Firebug, Lish McBride
Ava is a firebug—she can start fires with her mind. Which would all be well and good if she weren’t caught in a deadly contract with the Coterie, a magical mafia. She’s one of their main hit men . . . and she doesn’t like it one bit. Not least because her mother’s death was ordered by Venus—who is now her boss. When Venus asks Ava to kill a family friend, Ava rebels. She knows very well that you can’t say no to the Coterie and expect to get away with it, though, so she and her friends hit the road, trying desperately to think of a way out of the mess they find themselves in. Preferably keeping the murder to a minimum. (Goodreads)
First lines: Ryan slammed the book shut and tipped his head back, sprawling on the bench and claiming it as his own. I looked down at my lap, his current pillow, and shook my head.
“It’s cheating.”
“I’m not asking you to write the paper for me, Ava. Just engage in a lively discussion about the book.”
Hero Complex, Margaux Froley
Less than a month has passed since Devon Mackintosh uncovered the truth about the apparent suicide of Keaton’s golden boy and her unrequited love, Hutch. But that doesn’t mean the danger is over. Her own life has been threatened. Solving Hutch’s case only unearthed more questions: what lies beneath the Keaton land that could be so valuable as to tear the Hutchins family apart? Hutch’s grandfather, Reed Hutchins, knows the answer. But Reed is dying of cancer, and this dark family secret might die with him. Faced with no other option, Devon swipes Reed’s diary and plunges into his life as an 18-year-old science prodigy in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor. Through his adolescent eyes—and his role in biological weapons research, still classified to this day—Devon fights to piece together the final clues to what haunts the Keaton hillsides, the truth Reed’s enemies are still willing to kill for. (Goodreads)
First lines: The limo had seemed excessive. That was before Devon boarded the 250-foot mega yacht- where she handed her overnight bag to her personal butler, slipped on a hand-beaded Marchesa gown, and requested a sing from the children’s choir singing the Rolling Stones catalogue: “Moonlight Mile.” It seemed an appropriate song for the moonlight waters of the San Francisco Bay on New Years Eve.
Perfectly good white boy, Carrie Mesrobian
Sean Norwhalt can read between the lines.
“You never know where we’ll end up. There’s so much possibility in life, you know?” Hallie said.
He knows she just dumped him. He was a perfectly good summer boyfriend, but now she’s off to college, and he’s still got another year to go. Her pep talk about futures and “possibilities” isn’t exactly comforting. Sean’s pretty sure he’s seen his future and its “possibilities” and they all look disposable. Like the crappy rental his family moved into when his dad left.Like all the unwanted filthy old clothes he stuffs into the rag baler at his thrift store job. Like everything good he’s ever known. The only hopeful possibilities in Sean’s life are the Marine Corps, where no one expected he’d go, and Neecie Albertson, whom he never expected to care about.(Goodreads)
First lines: I stood in the back of the barn, in front of a pile of boxes marked “Tools,” watching the party go on. The senior girls’ spring party was usually down by the old railroad trestle bridge off Highway 10, but this time it was out on someone’s farm, so they’d decided to make it a goddamn hoedown or something.
A thousand pieces of you, Claudia Gray
Marguerite Caine’s physicist parents are known for their radical scientific achievements. Their most astonishing invention: the Firebird, which allows users to jump into parallel universes, some vastly altered from our own. But when Marguerite’s father is murdered, the killer—her parent’s handsome and enigmatic assistant Paul—escapes into another dimension before the law can touch him. Marguerite can’t let the man who destroyed her family go free, and she races after Paul through different universes, where their lives entangle in increasingly familiar ways. With each encounter she begins to question Paul’s guilt—and her own heart. Soon she discovers the truth behind her father’s death is more sinister than she ever could have imagined.(Goodreads)
First lines: My hand shakes as I brace myself against the brick wall. Rain falls cold and sharp against my skin, from a sky I’ve never seen before. It’s hard to catch my breath, to get any sense of where I am. All I know is that the Firebird worked. It hangs around my neck, glowing with the heat of the journey.
Dirty Wings, Sarah McCarry
Maia is a teenage piano prodigy and dutiful daughter, imprisoned in the oppressive silence of her adoptive parents’ house like a princess in an ivory tower. Cass is a street rat, witch, and runaway, scraping by with her wits and her knack for a five-fingered discount. When a chance encounter brings the two girls together, an unlikely friendship blossoms that will soon change the course of both their lives. Cass springs Maia from the jail of the only world she’s ever known, and Maia’s only too happy to make a break for it. But Cass didn’t reckon on Jason, the hypnotic blue-eyed rocker who’d capture Maia’s heart as soon as Cass set her free–and Cass isn’t the only one who’s noticed Maia’s extraordinary gifts. Is Cass strong enough to battle the ancient evil she’s unwittingly awakened–or has she walked into a trap that will destroy everything she cares about? In this time, like in any time, love is a dangerous game. (Goodreads)
First lines: Before any of this, she thinks, there was the kind of promise a girl just couldn’t keep. Before the bad decisions, before the night sky right now so big, so big it’s big enough to swallow the both of them, before her hands shaking stop shaking stop shaking stop shaking. She is standing at the precipice of a cliff, the edges of her vision sparking out into static, the heaving sea below her moving against the rocking shore with a roar.
