of the honor society, straight A student, all while she works at her family’s dry cleaners and helps care for her hearing-impaired younger sister. On the outside, Mina does everything right. On the inside, Mina knows the truth. Her life is a lie.
At the height of a heat wave, the summer before her senior year, Mina meets the one person to whom she cannot lie. Ysrale, a young migrant worker who dreams of becoming a musician, comes to work at the dry cleaners and asks Mina the one question that scares her most. What does she want?
Mina finds herself torn between living her mother’s dreams, caring for her younger sister, grasping the love that Ysrael offers, and the most difficult of all, living a life that is true.
With sensitivity and grace, An Na weaves an intriguing story of a young woman caught in the threads of secrets and lies, struggling for love and finding a voice of her own."
"“I expect you might think the story I am about to tell you is untrue or perversely gothic in some unhealthy way. You might even think I’ve exaggerated the facts in order to twist this book into a modern-day metaphor on the exploitation of human creation, as did Mary Shelley with Frankenstein. Maybe you’ll think I’m trying to spook you with a psychological tale of a murderous double as Edgar Allan Poe wrote in “William Wilson,” or to stir up family shame as Hawthorne did in The House of the Seven Gables. But my story is entirely different.”
So begins Jack Gantos’ unnerving drama about three generations of family and friends in a small western Pennsylvania town, held together by the secrets of obsessional mother love–a love so blood-bound that, once revealed, it has no choice but to turn against its keepers."
"Leo Caraway-high school senior, president of the Young Republicans club, 4.0 GPA, future Harvard student-had his entire future perfectly planned out. That was, until the X factor. As in Marion X. McMurphy, aka King Maggot, the lead singer of Purge, the most popular, most destructive band punk rock has ever seen. He's also Leo's biological father.
When Leo discovers that his real father is a punk rock legend, he is disgusted. Not only is Leo not a punk rock fan, but he believes the X factor (the Maggot blood that is running through his veins) is a dangerous time bomb just waiting to explode. And sure enough it does-Leo stubbornly defends the unlikeliest of people, thereby getting himself falsely accused of cheating on a test.
Because of the blemish on his record, the once star pupil finds his scholarship to Harvard taken away. So he hatches the crazy plan of going on tour with King Maggot for Purge's summer revival tour, all the while secretly hoping to convince Maggot to pay for his tuition. But life on the road is even crazier than Leo ever bargained for, and before the summer is out, he will finally discover the surprising truth about his dad, his friends, and most important, himself."
"Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults, 2005
–Young Adult Library Services Association
A young adult novel Latino-style–the year is 1969. America is at war, “Hollywood” is a dirt-poor Chicano barrio in small town America, and Sammy and Juliana, about to head into their senior year, are in love.
Sammy & Juliana in Hollywood is a Chicano ode to survival. In so many ways, in so many of the characters’ lives, I see images of riding out the storms of youth, of a cultural revolution, of war and of death. But of love, too: lost love, found love, the love for friends and family, for place. What else is there to chase after?
–René Saladaña, Jr., author of Finding our Way and The Jumping Tree"
