Times are bad for 17-year-old Wyatt Lathem. All extracurricular activities at East Canton High have been cut due to the poor economy, so Wyatt’s baseball season is over before it begins. His coach advises Wyatt to get out—out of the school, out of the town—since there’s no future there, a move made more urgent by a violent clash between Wyatt and his volatile stepfather.

What Wyatt really wants to do is put his life in order, like those nicely aligned bullet points on his English teacher’s blackboard. So, after the fight, he heads to Silver City to live with his Aunt Hildy. Right off the bat, he meets sexy and mysterious Greer, a 19-year-old girl with a reputation; soon they are sleeping together, and Wyatt doesn’t quite seem to realize he’s in over his head.

It turns out that Wyatt and Greer have quite a bit in common. Their stepfathers are both jerks, and their fathers are both inmates at the nearby prison. Greer’s father is in for committing arson, Wyatt’s dad for murder. Greer says her father thinks Wyatt’s is innocent, and when Wyatt begins getting phone calls from his father, after years of hearing nothing from him, a plan begins to percolate: He will help his father escape and prove his innocence.

It’s fitting that Wyatt Lathem’s last name is an anagram for Hamlet: His father has been a ghostly presence in his life, and he is about to look into his father’s past to become the stuff of tragedy. By the end of the tale, no lives are left unaffected. Death looms, but so does reconciliation in this thrilling tale of family, bad decisions conceived with earnest good intentions, love and hope. Abrahams devises his tale meticulously, creating a believable teenaged protagonist with the right mix of earnestness, innocence and naiveté. Like the Shakespearean tragedy that lends it an undertone of menace, this tale quickens its pace as the players come together to take their fated roles, and Wyatt is forever changed by it all.

Margaret McMullan returns to Mississippi and its history in the gripping Sources of Light. After her father’s war-hero death in Vietnam, Samantha Thomas and her mother relocate to Jackson, Mississippi, near her father’s hometown. While her mother teaches art history at the local college, Sam begins her freshman year of high school in 1962, simply wanting to fit in like the popular Mary Alice, eagerly awaiting her first dance with Mary Alice’s older brother and hoping to fill out her new bra.

After her mom’s friend Perry gives her a camera and ongoing photography lessons, Sam begins to notice and document the racial tensions in Jackson: the violence that spurs from a lunch counter sit in and the deterioration of her community as energy is spent on the “black problem” rather than schools, houses and roads. The town deems Sam, her mother and Perry “agitators” when they take an interest in racial equality, including registering blacks to vote.

When Sam’s family is the target of threats and vandalism from a white supremacist group, they must decide whether to continue helping local African Americans. Adding to the dilemma is Sam’s desire to keep her first boyfriend, even though he may be involved in the violence. A regular girl with bold ideas, Sam realizes that like her father, she is caught in the crossfire of war—and she wonders if she will come out a hero, too. Her keen observations on both adolescence and the racial divide will teach readers about the Civil Rights Movement and growing up in the early 1960s.

Using photography as a metaphor, McMullan shows how Sam looks for the sources of light and good amidst the hatred that surrounds her. Inserting elements of her own childhood and even alluding to her previous Reconstruction novel When I Crossed No-Bob, she seamlessly blends fact and fiction and portrays this turbulent time in American history with candor and grace.

Angela Leeper is a librarian at the University of Richmond.

Sixteen-year-old Sydney Biggs is a girl in trouble and then some: not just pregnant, but grounded with good cause. When best bud Natalia “borrows” her mom’s car, it’s just to drive Sydney to inform the father-to-be, Tommy. But the car is reported stolen, and both girls are taken home by the police. It’s the last straw for Sydney’s mother; she turns Syd over to her father’s care for the summer, and he enrolls her in a wilderness camp, which Natalia ends up attending as well.

In Every Little Thing in the World, Nina de Gramont has given terrific authenticity and freshness to a common story and a setting rife with potential clichés. Syd’s parents are both so wrapped up in their own concerns that she needs to rely on friends and fellow campers to help decide what to do. But the summer will strain her friendship with Natalia to the breaking point, as revelations about Natalia’s own home life force her to rethink the meanings of “life” and “choice.”

