By Maureen Johnson

When seventeen–year–old Ginny receives a packet of mysterious envelopes from her favorite aunt, she leaves New Jersey to criss–cross Europe on a sort of scavenger hunt that transforms her life.

By Paul Auster
Recommended By Pam Martin, Assistant Library Director

A single child born in 1947 experiences four parallel lifetimes poignantly marked by shifting family fortunes, athletic pursuits, friendships, sex, intellectual passions, and the same intriguing woman.

By Richard Slotkin

A biographical novel depicting an intimate portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

By Sherman Alexie
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all–white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.

By John Green

Having been recently dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, recent high school graduate and former child prodigy Colin sets off on a road trip with his best friend to try to find some new direction in life while also trying to create a mathematical formula to explain his relationships.

By Alison Espach
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

“In Espach's charming coming-of-age debut, 14-year-old Emily Vidal's life begins to veer off course at her father's 50th birthday party when he announces that he and her mother are divorcing… (From Publishers Weekly).”

By Mark Twain

When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series of adventures. Beneath the exploits, however, are more serious undercurrents - of slavery, adult control and, above all, of Huck's struggle between his instinctive goodness and the corrupt values of society, which threaten his deep and enduring friendship with Jim.

By Mark Twain

The adventures of a mischievous young boy and his friends growing up in a Mississippi River town in the nineteenth century.

 

Became numerous movies: Tom Sawyer (1907, 1917, 1930, 1936, 1973. 1973-TV movie, 1984, and 2000), Huck and Tom (1918), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1938), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944 and 1985), Back to Hannibal: The Return of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1990-TV movie), and Tom and Huck (1995).

By Karen Thompson Walker
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

A painstakingly researched debut imagines the coming-of-age story of young Julia, whose world is thrown into upheaval when it is discovered that the Earth's rotation has suddenly begun to slow, posing a catastrophic threat to all life.

By Alberto Moravia

A thirteen-year-old boy, on vacation at a Tuscan seaside resort, joins a local group of young toughs and struggles to overcome his troubling attachment to his beautiful widowed mother.

By Jonathan Evison

Loner William Miller tries to cope after his mother dies of cancer, his bodybuilding father remarries a grief counselor, and he falls in love with his stepsister Lulu.

By Sarah Dessen

When Auden impulsively goes to stay with her father, stepmother, and new baby sister the summer before she starts college, all the trauma of her parents' divorce is revived, even as she is making new friends and having new experiences such as learning to ride a bike and dating.

By Ethan Canin

Corey Sifter is befriended by the wealthy Metarey family, a politically powerful dynasty in New York, and becomes an aide to New York senator Henry Bonwiller as he runs for the Democratic presidential nomination during the Nixon era.

By Ayad Akhtar

A young Pakistani boy, whose parents left the fundamentalists behind when they came to America, finds transformation and a path to happiness through a family friend, Mina, who shows him the beauty and power of the Quran.

By Ibi Zoboi

Separated from her detained mother after moving from Haiti to America, Fabiola struggles to navigate the home of her loud cousins and a new school on Detroit's gritty west side, where a surprising romance and a dangerous proposition challenge her ideas about freedom.

By Jacqueline Woodson
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, November 14, 2017. 7:30 PM

Torn between the fantasies of her youth and the realities of a life marked by violence and abandonment, August reunites with a beloved old friend who challenges her to reconcile her past and come to terms with the difficulties that forced her to grow up too quickly.

By Hilary Thayer Hamann
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

"Hamann's debut traces the sensual, passionate, and lonely interior of a young woman artist growing up in windswept East Hampton at the end of the 1970’s (From the Publisher)."

By Lauren Groff
Recommended By Isabel Zinman, Readers' Services Librarian

“In a haunting story of the American dream, Bit, born in a back-to-nature commune in 1970s New York State, must come to grips with the outside world when the commune eventually fails (From the Publisher).”

By Judy Blume

Faced with the difficulties of growing up and choosing a religion, a twelve–year–old girl talks over her problems with her own private God.

By Ernest Cline
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager
With Stacey Mencher, Readers' Services Librarian

Monday, April 8, 2019. 7:30 PM.

Struggling to complete his final month of high school only to glimpse a UFO that exactly resembles an enemy ship from his favorite video game, Zack Lightman questions his sanity before becoming one of millions of gamers tasked with protecting the Earth during an alien invasion.

By Chad Harbach
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian
With Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, February 26, 2013.  1:30 PM.

A baseball star at a small college near Lake Michigan launches a routine throw that goes disastrously off course and inadvertently changes the lives of five people, including the college president, a gay teammate, and the president's daughter.

By Jamie O'Neill

In a story set against the backdrop of Dublin in 1915, two boys who meet at the local swimming hole plan to swim to an island in Dublin Bay the following Easter, but their plans coincide with the Easter uprising--a historic rebellion that changes their lives.

By Iain Lawrence

In the spring of 1943, sixteen-year-old Kak, desperate to escape his abusive parents, lies about his age to enlist in the Canadian Air Force and soon finds himself based in England as part of a crew flying bombing raids over Germany.

By Dai Sijie

At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” When the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation their re-education takes a most surprising turn.

By Dorothy Allison

Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, keeps quiet about her stepfather’s abuse.

