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 ›
Romantic Attraction in YA Fiction
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 ›
how she died, how i lived
One day twenty-year-old loner and weirdo Kyle Paxson sends texts to five of his former classmates at Midland High School asking them to meet with him. Only one replies, and she ends up raped, beaten and murdered with a crowbar… Read More ›
The Geography of Lost Things
Graduating senior Ali Collins has a full-ride scholarship to UC-Davis waiting for her acceptance letter to be sent, but, stuck at the bottom of her backpack, it is already past due. She can’t make herself mail it. Instead, she spends… Read More ›
Someday
This book is a sequel to EVERY DAY by the same author. I have not read that but recommend others read it first before picking up SOMEDAY. In this book there are two characters who do not have bodies but… Read More ›
Otherearth
This book is the sequel (which I have not read) to OTHERWORLD by the same authors. I gamely started it anyway, expecting enough back story explanations to soldier on. By the time I reached Page 67, however, I had been… Read More ›
Odd One Out
Courtney (“Coop”) is a heterosexual high school junior who lives with his widowed mother. Next door is his best friend Jupiter (“Jupe”), a girl living with her two dads–her biological dad and a step-dad who left a wife and children… 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 