Sydney is a great narrator, self-aware about her position in the social food chain and frank about her mistakes. (After losing her virginity to a long-term boyfriend with whom she practiced safe sex consistently, she slept with Tommy, as she says, “not because I especially liked him, but because I was flattered by how much he liked me.”) It’s easy to root for her to make a decision that will bring her some peace and self-preservation, and this smart and thought-provoking book doesn’t shy away from the consequences of each choice.

The power-hungry computer HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey seems like a harmless teddy bear compared to the truly horrific technological threat in Catherine Jinks’ latest novel, Living Hell. But as the novel begins, life aboard the space station Plexus is predictable and routine, even dull, and life on Earth is just a distant memory. For 17-year-old Cheney and his friends, born aboard the ship, Plexus is the only world they’ve ever known.

Soon the ship’s trajectory needs to be adjusted to avoid a dangerous band of radiation. But what starts as a fairly routine course adjustment turns into everyone’s worst nightmare, as Plexus gradually morphs from a self-contained, protective ecosystem into something resembling a living, breathing organism, a creature that sees the humans that occupy it as dangerous invaders to be annihilated. Not experienced enough to be a seasoned problem-solving specialist like his parents and their friends, yet not young enough to simply cower in a corner, Cheney must protect the younger kids while trying to figure out how—and why—Plexus seems so fixated on destroying them all.

With cinematic descriptions and nearly nonstop action, Living Hell begs to be adapted for the big screen. In the meantime, the large cast of characters—including the ominous Plexus itself—will play out their parts in readers’ imaginations, even as their adventures illustrate both biological concepts and philosophical concerns. “Life is a force that cannot be tamed,” observes Cheney, and readers will likely spend a long time—after their heart rates have gone back to normal—reflecting on just how true that is.

“Much depends on a best friend,” Will Grayson says. And when that best friend is Tiny Cooper, friendship is a big deal. Literally. Tiny is 6'6", so huge that when he sheds a tear, it could drown a kitten. So huge that one of his sobs measures on the Richter scale in Kansas (and he lives in Chicago). Will believes that Tiny may just be “the world’s largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world’s gayest person who is really, really large.” Tiny and Will have been friends since fifth grade, and Will stood up for Tiny when a school-board member argued against gays in the locker room. But recently Will has become too disengaged from life. He lives by two simple rules that have helped him to survive high school: “1. Don’t care too much. 2. Shut up.”

Will Grayson is not gay, but in one of many funny scenes in his first-person narrative, he meets another Will Grayson in a Chicago porn shop who is gay, and who begins a dramatic relationship with Tiny. This Will’s story forms the other half of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan, who each wrote one of the Wills.

As it turns out, the original Will still needs Tiny, too. Tiny is the one who does care, who always speaks his mind, who lives in larger-than-life drama and color. And when Tiny puts on a musical, it becomes the vehicle by which each character finds meaning and order in the universe. The musical is Tiny’s gift to the world, and his gift to the original Will Grayson is an appreciation of life and a repudiation of his anti-life rules.

Tiny will long live in readers’ imaginations—provided they have imaginations large enough to contain him. For an older young adult audience, this book about love, friends and what matters in life will be one of the best books of the year.

RELATED CONTENT
Read our interview with John Green and David Levithan for Will Grayson, Will Grayson.

Karen Healey’s debut novel, Guardian of the Dead, takes place at a boarding school in New Zealand, where Ellie Spencer is living away from home for the first time. As the novel begins, she seems concerned with normal teenage pastimes—settling into a new school environment, getting a bit tipsy with her friend Kevin, becoming involved in a play and catching glimpses of handsome day student Mark Nolan, who inspires daydreams as she sits in her Classics class.

