Mental Images

Una delle insidie più pericolose e sottovalutate della nostra epoca, in cui le nuove tecnologie digitali funzionano come un rallentatore cognitivo ed emotivo che rende tutto apparentemente fattibile e fruibile senza sforzo, è il progressivo deperimento - se non addirittura l'estinguersi - della passione, quella sfida lanciata al mondo e a se stessi per continuare a migliorarsi, a sperare, a sognare.

Ever since her acceptance to UCLA, 17-year-old Raya Liston has been quietly freaking out. Then her beloved grandmother dies, and Raya jumps at the chance to spend her last free summer at the ashram in India where her grandmother met and fell in love with her grandfather. Raya hopes to find her center and her true path. But she didn't expect to fall in love...with a country of beautiful contradictions, her fiercely loyal cousin, a local girl with a passion for reading, and a boy who teaches her that in Sanskrit, there are 96 different ways to say the word love.

Stella lives with depression, and her goals for junior year are pretty much limited to surviving her classes, staying out of her parents’ constant fights, and staving off unwanted feelings enough to hang out with her friends Lin and Katie. Until Kevin. A quiet, wry senior who understands Stella and the lows she’s going through like no one else. With him, she feels less lonely, listened to - and hopeful for the first time since ever.... But to keep that feeling, Stella lets her grades go, and her friendships slide.

Morgan was born with a hole in her middle: a perfectly smooth, sealed, fist-sized chunk of nothing near her belly button. At 16, she's tired of keeping her physical abnormality a secret. One night, after a lifetime of hiding behind lumpy sweaters and a smart mouth, she decides to bare all. At first, she feels liberated. But the fallout is more than she bargained for. A few photos snowball into a media frenzy, and suddenly she is desperate to get back to her own strange version of normal.

Artist Piper Perish has moved from her hometown of Houston, Texas, to New York City. Her days are spent exploring; her nights are filled with painting. It's her lifelong dream come true.... Except life in the city isn't as glamorous as it looks from afar. Piper's high-pressure work as an assistant to a famous modern artist takes away time from her own art. And Piper's new friend Grace, a budding activist, has Piper beginning to wonder if making great art is really enough.

Extraordinary insight into living without sight. Outside Myself will enlighten both young and old. Tallie is a young girl struggling to adjust to her blindness. Benjamin is an older gentleman working in a library for the blind. A chance phone call between them leads to a transformative year, and a window of understanding is flung open as empathy, independence, and resolution rush in.

Aspiring filmmaker and wallflower Twinkle Mehra has stories she wants to tell and universes she wants to explore, if only the world would listen. So when fellow film geek Sahil Roy approaches her to direct a movie for the upcoming Summer Festival, Twinkle is all over it. The chance to publicly showcase her voice as a director? Dream come true. The fact that it gets her closer to her longtime crush, Neil Roy - aka Sahil’s twin brother? Dream come true x 2.

Olivia "Liv" Blakley knows how important it is to look good. Her father is running for governor, and Liv will be making public appearances with her family. Liv has an image to uphold - to her maybe boyfriend, to the new friends who suddenly welcome her into their circle, and to the public, who loves to find fault on social media. Liv's sunny, charming facade hides a dark inner voice that will settle for nothing less than perfection. No matter who she has to give up to get there. No matter what she has to lose to do it.

Kat and Meg couldn't be more different. Kat's anxiety makes it hard for her to talk to people. Meg hates being alone, but her ADHD keeps pushing people away. But when the two girls are thrown together for a yearlong science project, they discover they do have one thing in common: They're both obsessed with the same online gaming star and his hilarious videos. It might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship - if they don't kill each other first.

Ten teens are left alone in the wilderness during a three-day survival test in this multi-authored novel edited by award-winning author Shaun David Hutchinson. At Zeppelin Bend, an outdoor-education program designed to teach troubled youth the value of hard work, cooperation, and compassion, 10 teens are left alone in the wild. The teens are a diverse group who come from all walks of life and were all sent to Zeppelin Bend as a last chance to get them to turn their lives around.

