Difficult Teens

Jack and Christy have been best friends for over seven years. They play basketball and tennis together, they swim and skate together - even if Chris is better than Jack at everything. But now it’s the summer before high school, and not everything is fun and games. Always a tomboy, Chris is suddenly turning into a world-class beauty. She even puts on some makeup. All the boys are falling for her, including Jack. Yet does he really love her, or is he just afraid of losing the friendship they’ve enjoyed for so long?

Macy grew up unwanted, unloved, and alone. By his teens he had quit school and begun stealing. In and out of juvie, Macy is a shoplifter, a car thief, and, by age eighteen, a murderer. Danny grew up physically disabled, raised by his grandmother, and a loner. Now sixteen, he finds solace in taking photographs, particularly of monarch butterflies, and thinking about Leah, the most beautiful girl in town.

With sensitivity and insight, this series offers suggestions for healing activities that can help survivors learn to express their grief and mourn naturally. Acknowledging that death is a painful, ongoing part of life, they explain how people need to slow down, turn inward, embrace their feelings of loss, and seek and accept support when a loved one dies. Each book, geared for mourning adults, teens, or children, provides ideas and action-oriented tips that teach the basic principles of grief and healing.

When 13-year-old Mia finally reveals a closely-guarded secret, it soon echoes throughout her school. She was born with synesthesia, a neurological cross-wiring that lets her see sounds, taste shapes, and smell colors. To Mia, the letter A glows with faded sunflower-yellow, screeching chalk sizzles with jagged red sparks, and her cat's voice puffs with orange-mango haze. How can Mia "the alien" find acceptance and self-worth?

Written with the voice and rhythm of the street that only first-hand knowledge can provide, Shark Bait will attract young adult patrons to your library the way The Outsiders did a generation ago. In this gritty and realistic audiobook, 12-year-old Mokes is torn between obeying his father, the police chief in a small Hawaiian town, and hanging out with his trouble-seeking friends.

On February 22, 1853, 15-year-old Niels Nelson is prepared to be executed on Gallows Hill. The master carpenter comes to measure Niels for his coffin. The master baker bakes bread for the spectators. The messenger posts the notice of execution in the town square. The poet prepares his best pen to record the events as they unfold. A fly, Niels' only companion in the cell, buzzes. A dog hovers by his young master's window. A young girl hovers, too, pitying the boy. The executioner sharpens his blade.

The author of this diary began journaling on her 16th birthday. She lived in an upper middle class neighborhood in Santa Monica with her mom, dad, and Berkeley-bound older brother. She was a good girl, living a good life...but one party changed everything. One party, where she took one taste - and liked it. Really liked it.

August is a misfit with a pyro streak, and Jack is a golden boy on the varsity rugby team - but their intense friendship goes way back. Jack begins to see increasingly vivid hallucinations that take the form of an elaborate fantasy kingdom creeping into the edges of the real world. With their parents' unreliable behavior, August decides to help Jack the way he always has - on his own. He accepts the visions as reality, even when Jack leads them on a quest to fulfill a dark prophecy.

Ever since the untimely death of her mother, 14-year-old Joan Skraggs has been desperately unhappy. Under the thumb of her cruel father and three sullen brothers, Joan lives like a servant on their farm just outside of Lancaster, forever cooking, cleaning, and attending to the many demands of the home. But she has little freedom and less support from her family for her love of reading and blossoming interest in education.

Despite my best intentions, I was beginning to understand how my dad saw the world. The shadows haunting every living thing. The secrets inside the lies wrapped in bullshit. Even Gracie’s box of pills was beginning to make sense. For the past five years, Hayley Kincain and her father, Andy, have been on the road, trying to outrun the memories that haunt them both. They moved back to Andy’s hometown to try a “normal” life, but the horrors he saw in the war threaten to destroy their lives.

