This story opens with sixteen-year-old Brianna (Bri) Jackson dealing with a lot of worries. Her dad, once a rising rap star on the underground scene, is twelve-years-dead from a gang-related shooting, having left the family his famous name, a prized… Read More ›
Death and Grieving
The Art of Losing
Freshman year for Harley Langston changes dramatically when Mike Baker, newly-transferred lacrosse and basketball star, sits down at her cafeteria table and starts up an intense conversation when he sees her reading Gail Simone’s BIRDS OF PREY. As they find… Read More ›
The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried
Seventeen-year-old Dino DeLuca is helping out his parents by doing cosmetology work at the family funeral home, a job at which he excels. One of the bodies he must work on is that of July Cooper, his longtime but estranged… Read More ›
The Music of What Happens
Seventeen-year-old Max Morrison and Jordan Edwards know each other from their AP Language & Composition class at Mesa-Guadalupe High School in Mesa, Arizona, but they are not friends until the summer before senior year when Max stumbles upon Jordan and… Read More ›
The Dead Queens Club
Annie Marck of Cleveland (Ohio) meets Henry of Lancaster (Indiana) at a summer Overachievers Camp. He nicknames her “Cleves” and they quickly bond as best friends. Their quirky friendship deepens during the second summer’s Overachievers Camp, after which Anne’s family… Read More ›
The Similars
Emmeline Chance is so anxious about returning from California to Vermont to her highly prestigious and select private high school that she relies heavily on the “pharmas” her therapist has given her to dull her pain after the suicide of… Read More ›
Dry
This is the first book I have read, I believe, by the writing Shustermans. It is an excellent tale and apparently is already being made into a movie. Set in the present, the good folks of already water-starved California are… Read More ›
The Truth about Martians
Life seems really hard for 11-year-old Mylo, who sleeps in a room with an empty bed where his brother used to be. It even seems to him that there is grayness around his dad, who doesn’t play ball with him… Read More ›
What the Woods Keep
Upon turning eighteen, Hayden Holland, currently living in New York with a roommate named Del, is contacted by the family lawyer about the Promise, Colorado estate she is inheriting from her mother, who mysteriously vanished in its woods some ten… Read More ›
A Lite Too Bright
As the grandson (and third-generation namesake) of the author of A WORLD AWAY, a book supposedly so widely respected that it is read in high schools everywhere, Arthur Louis Pullman finds himself in an unhappy place. His girlfriend has given… Read More ›
Before You Buy YA 