1) "Because You'll Never Meet Me" by Leah Thomas
Opposites attract—and repel—in Thomas' epistolary debut novel.
Ollie sees his new German pen pal, Moritz, as a potential lifeline. Ollie’s allergy to electricity has exiled him and his mother to a cabin in the Michigan woods with little company besides Auburn-Stache, his unconventional doctor, and Liz, a girl who brings him news from the world of TVs and humidifiers. Buzzing with awkward wisecracks and restless energy, he draws the aloof, sardonic Moritz into conversation. Rescued from a lab, Moritz requires a pacemaker and lacks eyes, but he insists he isn't blind; he can acutely sense his surroundings by clicking his tongue. Unfortunately, superecholocation and sarcasm don't help him fight a bully or approach Owen, the boy who treats him like a human. Ollie and Moritz need each other, even if they won't admit it. Isolation and the intimacy afforded by distance sharply focus the characters' developments; their personalities take shape quickly, and their relationship deepens as they play off each other’s anecdotes and insults. The humorous and increasingly emotional exchanges create cliffhangers, culminating in occasionally disturbing revelations about the boys' origins. Their link is heavily foreshadowed, while other plotlines remain open enough to give the ending a sense of anticipation as well as satisfaction.
A witty, unusual take on friendship and parlaying weakness into power. (Fiction. 14 & up)
2) "Tunnel Vision" by Susan Adrian
What happens when your special talent is especially dangerous?
Jake’s ability to form a mental link to anyone he’s holding a personal possession of—what he calls “tunneling”—has always been a secret. Only his best friend and his dad knew, and now his dad’s dead. But when he tries to impress his friends by tunneling at a party, his secret escapes, and his entire life is soon overthrown by government agents who convince him that he has a duty to save lives. No longer free to live as a regular teenager, Jake only hopes that he can protect the people who mean the most to him—his mother and sister. An exciting plot paired with a sympathetic protagonist makes for a roller-coaster adventure that asks some big moral questions: Is it ethical to tunnel into another person’s mind, even to do good? Which is more important, the individual or the country? The action moves at a quick pace that fans of adventure fiction will appreciate while still leaving room for deeper contemplation. Toward the end of the book, convenient plot twists drive the action, but readers may not notice, caught up as they’ll be in the web of terror and deceit.
Danger, intrigue, a dash of romance, and a good, hard look at ethical dilemmas—a pretty complete package. (Paranormal thriller. 15-18)
3) "Everything, Everything" by Nicola Yoon
Suffering from “bubble baby disease,” Madeline has lived for 18 years in a sterile, sealed house with her physician mother.
Madeline is a bright, witty young woman who makes the best of life with a compromised immune system by playing games with her mother, studying with online tutors, and writing brief spoiler book reviews on Tumblr. Her life is turned upside down when a troubled new family moves in next door and she sees Olly for the first time. Olly, a white boy “with a pale honey tan” and parcours moves, wants to meet her, but Madeline’s mother turns him away. With the help of an indestructible Bundt cake, Olly perseveres until he gets her email address. Madeline—half Japanese, half African-American—chronicles her efforts to get to know Olly as she considers risking everything to be with him. She confides to her wise and understanding nurse, Carla, the truth she keeps from her overprotective mother: that it’s painfully hard to be a teenager with a crush, yearning to venture outside and experience the world. Spot art by the author’s husband, occasional lists in Madeline’s handwriting, emails, and instant-messaging transcripts add a lively dimension to Madeline’s quirky character. In her debut, Jamaican-American Yoon gives readers complex characters and rich dialogue that ranges from humorous to philosophical.
This heartwarming story transcends the ordinary by exploring the hopes, dreams, and inherent risks of love in all of its forms. (Fiction. 12-17)
4) "Mindwalker" by A.J. Steiger
A girl living in a dystopic future United States divided into castes has the ability to enter other people’s brains and erase selected memories.