As an obedient orphan of the U.N.A. (the super-country that was once Mexico, the US, and Canada), Alenna learned at an early age to blend in and be quiet - having your parents taken by the police will do that to a girl. But Alenna can’t help standing out when she fails a test that all 16-year-olds have to take: The test says she has a high capacity for brutal violence, and so she is sent to the wheel, an island where all would-be criminals end up.

Septembre 2019. Neuf mois après l'accident qui l'a plongée dans le coma, Anna s'apprête à quitter l'hôpital. Comment se remettre d'un tel drame ? À vingt ans, Mathis et Anna doivent apprendre à gérer l'absence de Nico, et leur culpabilité. L'avenir leur tend les bras, mais parviendront-ils à reprendre le cours de leur vie ? Après Demain le jour se lèvera, nous retrouvons la bande d'amis en pleine reconstruction. À la lueur de nos pas accordés aborde le thème de la résilience, de la renaissance. Une ode à la vie, à l'amour, et à l'espoir !

In the affluent town of Weslyn, Connecticut, where most people worry about what to be seen in and who to be seen with, Emma Thomas would rather not be seen at all. She’s more concerned with feigning perfection - pulling down her sleeves to conceal the bruises, not wanting anyone to know how far from perfect her life truly is. Without expecting it, she finds love. It challenges her to recognize her own worth - at the risk of revealing the terrible secret she’s desperate to hide.

Fourteen-year-old Luce has had a tough life, but she reaches the depths of despair when she is assaulted and left on the cliffs outside a grim Alaskan fishing village. She expects to die when she tumbles into the icy waves below but instead undergoes an astonishing transformation: she becomes a mermaid. A tribe of mermaids finds Luce and welcomes her in. All of them, like her, are lost girls who surrendered their humanity in the darkest moments of their lives.

Reeling from the devastation of Dust & Decay, Benny Imura and his friends plunge deep into the zombie-infested wastelands of the great Rot & Ruin. Benny, Nix, Lilah, and Chong journey through a fierce wilderness that was once America, searching for the jet they saw in the skies months ago. If that jet exists, then humanity itself must have survived somewhere.

First a Canadian Rockies avalanche kills their parents. Then Children’s Services threatens to separate them. That’s when the three Gunnarsson kids decide to run away into the mountains and fend for themselves until the oldest turns 18 and becomes their legal guardian. Not many would dare. But Jon, Korka, and Aron’s parents ran a survival school. Turns out their plan is full of holes.

Charlie Grant’s older sister is getting married this weekend at their family home, and Charlie can’t wait - for the first time in years, all four of her older siblings will be under one roof. Charlie is desperate for one last perfect weekend before the house is sold and everything changes. The house will be filled with jokes and games and laughs again. Making decisions about things like what college to attend and reuniting with longstanding crush Jesse Foster - all that can wait. She wants to focus on making the weekend perfect.

Carson Mastick is entering his senior year of high school and desperate to make his mark, on the reservation and off. A rock band - and winning the local Battle of the Bands, with its first prize of a trip to New York City - is his best shot. But things keep getting in the way. Small matters like the lack of an actual band, or the fact that his brother just got shot confronting the racist owner of a local restaurant.

How do you let go of something you've never had? Junior year for Brooke Winters is supposed to be about change. She's transferring schools, starting fresh, and making plans for college so she can finally leave her hometown, her family, and her past behind. But all of her dreams are shattered one hot summer afternoon when her mother is arrested for killing Brooke's abusive father. No one really knows what happened that day, if it was premeditated or self-defense, whether it was right or wrong. And now Brooke and her siblings are on their own.

Anna Chiu has her hands full. When she's not looking after her brother and sister or helping out at her father's restaurant, she's taking care of her mother, whose debilitating mental illness keeps her in bed most days. Her father's new delivery boy, Rory, is a welcome distraction and even though she knows that things aren't right at home, she's starting to feel like she could be a normal teen. But when her mother finally gets out of bed, things go from bad to worse.