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Showing 51–83 of 83 books

  • List: Alex Awards
  • Genre: Realistic Fiction
  • The Night Birds

    The Night Birds

    By Thomas James Maltman

    Asa, a Minnesota boy growing up in the nineteenth century, learns secrets about his family's violent, complicated past following the bloody Dakota Conflict of 1862.
  • One Hundred Demons

    One Hundred Demons

    By Lynda Barry

    Whether she's talking about head lice, old boyfriends, or hippies who “forgot” to pay her wages, Barry playfully explores, in “autobifictionalographical” text and art, those demons common to teens––and to us all.
  • Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven

    Only Twice I've Wished for Heaven

    By Dawn Turner Trice

    Eleven-year-old Tempest doesn't like her new home in Lakeland, a planned community for African Americans. Most of her school classmates are boring, and their prissy airs anger and puzzle her. What saves her is a friendship with troubled Valerie, an outsider like herself, and the secret trips she makes each day to Miss Jonetta's liquor store on fascinating Thirty-fifth Street, where she discovers great courage and caring—and terrible secrets about the world of grown-ups and about her best friend.
  • Over and Under

    Over and Under

    By Todd Tucker

    Andy and Tom's fourteenth summer is defined by adventures in the woods and caves near their home, a strike that polarizes their small town, and secrets that test their friendship.
  • Peace like a River

    Peace like a River

    By Leif Enger

    Set in a quiet 1960s Minnesota community, this magical debut novel centers around 11-year-old asthmatic Reuben Land and his family: his father, his brother, and his precocious younger sister. Life turns upside down when Davy, Reuben's older brother, kills two intruders who plan to harm the family. After Davy breaks out of jail, the Lands leave their home and set out to find him.
  • Plainsong

    Plainsong

    By Kent Haruf

    They were always connected, in the way people in small towns are: the elderly McPheron brothers, unschooled but wise in other ways; high school teacher Tom Guthrie and his mischievous sons, Bobby and Ike; and Victoria Roubideaux, 17 and pregnant, with nowhere to go. In this plainspoken yet graceful story that is at once complex and elemental, Haruf deftly brings his characters together, slowly turning them into a family ready to face private fears with a renewed sense of hope, connection, and even joy.
  • Project X

    Project X

    By Jim Shepard

    School is a nightmare for eighth-grader Edwin, who suffers daily indignities and bullying. With his only friend, he plots a terrible revenge. A searing, startlingly real account of one boy's path to violence.
  • The Reappearance of Sam Webber

    The Reappearance of Sam Webber

    By Jonathon Scott Fuqua

    There's a strong sense of place in this ultimately warm, reassuring novel set in a poor, racially tense Baltimore neighborhood. Sam Webber doesn't like his new home, a smelly apartment light years away from the middle-class area where he spent his first 11 years. Since his father's disappearance, he's felt responsible for protecting his mother, but he's so sad and scared he can't even help himself: druggies and muggers patrol the streets; bullies hound him in school. His only friend is the school's black janitor, who turns out to need Sam as much as Sam needs him. Themes of racism, urban violence, depression, and family structure threaded through the story make the book effective for discussion as well as for independent reading.
  • River, Cross My Heart

    River, Cross My Heart

    By Breena Clarke

    Strong-willed Alice Bynam is convinced that by moving to Georgetown, her family will have more economic and educational opportunity. That's true, but whites still rule the roost in the 1920s, and they've barred 10-year-old Johnnie Mae and her friends from swimming in a local pool. When Johnnie Mae opts for the river, instead, her younger sister, Clara, drowns, leaving her family and community behind to struggle with the personal loss and the legacy of racial injustice.
  • Room: A Novel

    Room: A Novel

    By Emma Donoghue

    Narrator Jack and his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier when she was a 19-year-old college student, celebrate his fifth birthday. They live in a tiny, 11-foot-square soundproofed cell in a converted shed in the kidnapper's yard.
  • Roughneck

    Roughneck

    By Jeff Lemire

    In the snowy recesses of northern Canada, a down-and-out former hockey player must confront his past when his long-lost sister returns to town battling demons of her own. Can they save each other? Or will violence swallow them both?
  • Salvage the Bones

    Salvage the Bones

    By Jesmyn Ward

    Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.
  • The Sand-Reckoner

    The Sand-Reckoner

    By Gillian Bradshaw

    Archimedes is known best for his mathematical abilities, but he was also one of the first army engineers. Both skills came in handy in ancient Greece when the Romans threatened to take over the known world.
  • The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures

    The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures

    By Caroline Preston

    For her graduation from high school in 1920, Frankie Pratt receives a scrapbook and her father's old Corona typewriter. Despite Frankie's dreams of becoming a writer, she must forgo a college scholarship to help her widowed mother. But when a mysterious Captain James sweeps her off her feet, her mother finds a way to protect Frankie from the less-than-noble intentions of her unsuitable beau. Through a kaleidoscopic array of vintage postcards, letters, magazine ads, ticket stubs, catalog pages, fabric swatches, candy wrappers, fashion spreads, menus, and more, we meet and follow Frankie on her journey in search of success and love.
  • Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

    Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II

    By Robert Kurson

    In this vivid and thrilling account, a journalist recounts the adventures of the two deep-sea divers who discover a WWII German U-boat off the coast of New Jersey and become obsessed with uncovering its story.
  • She Rides Shotgun

