The day after her fifteenth birthday, Willowjean “Will” Parker runs away from home and ends up joining the circus. Life is not easy for her on the road as she learns the ins and outs of carny life, but it… Read More ›
Suicide
The Black Kids
Set in Los Angeles in the year 1992–the year LA erupted into violence after the brutal beating of Rodney King by four LAPD officers–this story traces the evolution of senior Ashley Bennett, her friends, and her family as they confront… Read More ›
Saving Everest
Beverly is the only Black girl in her high school. She lives with her alcoholic, needy, and not-always-responsible mom in a ratty apartment. She takes care of her mom more than vice versa. She has an “aunt” who parties hard… Read More ›
Suggested Reading
Clara Evans, graduating senior at the private Lupton Academy, lives, eats and breathes books–fiction books, in particular. Although her best friend, LiQui, is student council president and, through her, Clara associates with non-book-fanatic people (going to Friday night football games… Read More ›
Ordinary Girls
Here’s a modern day send-up of a Jane Austen novel: two young girls–their acclaimed novelist father deceased for many years–live with their inept artistic mother in a shabby but genteel Victorian house in a Philadelphia neighborhood. They subsist on royalties… 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Dear Evan Hansen
Senior Evan Hansen is starting his last year at school with a broken arm gotten from falling a great distance out of a tree while working his summer job as an assistant park ranger. Not that anyone will notice, because… Read More ›
Words We Don’t Say
Joel Higgins is a high school junior who lost his best friend Andy to cancer. He struggles with loss but also guilt that he began to shirk off visiting Andy in his last days. While he is surrounded by parents… Read More ›
Before You Buy YA 