Anna is a 16-year-old who is the product of an adulterous affair between her magician father and married-to-someone-else mother. She lives in what sounds like a traditional fairytale kingdom, where she has been locked away in a tower all her… Read More ›
Offensive Language in YA Literature
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 ›
Orphan Monster Spy
Sarah is the teenage daughter of a beautiful German Jewess whose husband? boyfriend? made himself scarce years earlier. As their situation in Nazi Germany becomes ever more precarious, the mother dissolves into an alcoholic, depressed mess. She rallies finally for… 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 ›
Thief of Happy Endings
Cassidy is a teenager with a good family and one friend. At the age of seven she was thrown from a horse, needed 30 stitches in her noggin, and was left with a cautious attitude toward life. Now things are… Read More ›
Unclaimed Baggage
Three teenagers end up working together at an Unclaimed Baggage store in small-town Huntsville, Alabama: (1) Doris, an experienced staffer who hires the other two as new employees, and who is something of a social misfit because she is liberal… Read More ›
When Elephants Fly
T. Lillian Decker (Tiger Lily Decker) is an 18-year-old high school senior whose schizophrenic mother almost kills her at the age of seven by insisting she can fly off a roof. The mother goes to prison for attempted murder and… Read More ›
Freak ‘n’ Gorgeous
Sixteen-year-old Konrad Wolnik is your normal-looking high school sophomore who has recently broken up with his hot girlfriend of seven months, Sara. He wakes up one morning the victim of an Inexplicable Development, a rare chromosomal event that transforms him… Read More ›
A Very Large Expanse of Sea
Shirin is a 16-year-old American girl of Persian ancestry living in NYC in 2002, a year after the 9/11 attack. Her parents are loving, ambitious, good role models, if curiously uninterested in the day-to-day school lives of their two children… 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 