Being yourself can be such a bad idea. For 16-year-old Badi Hessamizadeh, life is a series of humiliations. After withdrawing from public school under mysterious circumstances, Badi enters Magnificat Academy. To make things "easier", his dad has even given him a new name: Bud Hess. Grappling with his Iranian-American identity, clinical depression, bullying, and a barely bottled rage, Bud is an outcast who copes by resorting to small revenges and covert acts of defiance, but the pressures of his home life and the unrequited affection of his new friend, Nikki, prime him for a more dangerous revolution.

When Thisbe Locke is last seen standing on the edge of the Coronado Bridge, it looks like there is only one thing to call it. But her sister Ted is not convinced. Despite the witnesses and the police reports and the divers, and the fact that she was heartbroken about the way things ended with Clay and how she humiliated herself at that party, Thisbe isn't the type of person to end up just an "incident". While everyone in town prepares to mourn the loss (some more than others), Ted and Fen, the new kid in town, set out to put the pieces together and find her sister.

Seventeen-year-old Arman Dukoff can't remember life without anxiety and chronic illness when he arrives at an expensive self-help retreat in the remote hills of Big Sur. He's taken a huge risk - and $2,000 from his meth-head stepfather - for a chance to "evolve", as Beau, the retreat leader, says. Beau is complicated. A father figure? A cult leader? A con man? Arman's not sure, but more than anyone he's ever met, Beau makes Arman feel something other than what he usually feels - worthless.

Piper Perish inhales air and exhales art. The sooner she and her best friends can get out of Houston and get to New York City, the better. Art school has been Piper's dream her whole life, and now that senior year is halfway over, she's never felt more ready. But in the final months before graduation, things are weird with her friends and stressful with three different guys, and Piper's sister's tyrannical mental state seems to thwart every attempt at happiness for the close-knit Perish family.

Insatiable is an astonishingly moving story of four teenage girls whose shame, fear and confusion compel them to binge, purge and refuse to eat in misguided attempts to feel safe and in control of their lives.

My lips are white. Sixteen-year-old Sep stares into the bathroom mirror. It’s not some weird lipstick (she never wears lipstick). Her lips are just - white. In a panic, she digs up an old lipstick and smears it on her colorless lips. But soon, more and more white spots begin to bloom, spreading their chalky tendrils across her olive brown skin. Does she have a disease? Is she turning into some kind of freak?

With a 50/50 shot at inheriting her family's genetic curse, Rose is skeptical about pursuing anything that presumes she'll live to be a healthy adult - including her dream career in ballet and the possibility of falling in love. But when she meets a boy from a similarly flawed genetic pool and gets an audition for a dance scholarship across the country, Rose begins to question her carefully laid rules.

In Diva, the companion to Alex Flinn's YA novel Breathing Under Water, Caitlin is dealing with a lot. She's living through the aftermath of an abusive relationship, she has a youth-obsessed mother who just doesn't understand her, and she's on a constant yo-yo diet to live up the standards of her nitpicking friends. All Caitlin wants is to escape her not-so-glamorous life and pursue her dream of becoming a singer, but when she's accepted into the Miami High School of the Arts, her life doesn't magically become perfect.

Zycie osiemnastoletniej Kaski zmienia sie o 180 stopni, gdy pewnego dnia zdaje sobie sprawe, ze musi schudnac. Kiedy po wielu perturbacjach trafia w rece ekscentrycznej specjalistki od odchudzania, zaczyna sie nowy, znacznie lzejszy i szczesliwszy rozdzial w jej zyciu. Kaska diametralnie odmienia swój stosunek do szkolnych przesladowczyn, staje sie asertywna, otwiera sie na nowe znajomosci, a przede wszystkim po raz pierwszy w zyciu poznaje smak milosci.

Meet Sloane Emily Jacobs: A seriously stressed-out figure skater who choked during junior nationals. Now meet Sloane Devon Jacobs, a spunky ice hockey player who's been suspended from her team for too many aggressive hip checks. The two girls are on their way to skating camps in Montreal when a luggage mix-up causes them to meet. Pretty soon, the Sloanes realize that this is the opportunity they’ve been waiting for: the chance to escape their lives and switch places for the summer.