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 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 Mary E. Pearson
Series Jenna Fox Chronicles

In the not-too-distant future, when biotechnological advances have made synthetic bodies and brains possible but illegal, a   seventeen-year-old girl, recovering from a serious accident and suffering from memory lapses, learns a startling secret about her existence.

By Tamora Pierce
Series Song of the Lioness Quartet

Eleven–year–old Alanna, who aspires to be a knight even though she is a girl, disguises herself as a boy to become a royal page, learning many hard lessons along her path to high adventure.

By Karen Hesse

An Aleutian Islander recounts her suffering during World War II in American internment camps designed to "protect" the population from the invading Japanese.

By Jason Reynolds

When sixteen-year-old Rashad is mistakenly accused of stealing, classmate Quinn witnesses his brutal beating at the hands of a police officer who happens to be the older brother of his best friend. Told through Rashad and Quinn's alternating viewpoints.

By Jennifer Niven

Meeting on the ledge of their school's bell tower, misfit Theodore Finch and suicidal Violet Markey find acceptance and healing that are overshadowed by Finch's fears about Violet's growing social world.

By Tiffany Jackson

Mary B. Addison killed a baby. Allegedly. She didn't say much in that first interview with detectives, and the media filled in the only blanks that mattered: a white baby had died while under the care of a churchgoing black woman and her nine–year–old daughter. The public convicted Mary and the jury made it official. But did she do it?

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 Kiersten White
Series Conquerors Saga

WEver since Lada Dragwlya and her brother, Radu, were wrenched from their homeland of Wallachia and abandoned by their father to be raised in the Ottoman courts, Lada has known that being ruthless is the key to survival, and when she meets Mehmed, the heir to the very empire that Lada has sworn to fight against, complications arise as Lada, Radu and Mehmed form a toxic triangle that strains the bonds of love and loyalty to the breaking point.

By Anne Frank
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Tuesday, March 10, 2020. 7:30 PM.

Commemorating the 75th anniversary of Anne Frank's death

Teens Welcome

The autobiographical reminiscences of a young Jewish girl coming of age during World War II describes her life in hiding from the Nazis and offers a poignant study of the tragedy of the Holocaust.

By Barry Lyga

A fifteen-year-old "geek" who keeps a list of the high school jocks and others who torment him, and pours his energy into creating a great graphic novel, encounters Kyra, Goth Girl, who helps change his outlook on almost everything, including himself.

By Emily X. R Pan
With Meghan Fangmann, Librarian, Pam Strudler, Librarian

Tuesday, August 6, 2019. 7:30 PM.

A teen grieving the loss of her mother travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time and search for her mother's spirit while uncovering tragic family secrets and struggling to reconcile the truth about how her mother's life really ended.

By Lucy Grealy

A memoir in which award–winning poet Lucy Grealy recalls her experiences with a potentially terminal cancer that required she have a third of her jaw removed when she was nine years old, and discusses the suffering she endured as she was growing up from classmates, strangers, and other people because of her looks.

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 Heather Demetrios

Desperate to escape her small California town and the home of her controlling parents, aspiring artist Grace falls in love with Gavin, a charming young man who gradually reveals a controlling and dangerous nature.

By Suzanne Collins
Series Hunger Games Trilogy

In a prequel to The Hunger Games, eighteen–year–old Coriolanus Snow prepares to mentor the female tribute from District 12 in the tenth Hunger Games, with the fate of his family hanging on the slim chance that he can help her win the Games.

By Kami Garcia
Series Beautiful Creatures

Ethan is powerfully drawn to Lena, a new classmate with whom he shares a psychic connection and whose family hides a dark secret that may be revealed on her sixteenth birthday.

By Libba Bray

When a plane crash strands thirteen teen beauty contestants on a mysterious island, they struggle to survive, to get along with one another, to combat the island's other diabolical occupants, and to learn their dance numbers in case they are rescued in time for the competition.

By Jenny Downham

A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and carries out a list of things to do before she dies.

By Robin Schneider

Star athlete and prom king Ezra Faulkner's life is irreparably transformed by a tragic accident and the arrival of eccentric new girl Cassidy Thorpe.

By Meg Wolitzer

Jam Gallahue, fifteen, unable to cope with the loss of her boyfriend Reeve, is sent to a therapeutic boarding school in Vermont, where a journal-writing assignment for an exclusive, mysterious English class transports her to the magical realm of Belzhar, where she and Reeve can be together.

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 Ruta Sepetys
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director, Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

In 1941, Lina and her family are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia.

By Mariatu Kamara with Susan McClelland

When Mariatu set out for a neighborhood village in Sierra Leone, she was kidnapped and tortured, and both of her hands cut off. She turned to begging to survive. This heart-rending memoir is a testament to her courage and resilience. Today she is a UNICEF Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict.