By Uzodinma Iweala
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

Recruited by a unit of guerrilla fighters after the brutal murder of his father by militants, a West African student falls under the spell of his dangerous commander, and finds his new life increasingly contrasting with his former existence.

By Mark Sullivan
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

A teenage boy in 1940s Italy becomes part of an underground railroad that helps Jews escape through the Alps but is forced by his parents to enlist as a German soldier for his own protection, where he becomes a spy for the Allies.

By Robert Sharenow

German soldiers take Peter from a Warsaw orphanage, and soon he is adopted by Professor Kaltenbach, a prominent Nazi, but Peter forms his own ideas about what he sees and hears and decides to take a risk that is most dangerous in 1942 Berlin.

By Craig Thompson
Recommended By Meghan F., Children's Services Librarian , Kaye Spurrell, Readers' Services Librarian

Blankets is the story of a young man coming of age and finding the confidence to express his creative voice.

By Toni Morrison
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

The story of Pecola Breedlove profiles an eleven-year-old black girl growing up in an America that values blue-eyed blondes and the tragedy that results from her longing to be accepted.

By Jonathan Tropper

“…In the marvelously funny and self-deprecating voice of Joe, Tropper fully realizes his characters and tells their stories with poignancy, wit, and charm. This coming-of-age story is a keeper…(From Library Journal).”

By E. Lockhart
Series Ruby Oliver

A Seattle fifteen–year–old explains some of the reasons for her recent panic attacks, including breaking up with her boyfriend, losing all her girlfriends, tensions between her performance–artist mother and her father, and more.

By Robin Kirman

The brutal murder of a Harvard senior and rumors about a charismatic instructor haunt the lives of three graduates over the course of a decade-long search for answers.

By Hanif Kureishi

Karim's father becomes London's buddha of suburbia & draws his son into an overwhelming world of eccentric people & extravagant parties.

By Meg Medina
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian
With Meghan Fangmann, Librarian, Pam Strudler, Librarian

Tuesday, August 7, 2018. 7:30 PM

Enduring the infamous New York summer of 1977 in the wake of arson fires, a massive blackout and the Son of Sam serial killings, 17-year-old Nora Lopez navigates the additional stresses of her family's limited finances, her father's absence and her brother's growing violence.

By Claire Messud

Lifelong friends Julia and Cassie find their relationship tested as their paths diverge during adolescence as Cassie embarks on a dangerous journey.

By André Aciman
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

The sudden and powerful attraction between a teenage boy and a summer guest at his parents' house on the Italian Riviera has a profound and lasting influence that will mark them both for a lifetime.

By Stephen King

An introverted girl with remarkable powers of telekinesis faces the horrors of teenage life and unleashes a few horrors of her own when she attends the high school prom.

By J.D. Salinger
Recommended By Amy B., Children's Librarian

In an effort to escape the hypocrisies of life at his boarding school, sixteen–year–old Holden Caulfield seeks refuge in New York City.

By Laura Moriarty
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

A young girl tries to make sense of an unruly world spinning around her. Growing up with a single mother who is chronically out of work and dating a married man, 10-year old Evelyn Bucknow learns early how to fend for herself.

By Alice McDermott

A teenage girl, raised on the east end of Long Island among the country estates of the rich, reflects on her understanding of human nature during a seemingly idyllic summer spent with her eight-year-old cousin Daisy.

By Yasmine El Rashidi

A woman in Cairo reflects on three pivotal summers of her life, including when she was a six– year– old unable to ask questions, an idealistic college student in the volatile Mubarak period, and an adult in the aftermath of Mubarak's overthrow.

By David Benioff
Recommended By Ralph Guiteau, Readers' Services Librarian

Documenting his grandparents' experiences during the siege of Leningrad, a young writer learns his grandfather's story about how a military deserter and he tried to secure pardons by gathering hard–to–find ingredients for a powerful colonel's daughter's wedding cake.

By Jean M. Auel
Series Earth's Children
Recommended By Lakshmi Kasturi, Library Clerk, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

An injured and orphaned infant carries within her the seed and hope of mankind in this epic of survival and destiny set at the dawn of prehistory.

 

Became the movie: Clan of the Cave Bear.

By J. Courtney Sullivan

Four college first year students at Smith form an intense bond that grows stronger throughout their college years and is put to the test after graduation.

By Angie Thomas
Recommended By Adrienne Rein, Library Clerk

A gang leader’s son finds his effort to go straight for the sake of his child challenged by a loved one’s brutal murder, in a poignant exploration of Black coming-of-age set 17 years before the events of the award-winning The Hate U Give.

By Jackie Collins
Series Lucky Santangelo
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

“A prequel to the Lucky Santangelo series features a headstrong teenaged Lucky, who after the murder of her mother escapes her notorious father’s protective stranglehold to pursue a life of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll (From the Publisher).”

By K.M. Walton
Recommended By Stacey Mencher, Technology and Applications Manager

When Bull Mastrick and Victor Konig wind up in the same psychiatric ward at age sixteen, each recalls and relates in group therapy the bullying relationship they have had since kindergarten.

By Meg Howrey
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“Kate is conflicted after she is offered her sister Gwen’s starring role in a ballet, especially because her jealousy prevented her from seeing the signs of mental breakdown that made Gwen lose the role (From the Publisher).”

By Caroline Leavitt
Recommended By Lisa H., Readers' Services Librarian

In 1969, sixteen– year– old Lucy is about to run away to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte.