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Showing 151–200 of 228 books

  • List: Alex Awards
  • The Oxford Project

    The Oxford Project

    By Stephen G. Bloom, Peter Feldstein (Photographer)

    In this riveting sociological study, the residents of Oxford, Iowa were photographed in 1984 and then again in 2005. Their compelling life stories, vividly expressed in brief biographical sketches, show just how much someone can change in 21 years.
  • The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

    The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

    By Aimee Bender

    Being able to taste people's emotions in food may at first be horrifying. But young, unassuming Rose Edelstein grows up learning to harness her gift as she becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.
  • 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.
  • The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men against the Sea

    The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men against the Sea

    By Sebastian Junger

    In 1991, as Halloween nears, a cold front moves south from Canada, a hurricane swirls over Bermuda, and an intense storm builds over the Great Lakes. These forces converge to create the cruelest holiday trick of all, a 100-year tempest that catches the North Atlantic fishing fleet off guard and unprotected. Readers weigh anchor with sailors struggling against the elements; they follow meteorologists, who watch helplessly as the storm builds; and, by helicopter and boat, they navigate 100-foot seas and 120-mph winds to attempt rescue against harrowing odds.
  • Persepolis

    Persepolis

    By Marjane Satrapi

    In graphic novel format, the author describes her youth in revolutionary Iran.  From the overthrow of the Shah to the establishment of the new regime, she witnesses heartbreak and struggle as life changes in her country.
  • 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.
  • Pure

    Pure

    By Juliana Baggott

    In a world destroyed by nuclear detonations, only a privileged few have remained pure. Two teens from different sides of the Dome unite to search for answers to troubling questions about their origins.
  • The Queen of Blood

    The Queen of Blood

    By Sarah Beth Durst

    Daleina is determined to keep her family safe from vengeance-seeking spirits, placing her in the crossfire of an insecure queen and powerful spirits.

  • The Radleys

    The Radleys

    By Matt Haig

    Struggling with overwork and parenting angst, English village doctor Peter Radley endeavors to hide his family's vampire nature until their daughter's oddly satisfying act of violence reveals the truth, an event that is complicated by the arrival of a practicing vampire family member.
  • Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants

    Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants

    By Robert Sullivan

    Sullivan spent a year observing the lives and deaths of New York City's rats in this surprising, graphic, and entertaining natural history.
  • Ready Player One

    Ready Player One

    By Ernest Cline

    Ready Player One takes place in the not-so-distant future--the world has turned into a very bleak place, but luckily there is OASIS, a virtual reality world that is a vast online utopia. People can plug into OASIS to play, go to school, earn money, and even meet other people (or at least they can meet their avatars), and for protagonist Wade Watts it certainly beats passing the time in his grim, poverty-stricken real life. Along with millions of other world-wide citizens, Wade dreams of finding three keys left behind by James Halliday, the now-deceased creator of OASIS and the richest man to have ever lived. The keys are rumored to be hidden inside OASIS, and whoever finds them will inherit Halliday's fortune. But Halliday has not made it easy.

  • The Reapers Are the Angels

    The Reapers Are the Angels

    By Alden Bell

    Zombies have infested a fallen America. A young girl named Temple is on the run. Haunted by her past and pursued by a killer, Temple is surrounded by death and danger, hoping to be set free
  • 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.
  • Red, White & Royal Blue

    Red, White & Royal Blue

    By Casey McQuiston

    In this quirky political rom-com, First Son Alex fakes a friendship with longtime rival Prince Henry of Britain when an incendiary photo of them is leaked to the tabloids. A genuine romance blossoms between the two, but it must be kept secret for the sake of Alex's mother's presidential reelection campaign.
  • The Regional Office is Under Attack!

    The Regional Office is Under Attack!

    By Manuel Gonzales

    Fraught with explosive action, female assassins, teenage crushes, and even a cyborg, this fast-paced, dynamic story of revenge explores what happens to a group of woman hell-bent on defending the world from evil forces.
  • Relish: My Life in the Kitchen

    Relish: My Life in the Kitchen

    By Lucy Knisley

    Knisley's life has revolved around food in all its manifestations. This graphic memoir is perfect for those who live to eat or those who simply eat to live.
  • 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.
  • Robopocalypse

    Robopocalypse

    By Daniel H. Wilson

    Two decades into the future humans are battling for their very survival when a powerful AI computer goes rogue, and all the machines on earth rebel against their human controllers.
  • Romeo and/or Juliet: A Choosable-Path Adventure

    Romeo and/or Juliet: A Choosable-Path Adventure

    By Ryan North

    Take the lead in this choose-your-own-adventure graphic novel. Fantastic, dense illustrations draw you into a Romeo and Juliet retelling like none other you've ever experienced. Romance isn't dead and in the end, maybe Romeo and Juliet aren't either.
  • 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?
  • The Round House

    The Round House

    By Louise Erdrich

    After his tribal specialist mother is brutally attacked, fourteen-year-old Joe Coutz sets off with his three friends to find out who is responsible.
  • The Rover

    The Rover

    By Mel Odom

    Four-feet-tall Wick, Third Level Librarian in the Vault of All Known Knowledge, is an imaginative Halfer who longs for the drama he reads about in books. He finally gets a chance to experience adventure when he's kidnapped by pirates, sold into slavery, rescued by thieves, and sent to rob a tomb. Lighthearted, exuberant, and fun.
  • Sacred Heart