The fantasy elements of the story evolve slowly, and Ellie herself is surprised by her increasingly intense interactions with Mark. When she literally runs into him, she experiences a physical shock, realizing that “the perfect planes of his pale face had rearranged themselves into something frightening.” But as unsettling as her encounters with Mark become, Ellie finds herself turning to him for help when her friend Kevin seems to be in danger from a mysterious woman named Reka. In her efforts to save Kevin, Ellie must learn to trust her own emerging powers as well as the world Mark opens for her—a mythological world populated by mist-dwelling Maori fairy people, known as the patupaiarehe, who need human lives to gain immortality. The incredible battle that follows tests Ellie’s commitment to her friends, her country and her growing love for Mark.

Guardian of the Dead will appeal to readers who are fans of young adult authors such as Holly Black and Libba Bray. And without a doubt, Healey will soon have many fans of her own.

“TWO WEEKS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE,” promises a flyer at the local grocery store. Change is just what studious Georgia—whose piled-on academic and family responsibilities have resulted in secret panic attacks—needs. She recruits petite, artistic Riley, her best friend since kindergarten, and along with nearly a dozen high school students from their Philadelphia suburb, they travel to the border town of Juárez, Mexico, to give a squatters’ village called Anapra its first bathroom.

Beth Kephart’s lyrical new book, The Heart Is Not a Size, describes the community’s joyous interest in the Americans, their camaraderie and their survival amid poverty, harsh desert conditions and the increasing number of haunting, unsolved muertas—murders of young women and teens. Kephart’s gentle storytelling captures Georgia’s concerns, her “fuzzy collisions of optimism and despair,” as she tries to shoulder the burden of responsibility and confront the truth about Riley’s escalating eating disorder at the expense of their friendship.

Georgia’s secrets are also revealed with the help of fellow group member Drake, a privileged yet compassionate teen who shares her enthusiasm for the poet Jack Gilbert. While it takes the combined efforts of their team to transform the village, she discovers that one person can make a difference when it comes to friendship. Inspired by a trip the author took with family and church members to Anapra, The Heart Is Not a Size will encourage teens to open their hearts (no matter the size) in their relationships and give back to the Earth and its residents.

Ring the bells of Redwall Abbey—there’s another chronicle of Mossflower Wood! For those not familiar with the series, the Redwall novels are set in a fantasy world inhabited by intelligent mice, hares, shrews and more. Each tale almost invariably involves a conflict between “good” animals and various evil “vermin”—rats, stoats, weasels, ferrets and so on. It’s a formula that fans adore, which Jacques has great talent for exploring in surprising variety.

The Sable Quean begins with an evil plot by the self-proclaimed “Sable Quean,” a black-furred weasel name Vilaya. Rather than storm the well-protected abbey, Vilaya sends her lieutenant, the vicious weasel Zwilt the Shade, to kidnap the “dibbuns” (or children) of Redwall Abbey. Her scheme is to ransom the children for control of Redwall, thereby capturing the entire realm without a fight. But Vilaya does not expect the arrival of Blademaster Buckler Kordyne and his friend Diggs, two soldier hares sent to Redwall with a gift for the current abbess. Naturally, the two heroes discover the plot, and set out to rescue the missing little ones—who are already proving that capturing the “dibbuns” is an entirely different thing from keeping them captive.

The Sable Quean stands on its own; you need not have read the series to jump into this one. Redwall lovers will delight in little tidbits from the other books woven throughout, while newcomers may have their appetites whetted for more. Jacques peppers his stories with unusual characters, and this is no exception, from the first ever “warrior mole” to an insane hedgehog. Some readers may find his dialects a challenge (mole speech is particularly obscure), and the frequent poetry tends to interrupt the action, though Redwall fans will likely enjoy these bits of woodland culture. Typical of the series, there’s not a lot of subtlety—the villains’ motivations are rudimentary at best—nor is there much character growth. But there’s plenty of adventure with engaging plot twists, as well as likable characters to delight fantasy fans young and old. In the end, The Sable Quean is an enjoyable addition to a popular series, and a treat for Redwallers everywhere.

Howard Shirley is a children’s writer and lifelong fantasy reader. You can visit his website at www.howardshirleywriter.com.

Like last year’s critically acclaimed Marcelo in the Real World, Francisco X. Stork’s The Last Summer of the Death Warriors is the story of a teen faced with difficult choices before the start of a new school year. Kicked out of his foster home and recently orphaned, 17-year-old Pancho Sanchez has one more chance at St. Anthony’s, an orphanage in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Unable to find a construction job for the season, he becomes the aide to fellow resident Daniel Quentin, known as D.Q., who is dying from a type of brain cancer known as diffuse pontine glioma. The immediate allusions to Don Quixote give depth to the quiet steadiness of the novel.

D.Q. has another round of treatment, which he knows he can bear because it will give him one more opportunity to confess his heart to Marisol, a young worker at Casa Esperanza, his outpatient home. And he’ll even endure the two-week recovery period with the bipolar mother who turned him over to St. Anthony’s as a child—if afterwards he can be legally emancipated, allowing him to die where he chooses and to follow the tenets of his Death Warrior Manifesto, a declaration to “love life at all times and in all circumstances.” (“‘Life Warrior’ is probably more accurate because the manifesto is about life,” admits D.Q., “but ‘Death Warrior’ is more mysterious-sounding.”)

Their journey out of town provides the angry, depressed Pancho with a way to avenge the death of his mentally challenged older sister after the police, claiming she died of natural causes, filed away the case. He is also a boxing fan, and the author takes great care jabbing boxing imagery into the Hispanic teen’s own fight for life. Like his literary predecessor, Pancho’s observations of D.Q. illuminate his friend’s idealism and his attempts to claim love in spite of the disease attacking his body and mind. In an unflinching ending, Pancho must decide between carrying out a certain death sentence or finding faith and his place in humanity—and becoming a true Death Warrior.

Angela Leeper is a librarian at the University of Richmond.

Meet Mary Quinn: 12-year-old orphan, thief and pickpocket, sentenced to die for her crimes. Saved from the gallows, she’s transformed from a street urchin into a fine young example of womanhood, thanks to Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy For Girls. On the cusp of her 17th birthday, she learns that the Academy is a front for Victorian London’s top secret women’s detective agency—and she is invited to join.

Mary’s first assignment places her in the household of a wealthy merchant suspected of sabotaging his own cargo ships in an insurance fraud scheme. Employed as a companion for the Thorolds’ daughter, Mary must entertain the miserable girl while trying to unearth any incriminating data. As it turns out, she’s not the only one seeking this information . . . and the Thorold family aren’t the only ones with secrets to protect.

A Spy in the House is, by any yardstick, an excellent novel. A fine whodunit, with clues carefully rationed out as the story evolves, it also holds some great surprises likely to catch even the sharpest readers off guard. There’s keener plotting and more depth to the characters than in many “adult” mysteries, and the grit and grime of London in the midst of a summer heat wave is palpable. Issues of race, class and the world’s oldest profession are tastefully interwoven with the story; much is made clear from the context in which it appears, but parents should be prepared to answer a few questions if they arise.

Mystery novels for younger readers often rely on excessive humor or quirkiness to offset the scariness inherent to suspense. This can disappoint a reader looking for a “real” mystery. A Spy in the House is entirely true to the genre, full of thrills and danger and wonderfully sharp writing. That’s the good news. Even better is that this is just the first part of a planned trilogy, so those of us who are already hooked can look forward to two more novels. I, for one, can't wait. Long live The Agency!

Heather Seggel is a freelance writer. She lives and works in Ukiah, California.

Martin Stokes is a 17-year-old black high school student. Arrested on his own front stoop for “steering” an undercover cop to a drug dealer, he’s spent five months in jail at Rikers Island when this story begins. By turns bleak and funny, Rikers High follows Martin’s struggles with his overworked legal-aid attorney, the bullying of his fellow inmates, a complicated home life and his own burgeoning anger at the unfairness of his incarceration. The novel spans just two and a half weeks, but those few days feel as long as a lifetime.