By Matt Dickinson

Having made a discovery of significance beneath the Antarctic ice cap, scientist Lauren Burgess rescues two explorers trapped on the ice only to find her science team targeted by one of the explorers, who has gone mad from isolation.

By Melissa De la Cruz
Series Blue Bloods Novels

Select teenagers from some of New York City's wealthiest and most socially prominent families learn a startling secret about their bloodlines.

By April Henry
Series Point Last Seen

While helping the Portland County Sheriff's Search and Rescue team search for a missing autistic man, teens Alexis, Nick and Ruby find the dead body of a girl and join forces to find the girl's murderer, forging an unlikely friendship in the process.

By Siobhan Dowd

In 1981, the height of Ireland’s "Troubles," eighteen–year–old Fergus is distracted from his upcoming A–level exams by his imprisoned brother’s hunger strike, the stress of being a courier for Sinn Fein, and dreams of a murdered girls whose body he discovered in a bog.

By Laura Ruby
Recommended By Kaye Spurrell, Readers' Services Librarian

Eighteen-year-old Finn, an outsider in his quiet Midwestern town, is the only witness to the abduction of town favorite Roza, but his inability to distinguish between faces makes it difficult for him to help with the investigation, and subjects him to even more ridicule and bullying.

By Shannon Hale

Fifteen-year-old Dashti, sworn to obey her sixteen-year-old mistress, the Lady Saren, shares Saren's years of punishment locked in a tower, then brings her safely to the lands of her true love, where both must hide who they are as they work as kitchen maids.

By Marcus Zuzak
With Jackie Ranaldo, Head of Readers' Services

Wednesday, January 27, 2010.  7 PM.

Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel - a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.

By Jason Reynolds

Soon after his mother's death, Matt takes a job at a funeral home in his tough Brooklyn neighborhood and, while attending and assisting with funerals, begins to accept her death and his responsibilities as a man.

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 Jane Yolen

A retelling of the Sleeping Beauty tale finds Briar Rose living in forests patrolled by the German army during World War II in a dark tale of the Holocaust.

By Lauren Oliver

Everyone thinks Mia and Brynn killed their best friend after becoming obsessed and delusional over a novel, but on the anniversary of their friend's death a discovery pulls them back together to find out what actually happened that night.

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 Peadar Ó Gulin

One by one, the teenagers of Ireland are called to the nightmarish Grey Land of the Sídhe (wicked fae). The teens reappear after only three minutes, but with magically misshapen bodies – or dead. Readers follow a class of fourteen–year–olds, including Nessa, with polio–twisted legs, as they experience the Call in a grisly and gripping plot.

By Laurie Halse Anderson

After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

By Deborah Heiligman

Charles Darwin and his wife, Emma, were deeply in love and very supportive of each other, but their opinions often clashed. Emma was extremely religious, and Charles questioned God’s very existence.

By Stephanie Kuehn

Exiled to a remote Vermont boarding school in the wake of a family tragedy and harboring a secret dread that he will turn into a vicious wolf just like his father, Andrew struggles with violent impulses and battles painful memories of a fateful summer that led to his isolation.

By James L. Swanson

Recounts the escape of John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's assassin, and follows the intensive twelve-day search for him and his accomplices.

By Swati Avasthi

Acting out superhero fantasies on the streets and rooftops of Chicago, best friends Corey, Holly and Savitri are shattered by a murderous act of violence that leaves two of them disillusioned and unable to move on, in a tale complemented by comic-style art sections.

By Kara Thomas
Recommended By Melissa Contino, Library Clerk

The surviving sister of a cheerleader who was one of five girls who died violently years earlier realizes during a memory-laden memorial that the tragedies may have been more sinister.

By Tomi Adeyemi
Series Legacy of Orïsha

Coming of age in a land where her magi mother was killed by the zealous king's guards along with other former wielders of magic, Zélie embarks on a journey alongside her brother and a fugitive princess to restore her people's magical abilities.

By Tomi Adeyemi
Series Legacy of Orïsha

After Zâelie and Amari bring magic back to the land of Orïsha, the monarchy and military unite to keep control of Orïsha, forcing Zâelie to fight to secure Amari's right to the throne and protect the new maji from the monarchy's wrath.

By Franny Billingsley

In the early twentieth century in Swampsea, seventeen-year-old Briony, who can see the spirits that haunt the marshes around their town, feels responsible for her twin sister's horrible injury until a young man enters their lives and exposes secrets that even Briony does not know about.

By Cassandra Clare
Series Mortal Instruments

Suddenly able to see demons and the Darkhunters who are dedicated to returning them to their own dimension, fifteen–year–old Clary Fray is drawn into this bizzare world when her mother disappears and Clary herself is almost killed by a monster.

By Elizabeth Acevedo

Two sisters mourn their father’s death after his plane crashes on a flight to the Dominican Republic.