    Sacred Heart

    By Liz Suburbia

    Adults have disappeared, and Ben Schiller is trying to keep things together until their return in this unsettling graphic novel. A series of mysterious deaths may be a sign of impending doom for Alexandria's troubled kids.
  • 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.
  • The Sea of Tranquility: A Novel

    The Sea of Tranquility: A Novel

    By Katja Millay

    Nastya has barely survived a brutal attack. Josh has lost his entire family. The two isolated teens are drawn together as they deal with their emotional and physical damage.
  • The Secret Family: Twenty-four Hours inside the Mysterious Worlds of Our Minds and Bodies

    The Secret Family: Twenty-four Hours inside the Mysterious Worlds of Our Minds and Bodies

    By David Bodanis

    With surprises and information on every page, Bodanis' book peels back the layers of our minds and bodies to reveal a churning world of tiny, invisible components, living and inanimate, in ourselves and in our surroundings, that silently and secretly affect us. By following the activities of a family—mom, dad, baby, young son, and teenage daughter—through a typical day, from breakfast to bedtime, Bodanis makes readers active partners in a mysterious and fascinating science adventure. If teens are shocked to discover that there's embalming fluid on postage stamps, just wait till they find out what's floating around the local mall.
  • Seeing in the Dark: How Amateur Astronomers Are Discovering the Wonders of the Universe

    Seeing in the Dark: How Amateur Astronomers Are Discovering the Wonders of the Universe

    By Timothy Ferris

    Differentiating between the nature of stargazing done by professionals in well-equipped observatories and the work of backyard scientists using homemade telescopes, Ferris invites teens to join the scientific community by tracing contributions of amateur astronomers, ranging from Copernicus to Brian May.
  • 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.
  • Sharp Teeth

    Sharp Teeth

    By Toby Barlow

    A fast-paced ride through the brutality of L.A.'s wilderness of drugs, gangs, and the connections people make with one another. The fact that most of the characters in this bloody, sexy, free-verse tale are mostly lycanthropes is almost incidental.
  • 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.
  • Soldier: A Poet's Childhood.

    Soldier: A Poet's Childhood.

    By June Jordan

    Growing up as an African-American in a white world with a father who is harsh one minute and caring the next, means June Jordan's growing up years are difficult but not impossible. Her father's desire for her success makes her strong and able to achieve that success.
  • Soulless: An Alexia Tarabotti Novel

    Soulless: An Alexia Tarabotti Novel

    By Gail Carriger

    Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette.
  • Space: A Memoir

    Space: A Memoir

    By Jesse Lee Kercheval

    In a memoir so beautifully and seamlessly written that teens will think it is fiction, Kercheval tells her own story, beginning when, at age 10, she moved with her family to a home in Cocoa Beach, Florida, in view of Cape Kennedy. Set against the promise implicit in the launching of Apollo, her touching recollection of her youth and teenage years--her strange, unhappy parents, her difficulties fitting into a new school, and her first love--speaks to universal concerns about growing up and resurrects a pivotal episode of American history and culture for a new generation.
  • 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.
  • Spinning Silver

    Spinning Silver

    By Naomi Novik

    Miryem is the daughter and granddaughter of moneylenders, but her father's inability to collect his debts has left his family on the edge of poverty—until Miryem takes matters into her own hands. Hardening her heart, the young woman sets out to claim what is owed and soon gains a reputation for being able to turn silver into gold.
  • Stardust

    Stardust

    By Neil Gaiman

    Many teens will already know Gaiman from his Sandman graphic novels and Neverwhere (1997). In this book, which makes fantasy accessible to a wide audience, 17-year-old Tristran Thorn pledges to fetch for his beloved a star that has fallen on the far side of the wall that marks the edge of the village where he lives. His quest takes him into the land of Fairie, where nothing along the way is really what it seems. Fantasy fans will see in this the work of many of their favorite writers; teens new to the genre will have a fine first reading experience; all will be charmed by the warmth and creativity of Gaiman's wonderful combination of comedy, romance, and energetic adventure.
  • Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

    Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

    By Mary Roach

    A look inside the world of forensics examines the use of human cadavers in a wide range of endeavors, including research into new surgical procedures, space exploration, and a Tennessee human decay research facility
  • Stitches: A Memoir

    Stitches: A Memoir

    By David Small

    David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.
  • Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America

    Sugar in the Raw: Voices of Young Black Girls in America

    By Rebecca Carroll

    Carroll captures the voices of the next generation of African American women in this collection of interviews. Teenagers will hear themselves plainly and powerfully echoed in the honest, unfiltered words of fifteen young black women, who range in age from eleven to twenty. From a variety of backgrounds and in very different ways, they speak candidly about their personal lives, their race, their gender, and their future as black women. A paperback format and a winning cover adds to the YA appeal.
  • The Swallows

    The Swallows

    By Lisa Lutz

    The arrival of a new teacher with a complicated past ignites a student rebellion against Stonebridge Academy's misogynistic culture, which has gone unchecked for years.
  • Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer

    Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer

    By Lynne Cox

    A long-distance swimmer describes her record-setting swims in the icy waters of the Bering Strait and Antarctica. An inspiring story of personal achievement and determination.
  • 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 Terrorist's Son: A Story of Choice

    The Terrorist's Son: A Story of Choice

    By Zak Ebrahim

    This true account of Zak Ebrahim, whose father was responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is a powerful book about tolerance and choice.
  • Things We Have in Common

    Things We Have in Common

    By Tasha Kavanagh

    Yasmin wants to be close to the most beautiful girl in her school, but surely a freak like her has no chance. Unless, that is, she can save her from the man who was staring at her from the woods.