Atlantia, Ally Condie
For as long as she can remember, Rio has dreamt of the sand and sky Above—of life beyond her underwater city of Atlantia. But in a single moment, all her plans for the future are thwarted when her twin sister, Bay, makes an unexpected decision, stranding Rio Below. Alone, ripped away from the last person who knew Rio’s true self—and the powerful siren voice she has long hidden—she has nothing left to lose. Guided by a dangerous and unlikely mentor, Rio formulates a plan that leads to increasingly treacherous questions about her mother’s death, her own destiny, and the complex system constructed to govern the divide between land and sea. Her life and her city depend on Rio to listen to the voices of the past and to speak long-hidden truths.(Goodreads)
First lines: My twin sister, Bay, and I pass underneath the brown-and-turquoise banners hanging from the ceiling of the temple. Dignitaries perch on their chairs in the gallery, watching and people crowd the pews in the nave. Statues of the gods adorn the walls and ceiling, and it seems as if they watch us, too.
Lies we tell ourselves, Robin Talley
In 1959 Virginia, the lives of two girls on opposite sides of the battle for civil rights will be changed forever. Sarah Dunbar is one of the first black students to attend the previously all-white Jefferson High School. An honours student at her old school, she is put into remedial classes, spit on and tormented daily. Linda Hairston is the daughter of one of the town’s most vocal opponents of school integration. She has been taught all her life that the races should be kept “separate but equal.”
Forced to work together on a school project, Sarah and Linda must confront harsh truths about race, power and how they really feel about one another.(Goodreads)
First lines: The white people are waiting for us. Chuck sees them first. He’s gone out ahead of our group to peer around the corner by the hardware store. From there you can see all of Jefferson High. The gleaming redbrick walls run forty feet high. The building is a block wide, and the window panes are spotless. A heavy concrete arch hangs over the two storey wood-and-glass doors at the front entrance.
Only ever yours, Louise O’Neill
In a world in which baby girls are no longer born naturally, women are bred in schools, trained in the arts of pleasing men until they are ready for the outside world. At graduation, the most highly rated girls become “companions”, permitted to live with their husbands and breed sons until they are no longer useful. For the girls left behind, the future – as a concubine or a teacher – is grim. Best friends freida and isabel are sure they’ll be chosen as companions – they are among the most highly rated girls in their year. But as the intensity of final year takes hold, isabel does the unthinkable and starts to put on weight.And then, into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride. freida must fight for her future – even if it means betraying the only friend, the only love, she has ever known.(Goodreads)
First lines: The chastities keep asking me why I can’t sleep. I am at the maximum permitted dosage of SleepSound, they say, eyes narrowed in suspicious concern. Are you taking it correctly, frieda? Are you taking it all yourself, freida? Yes.Yes. Now, can I have some more? Please?
The walled city, Ryan Graudin
730. That’s how many days I’ve been trapped.
18. That’s how many days I have left to find a way out.
DAI, trying to escape a haunting past, traffics drugs for the most ruthless kingpin in the Walled City. But in order to find the key to his freedom, he needs help from someone with the power to be invisible….
JIN hides under the radar, afraid the wild street gangs will discover her biggest secret: Jin passes as a boy to stay safe. Still, every chance she gets, she searches for her lost sister….
MEI YEE has been trapped in a brothel for the past two years, dreaming of getting out while watching the girls who try fail one by one. She’s about to give up, when one day she sees an unexpected face at her window…..(Goodreads)
First lines: There are three rules of survival in the Walled City: Run fast. Trust no one. Always carry your knife. Right now, my life depends completely on the first. Run, run, run.
Don’t you forget about me, Kate Karyus Quin
Welcome to Gardnerville. A place where no one gets sick. And no one ever dies.Except…
There’s a price to pay for paradise. Every fourth year, the strange power that fuels the town exacts its payment by infecting teens with deadly urges. In a normal year in Gardnerville, teens might stop talking to their best friends. In a fourth year, they’d kill them. Four years ago, Skylar’s sister, Piper, was locked away after leading sixteen of her classmates to a watery grave. Since then, Skylar has lived in a numb haze, struggling to forget her past and dull the pain of losing her sister. But the secrets and memories Piper left behind keep taunting Skylar—whispering that the only way to get her sister back is to stop Gardnerville’s murderous cycle once and for all.(Goodreads)
First lines: It was a bizarre May Day Parade at midnight instead of midday. There were no floats, no firefighters dressed in full gear tossing out bubble gum while their single siren blared, no horns tooting in time to the beat of the drums. The golden girls did not prance and smile with their silver batons spinning figure eights. Little kids with faces red and sticky from Popsicles and candy apples didn’t shove and shout and cry when the balloon they’d forgotten they were holding escaped into the sky.
