Ahh, summer days in a small midwestern town when you’re a high school junior-soon-to-be-senior working the usual low-wage jobs, attending summer band practice, planning for college and worrying about just how far away you want to get from home once… Read More ›
Controversial YA Topics
How to Make Friends with the Dark
The protagonist of this book, Grace (aka Tiger), is a high school sophomore living in a small Arizona desert town. She does not know who her father is/was, and her mother is secretive about most other parts of her past… Read More ›
The Princess and the Fangirl
This book is a modern version of THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, ComicCon-style. Two identical teenagers–one (Jessica Stone) an Oscar-nominated star of a wildly popular sci-fi series called “Starfield” and the other (Imogen Lovelace) a series devotee pushing a campaign… Read More ›
The First True Thing
First of all, let me say the blurbs on these book jackets are nonsense. This particular book, while worthy of notice and thought, will not leave you “breathless,” nor is it “heartbreaking” or particularly “raw.” OK, thank you, I feel… Read More ›
The Goodbye Summer
Caroline is sixteen-going-on-seventeen, the only child in a loving and attentive family. Although she has dated before, she falls hard for a grocery store clerk named Jake, who is three years her senior, and she becomes embroiled in an intense… Read More ›
Love and Other Curses
Sam is about to turn 17. He lives with his father, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother in a small town in central New York. The people in his bloodline are cursed such that if they fall in love before the age… Read More ›
Two Can Keep a Secret
Twins Ellery and Ezra Corcoran are relocating temporarily to live with their grandmother in small, picture-perfect Echo Ridge, Vermont, while their mother, Sadie, completes a four-month drug rehabilitation program in California. Ellery is particularly interested in Echo Ridge because she… Read More ›
Hot Dog Girl
In the summer before her senior year, Elouise (Elle/Lou) Parker is working at an old but beloved amusement park called the Magic Castle in her small hometown. She’s not crazy about being assigned to walk around and dance in a… Read More ›
Belly Up
Once upon a time long ago and in a land far away, parents and societies recognized that youth with less-than-fully-formed brains (referenced that way in this book) needed to be protected from premature sexual activity that could sabotage their best… Read More ›
Serious Moonlight
Birdie Lindberg is an 18-year-old girl living on Bainbridge Island, Washington, with her grandfather. Her grandmother died a few months earlier, her mother died about eight years earlier, and she never knew her father (who wasn’t married to her mother… Read More ›
Before You Buy YA 