Rikers High opens with Martin being cut in the face with a razor, and the story builds tension around whether or not he will seek revenge for the attack and jeopardize his chance for release. Author Paul Volponi taught adolescents at Rikers Island for six years, and he notes in a foreword that while the characters are fictitious, most of what transpires in the novel really happened at some point on his watch. That includes corrections officers beating up inmates and fighting with the teachers, kids beating up on each other and even one death, as well as seemingly endless hours of mind-numbing boredom. Volponi balances the excitement of the story’s various conflicts with a real sense of how long the days feel when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do—when fighting for the fun of it begins to seem like legitimate entertainment.

Martin is a smart kid with a good sense of humor (“I’d been sitting five feet from [the teacher] for a week, with a big cut on my face. But he still had no idea I was his student. He should have been a detective instead of a teacher. Then maybe the jail would be empty and some high school . . . would be full of kids.”), and readers will root for him to do the right thing. They’ll also have much to discuss with this engrossing and thought-provoking read.

Heather Seggel is a freelance writer in Ukiah, California.

It’s been almost two years since Melissa’s father lost his long-fought battle to cancer. She keeps him alive by remembering the unusual information he loved, like the fact that glass takes a million years to decay. These interesting tidbits offer the high school freshman a new way of looking at the world, but they don’t provide any guidance on how to grow up and work through her continuing grief.

While her older sister Ashley begins preparing for beauty pageants, following in the footsteps of their gorgeous mother, who has started dating again, plainer Melissa just wants everything to remain the same. At least she can depend on Ryan, her childhood friend who still likes to ride bikes in the river wash behind their Phoenix desert homes—until curvy, confident Courtney transfers to their school and immediately sets her sights on Ryan. And Melissa has always thought she could depend on her adoring father’s impeccable reputation, until she discovers clues about a woman from his past.

As she dates a popular senior athlete (as much a surprise to her as it is to the rest of the school), all the while hiding her envy of Ryan and his new girlfriend, Melissa achingly ponders beauty, jealousy, secrets and the signs of first love. Instead of seeking out the answers to her family’s mysteries, she realizes that she can fill in the gaps with her own stories. And taking her father’s facts and wisdom to heart, she also realizes that relationships are like glass: they may break into pieces around you, but those pieces stay with you forever.

In Jillian Cantor’s expressive, eloquently rendered coming-of-age novel, The Life of Glass, the broken-glass motif echoes throughout Melissa’s heartfelt story of love and resilience. Cantor’s pitch-perfect narration and spot-on depiction of emotional turmoil will remind readers of the exquisite fragility of adolescence.

Angela Leeper is a librarian at the University of Richmond.

Most adults would probably agree that the wisdom that comes with age is in large part due to having experienced both love and the death of a loved one. They’d also probably agree that while the former can be painful, the latter is infinitely more so, and it’s the one thing they wouldn’t wish on anyone else. In Jennifer R. Hubbard’s debut novel The Secret Year, Colt Morrissey isn’t so lucky: Julia Vernon, the girl he’s been secretly seeing for the past year, has died tragically, and to make it worse, he’s had to keep the grief bottled up. Then one day, Julia’s brother Michael confronts him with Julia’s journal, tells him he knows about their relationship and gives him the book.

In the days and weeks that follow, as he slowly relives their romance from Julia’s point of view, Colt will change the way he feels about Julia, his friends, his family and ultimately himself. It won’t be easy, though; Syd, the girl who’s been his pal since grade school, has suddenly taken an interest in him that is more than friendly, and Colt in turn is finding himself attracted to Kirby, Michael’s girlfriend. And at home, Colt’s older brother comes home from college with a startling announcement. All of these elements pivot around the dynamic of the culture clash between Colt’s lower-class neighborhood and Julia’s friends (and boyfriend Austin) from the “right” side of the tracks on Black Mountain.

Teen readers will see a lot of themselves in this book, and that includes some things that parents may find uncomfortable. Hubbard succeeds in avoiding the obvious clichés in The Secret Year; her characterizations are realistic, as is the plot. There are no easy solutions in life, and no storybook endings—we make the best of what fate gives us, and that is what Colt does.

James Neal Webb has more wisdom than he’d like, unfortunately.