Young Adult (ages 14-18)

Material appropriate for young adults

The Odyssey

With bold imagery and an ear tuned to the music of Homer’s epic poem, Gareth Hinds reinterprets the ancient classic as it’s never been told before. “Gareth Hind brings THE ODYSSEY to life in a masterful blend of art and storytelling. Vivid and exciting, this graphic novel is a worthy new interpretation of Homer’s epic.” Rick Riordan, author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series Fresh from his triumphs in the Trojan War, Odysseus, King of Ithaca, wants nothing more than to return home to his family. Instead, he offends the sea god, Poseidon, who dooms him to years of shipwreck and wandering. Battling man-eating monsters, violent storms, and the supernatural seductions of sirens and sorceresses, Odysseus will need all his strength and cunning and a little help from Mount Olympus to make his way home and seize his kingdom from the schemers who seek to wed his queen and usurp his throne. Award-winning graphic artist Gareth Hinds masterfully reinterprets a story of heroism, adventure, and high action that has been told and retold for more than 2,500 years though never quite like this.

The Nobel Prize

“I would like . . . to help dreamers, they find it hard to get on in life.” — Alfred Nobel. Alfred Nobel, born in Sweden in 1833, was a brilliant inventor and businessman. Although he held more than 300 patents when he died in 1896, he earned his extensive fortune and worldwide fame through his invention of dynamite and his work on armaments. He never married and was constantly on the move around Europe, visiting his manufacturing plants.His handwritten one-page last will and testament directed that the majority of his vast fortune be invested and the interest distributed to the most deserving individuals in the fields of medicine, chemistry, physics, literature and peace. Between 1901 and 2009, the five Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Science were awarded 537 times.This book tells the fascinating story of how a few simple instructions in Nobel’s will were transformed into a huge philanthropic organization that holds a unique position in the modern world.The Nobel Prize covers: The life and accomplishments of Alfred Nobel His will and the establishment of the Nobel Prize Committee How the Nobel laureates are selected The establishment of the new award in Economics in 1968 Profiles of U.S. presidents and world leaders who have won the prize Lists of families and individuals who have won the prize Profiles on the lives and accomplishments of the most famous laureates The backgrounds of each of the six prizes: chemistry, physics, medicine, peace, literature and economicsThe Nobel Prize brings to life the story of the world’s most famous prize.

A Bottle In The Gaza Sea

Seventeen-year-old Tal Levine of Jerusalem, despondent over the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, puts her hopes for peace in a bottle and asks her brother, a military nurse in the Gaza Strip, to toss it into the sea, leading ultimately to friendship and understanding.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 5, Issue 3

I Will Save You

Seventeen-year-old Kidd Ellison runs away to work for the summer at a beach campsite in California where his hard work and good looks lead to friendship and love but painful past memories surface in menacing ways.

Queen of Hearts

Marie-Claire Coté is fifteen-head-strong and full of life. It’s 1941, Canada is two years into World War II, and workers are scarce. So Marie-Claire pitches in on the family farm, tries to keep up with her school-work, and listening to stories told by her fun-loving hard-living uncle, Gérard. But the whole family is taken aback Gérard is diagnosed with tuberculosis and even more shocked when Marie-Claire and her younger brother and sister are all stricken with the disease and are sent to “chase the cure” at a nearby sanatorium located in the rolling hills of southern Manitoba. Marie-Claise fights her illness and longs for privacy in a place where there is none. She desperately wants to ignore the other “TB exiles” around her, especially her frail but irritatingly cheerful roommate Signy, who seems determined to become best friends. And then there’s fellow patient Jack Hawkings, the nineteen-year-old musician with the heart-stopping smile. Soon she discovers that the sanatorium is a world unto itself–a world in which loss can be survived, and friendship, and love can be found in unexpected places.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 4, Issue 3

The Game

The Game is just the beginning? It’s the year 2154. Lisse and her friends have been deemed unemployable in the eyes of society. Now they must scavenge the disintegrating city for food and shelter, just to make ends meet. But their dismal existence starts to look up when Lisse and her friends are invited to participate in The Game, an experience highly regarded in their society. The Game is a virtual reality experience where they are challenged to survive. But as they spend more time in The Game, the line between reality and fantasy starts to blur. What started as a simple exercise quickly becomes a test of endurance, trust, and their will to live.

What My Father Gave Me

Passionate, compelling essays reveal how daughters see their fathers. Editor Melanie Little brings together seven outstanding women — including Susan Olding, Jessica Raya and Saleema Nawaz — to write brilliant, powerful accounts of father-daughter relationships during their teen years. These deeply personal narratives draw readers into raw, real-life experiences. One girl recalls the parade of men in her mother’s life until a man named Al unexpectedly becomes the father she never had. Another father’s abandonment leads his teen daughter to enter a string of doomed relationships with older men, fueled by her “pilot light of pure hatred.” Another reveals the harrowing secret she guarded as a teen: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. One girl watches as the father she loves and respects struggles on the picket lines during a lockout at work and through an ensuing depression. Another daughter charts her own reckless behavior against that of her father’s, in search of a way to break the cycle. Gutsy and honest, these true stories invite readers behind secret doors as they celebrate the power of words to connect to the teen experience.

Behemoth

The second book in Westerfeld’s masterful series. Sequel to: Leviathan. Continues the story of Austrian Prince Alek who, in an alternate 1914 Europe, eludes the Germans by traveling in the Leviathan to Constantinople, where he faces a whole new kind of genetically-engineered warships.

No Safe Place

Orphaned and plagued with the grief of losing everyone he loves, 15-year-old Abdul has made a long, fraught journey from his war-torn home in Baghdad, only to end up in The Jungle — a squalid, makeshift migrant community in Calais. Desperate to escape, he takes a spot in a small, overloaded England-bound boat that’s full of other illegal migrants and a secret stash of heroin. A sudden skirmish leaves the boat stalled in the middle of the Channel, the pilot dead, and four young people remaining — Abdul; Rosalia, a Romani girl who has escaped from the white slave trade; Cheslav, gone AWOL from a Russian military school; and Jonah, the boat pilot’s ten-year-old nephew. As they attempt to complete the frantic and hazardous Channel crossing, their individual stories are revealed and their futures become increasingly uncertain.