Lain, 17, may still be in high school, but her future career as a Mindwalker seems set, and it’s exactly what she wants to do with the rest of her life. At school she meets Steven, an odd boy designated Type Four and required to wear a collar that monitors his bodily functions and tranquilizes him if he becomes violent. Lain, deliberately walking in her late father’s footsteps, truly believes she provides a necessary psychological service by eradicating painful memories. When Steven, the victim of atrocious child abuse, asks her to erase his memories illegally, she reluctantly agrees. When Lain learns that her activities have been detected, however, she must choose between her longed-for career and escape to Canada. Meanwhile, she finds herself far too attracted to Steven, a boy with whom she could not possibly have a future. Steiger creates extreme but mostly believable characters and a vivid future world with just enough familiar elements to lend it credence. Although some of the drama hinges on a standard mad-scientist plot rather than the dystopia within which he operates, on the whole the book manages to balance plot with thought-provoking contemplation about what makes personalities complete.
An intriguing read that sets genre fans up neatly for its sequel. (Dystopian romance. 12-18)
5) "Dead to Me" by Mary McCoy
A privileged girl turns detective in a gritty noir thriller about the not-so-glamorous side of Hollywood in the 1940s.
Alice Gates has always lived a comfortable life in her spacious Hollywood home. Her father does PR for a prestigious studio, and Alice and her sister, Annie, have spent their childhood hobnobbing with famous movie stars and attending glitzy parties. Suddenly, when Alice is 12, Annie leaves home with no explanation. Four years later, Alice receives a call that her sister is in the hospital, beaten and unconscious. As Alice tries to track down Annie’s assailant, she finds herself in the thick of a Tinseltown that isn’t quite so shiny, one full of runaways, pornographers, malicious gangsters, crooked cops and psychotic movie stars. As she begins to pick her way through the tangled web, she learns that the present-day events may ultimately lead back to the truth about her sister's leaving home all those years ago. McCoy's mystery unfolds slowly and cautiously, offering enough clues—and red herrings—to keep readers hooked. Its conclusion is tidily, perhaps a bit too conveniently, resolved, but against the richly envisioned backdrop of golden-age Hollywood's sinister underbelly, this minor quibble is easily forgiven.
Step aside, Nancy Drew; this dark mystery holds nothing back. (Historical mystery. 13 & up)
6) "It's A Wonderful Death" by Sarah J. Schmitt
Rowena Joy Jones isn’t supposed to be dead.
When a Grim Reaper named Gideon mistakenly collects 17-year-old RJ’s soul, RJ demands he send her back; however, returning to the land of the living isn’t as simple as hopping on the next Soul Mover. First, the beautiful, popular, and cruel RJ must face a Tribunal of angels who will decide her fate. As sending RJ back means rewinding time and altering the chain of events leading up to her accidental death, RJ needs to prove she can change her ways, becoming worthy of returning to Earth to live out her remaining days. If she fails the tasks set forth by the Tribunal, she’ll be forced to hang around the Afterlife until her official death date, at which time she can be “processed,” face Judgment, and move on to Heaven…or that other place. The Afterlife is a fully realized world comprising a mix of Judeo-Christian belief and Greek mythology, and it is populated by a colorful host of characters: sarcastic Guardian Angels, a hunky St. Peter, a soul-gobbling, three-headed dog, and even Death Himself. RJ’s first-person narration is alternately facetious and reverent. The novel’s only weakness lies in not giving readers enough of RJ’s mean-girl background to contrast with the effort she puts into redeeming herself.
Fun, funny, and full of life. (Fantasy. 12-18)
7) "Skyscraping" by Cordelia Jensen
A teenage girl grapples with her family’s growing pains.
Set in early 1990s Manhattan as the AIDS crisis was hitting its peak, Jensen’s semiautobiographical debut novel in verse explores how shifting parental dynamics can affect a household. At the novel’s start, Miranda “Mira” Stewart has always been a dedicated student and engaged daughter, devoted to her academician father and younger sister and struggling to relate to her self-involved artist mother. Her biggest concerns are what theme to choose as she takes the editorial helm of her high school yearbook, how to negotiate the absence of her recently graduated boyfriend, and filling out college applications—all typical senior-year fare. “But the constellation of a family / can shift shape / in seconds.” When Mira discovers her father in a compromising position with his male teaching assistant, both her image of him and her understanding of her parents’ relationship collapse. Mira withdraws from her family and acts out at school, at first unwilling to forgive her parents for having kept a crucial part of their relationship hidden. Throughout, Jensen’s spare free-verse poems and accessible imagery realistically portray the fraught moments of adolescent identity formation with great empathy.
Compelling snapshots of contemporary family drama and the AIDS epidemic as captured through a teen’s eyes. (Historical fiction/verse. 14 & up)
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