Terror kid, Benjamin Zephaniah
Rico knows trouble. He knows the look of it and the sound of it. He also knows to stay away from it as best as he can. Because if there’s one thing his Romany background has taught him, it’s that he will always be a suspect. Despite his best efforts to stay on the right side of the law, Rico is angry and frustrated at the injustices he sees happening at home and around the world. He wants to do something – but what? When he is approached by Speech, a mysterious man who shares Rico’s hacktivist interests, Rico is given the perfect opportunity to speak out about injustice. After all, what harm can a peaceful cyber protest do…(Goodreads)
First lines: Rico stood and stared and the shopping trolley flew through the air and smashed through the sports shop window. The boots and shoulders of the rioters had already weakened the toughened glass, and the force of the trolley caused the whole pane to shatter and collapse.
Blackbird, Anna Carey
A girl wakes up on the train tracks, a subway car barreling down on her. With only minutes to react, she hunches down and the train speeds over her. She doesn’t remember her name, where she is, or how she got there. She has a tattoo on the inside of her right wrist of a blackbird inside a box, letters and numbers printed just below: FNV02198. There is only one thing she knows for sure: people are trying to kill her. On the run for her life, she tries to untangle who she is and what happened to the girl she used to be. Nothing and no one are what they appear to be. But the truth is more disturbing than she ever imagined.(Goodreads)
First lines: The train holds the heat of the sun, even an hour after it has sunk below the pavement, pushing its way below the sprawling city. At the Vermont/Sunset station, a Chinese woman with a severe black bob leans over the platform’s edge, trying to gauge how far away the train is. A group of high school kids stands under a poster for some TV show, sharing ipod buds and discussing a boy called Kool-Aid.
Where silence gathers, Kesley Sutton
For as long as she can remember, Alexandra Tate has been able to see personified Emotions, and she’s found a best friend in Revenge. He’s her constant companion as she waits outside Nate Foster’s house, clutching a gun. Every night since Nate’s release from prison, Alex has tried to work up the courage to exact her own justice on him for the drunk driving accident that killed her family. But there’s one problem: Forgiveness. When he appears, Alex is faced with a choice—moving on or getting even. It’s impossible to decide with Forgiveness whispering in one ear . . . and Revenge whispering in the other.(Goodreads)
First lines: Revenge finds me on the bridge. He sits down just as I finish my uncle’s bottle of rum. His legs dangle off the edge. I don’t look at him, and for a few moments neither of us says a word. Plumes of air leave my mouth with every breath. It’s still too cold for crickets, so the night is utterly silent. If I listen hard enough, I can almost hear the stars whispering to each other. Cruel, biting whispers.
Apple and Rain, Sarah Crossnan
When Apple’s mother returns after eleven years away, Apple feels whole again. But just like the stormy Christmas Eve when she left, her mother’s homecoming is bittersweet. It’s only when Apple meets someone more lost than she is that she begins to see things as they really are.(Goodreads)
First lines: I don’t know if what I remember is what happened or just how I imagined it happened now I’m old enough to tell stories. I’ve read about this thing called childhood amnesia. It means we can’t remember anything from when we were really small because before three years old we haven’t practiced the skill of remembering enough to do it very well. That’s the theory, but I’m not convinced.
Graphic novels
In real life, Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang
Anda loves Coarsegold Online, the massively-multiplayer role-playing game where she spends most of her free time. It’s a place where she can be a leader, a fighter, a hero. It’s a place where she can meet people from all over the world, and make friends.
But things become a lot more complicated when Anda befriends a gold farmer–a poor Chinese kid whose avatar in the game illegally collects valuable objects and then sells them to players from developed countries with money to burn. This behavior is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but Anda soon comes to realize that questions of right and wrong are a lot less straightforward when a real person’s real livelihood is at stake. (Goodreads)
Non fiction
The fashion book, Alexandra Black
From corsets and camis to tailoring and textiles, The Fashion Book is a sassy style guide for teenage girls who want to discover the stories behind their favorite looks, find their own style, and learn what makes the fashion world tick.Packed with gorgeous images, this illustrated book for young adults takes a unique look at fashion. It reveals how modern-day looks, from catwalk to high-street fashions, draw on the styles of the past from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and from the rebel attire of the 50′s to the sport-inspired looks of the 80′s.
Through witty graphics and bright lively text, teens can go behind the scenes of the exclusive fashion world. Style icons, designers, and top models all give practical tips to create stunning outfits, explain key fashion terms, discuss careers in fashion, and reveal secrets of the industry. Trivia, a glossary, inspirational quotes, and more make The Fashion Book a must-have accessory for teens.(Goodreads)