    She Rides Shotgun

    By Jordan Harper

    Polly, an 11-year-old girl with “gunfighter eyes,” her teddy bear, and her estranged father suddenly find themselves struggling for survival in a world ruled by gangs. Fast-paced and thrilling, this will get even reluctant readers' hearts racing.
  • Snow in August

    Snow in August

    By Pete Hamill

    A piece of history comes to life for young adults in a vivid novel about prejudice, love, courage, and miracles. Eleven-year-old Michael Devlin lives with his widowed mother in a working-class neighborhood in 1940s Brooklyn, in the shadow of Ebbets Field. The last thing he expects to find is a friend in Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a refugee from Prague, who trades wonderful stories from Jewish folklore for lessons in English and American culture, especially the sport of baseball. When religious prejudice rears its ugly head, Michael's real world and Hirsch's fantastical one fold together in a powerful, unexpected way.
  • The Spellman Files

    The Spellman Files

    By Lisa Lutz

    Isabel can't quit her private investigator job; she works for her family, and they'll kill her if she tries to leave. A quickly paced, quirky mystery.
  • The Talk-Funny Girl

    The Talk-Funny Girl

    By Roland Merullo

    Raised by parents so intentionally isolated that they speak their own hybrid dialect, abused youth Marjorie witnesses her parents' submission to a sadistic cult leader before she is rescued by another abuse survivor who teaches her stoneworking skills.
  • Tell the Wolves I'm Home

    Tell the Wolves I'm Home

    By Carol Rifka Brunt

    June thought she knew everything about her beloved uncle, Finn. After his death from a mysterious new illness called AIDS, his grieving boyfriend delivers Finn's favorite teapot to June's door, and she realizes nothing is what she thought it was: not her family, not her uncle, not even herself.
  • The Thirteenth Tale

    The Thirteenth Tale

    By Diane Setterfield

    Margaret, a shy, unknown biographer, has to sift truth from fiction as she becomes the first person to hear the secrets of a reclusive best-selling author's mysterious past.
  • Three Girls and Their Brother

    Three Girls and Their Brother

    By Theresa Rebeck

    This witty satire of show-biz politics, told from the perspective of four New York teenage siblings in the eye of a publicity tornado, provides a fascinating insider's look at the world of the rich and famous.
  • The Universe Versus Alex Woods

    The Universe Versus Alex Woods

    By Gavin Extence

    It all begins when Alex is hit in the head by a meteorite and it all ends when he is arrested trying to re-enter England with several grams of marijuana, lots of cash, and the ashes of Mr. Peterson.
  • Upstate

    Upstate

    By Kalisha Buckhanon

    Teens Antonio and Natasha try to keep their love alive through letters after he goes to prison. As Natasha excels in school, Antonio frights for survival.
  • The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

    The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

    By Helen Grant

    Reviled in her German village home where her only friends are a fellow outcast and an elderly storyteller, eleven-year-old Pia investigates the disappearances of three local girls whom she believes are tied to unsolved missing persons cases from decades earlier
  • What Girls Learn

    What Girls Learn

    By Karin Cook

    This poignant, honest novel calls up themes that teenagers will easily recognize from reading young-adult books—family relationships, sibling rivalry, the death of a parent. In fact, this reads as if it were written just for teens. With a fine ear for dialogue and a firm grasp on the concerns of adolescent girls, Cook tells the story of two sisters—Tilden, quiet and good; Elizabeth, the family rebel—and their relationship with their beloved mother, Frances. When Frances marries Nick, the girls must adjust; when Frances is diagnosed with breast cancer, the girls' lives change in ways they never expected.
  • When the Emperor Was Divine

    When the Emperor Was Divine

    By Julie Otsuka

    A short and understated, but also powerful novel in which members of a Japanese-American family, forced to move from a happy California home to cramped, humiliating detention camps set up by the American government, return home after World War II to find suspicious neighbors, a vandalized house, and a broken family.
  • Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

    Where'd You Go, Bernadette?

    By Maria Semple

    Through a series of emails, letters, and FBI files, Bee follows the trail of her missing mother to the ends of the earth in this quirky, laugh-out-loud tale.
  • The Whistling Season

    The Whistling Season

    By Ivan Doig

    Rose, who can't cook but doesn't bite arrives in Montana, bringing joy and order to three motherless boys and their father.
  • Wonder When You'll Miss Me

    Wonder When You'll Miss Me

    By Amanda Davis

    After she is sexually assaulted under the school bleachers, 16-year old Faith runs away from home, accompanied by The Fat Girl, a taunting imaginary former self. At the circus, Faith finds a safe haven and healing environment.
  • The World Made Straight

    The World Made Straight

    By Ron Rash

    When 17-year-old Travis Shelton discovers a marijuana farm in the Appalachian woods, he begins a confrontation with the subtle evils within his rural world.
  • The Year of Ice

    The Year of Ice

    By Brian Malloy

    Malloy's first novel is a memorable story of the emotional complexities of American families and the complications of coming of age. High-school senior Kevin Doyle is literally skating on thin ice: a self-described “alpha male,” he is secretly gay and increasingly estranged from his father, who has a secret of his own.
  • Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

    Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague

    By Geraldine Brooks

    A year after the plague strikes her village, Anna reflects on how the townsfolk handled their minister's request to remain in town to prevent the illness from spreading. Faith, then healing herbs and potions keep everyone going--until doubt creeps in, and witch-hunting, greed, and madness take over the villagers' lives.