Nora Walker is living alone in the family homestead that nestles close to the bottomless lake and the lush forests of Fir Haven, while her mother has taken off towards the west coast to make sales calls for the special… Read More ›
Simon Pulse
Watch Over Me
Zoey is the managing “adult” living in a household which has been defined by domestic violence. At the age of 15 she testified against her abusive cop father in court, and he was sent to jail. Now she is 18… Read More ›
The Best Lies
Katherine Remy Tsai is a 16-year-old with battling professional parents who love her perfect older brother better, so much so that his schoolmates don’t even realize he has a sister. Things have been mighty stressful at home for many years,… Read More ›
Slay
Kiera is a Black honors student at Jefferson Academy in Bellevue WA, where the student body is overwhelmingly white. Having transferred from a school where the majority of the student body consisted of students of color, Kiera has had to… Read More ›
Crown of Feathers
(This has a lot of spoilers so readers beware!) This is a story of two sisters: Val is strong, controlling and unemotional; Veronyka is kindhearted, wants to help others, and has a connection with animals. They are children of Phoenix… 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 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 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 ›
All That I Can Fix
The parents in many Young Adult novels are self-involved, negligent people who may provide food and shelter but pretty much expect their teenage children to raise themselves. Or expect the kids to tend to the parents’ needs. This book takes… Read More ›
Light Years
Teenage Luisa (aka Lu) is a talented, brilliant girl with a peculiar inherited faculty of experiencing smells and colors when she is feeling strong emotion. (She has other “gifts” which emerge in the course of the book.) She applies for… Read More ›
Before You Buy YA 