Young Adult (ages 14-18)

Material appropriate for young adults

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Paradise Red

Master storyteller K. M. Grant brings the dramatic saga of young love and religious conflict to a satisfying end in the final book of the Perfect Fire trilogy. As winter falls upon the Occitan, Raimon must find a way to recover the Blue Flame from the hands of the evil White Wolf. But his plan could lead him back to the pyre—and he might not be so lucky to escape from it again. Meanwhile, Yolanda—unwillingly married to Sir Hugh des Arcis—is threatened by her husband’s desire for a son. As Sir Hugh sets off on a mission to claim the Occitain for France, she makes her own journey through the blizzard to find Raimon, a journey that could end in disaster. As the flames rise one last time, Raimon and Yolanda’s fates, like the fates of the Flame and the Occitan itself, hang by a smoky thread.

Factotum

Rossamund Bookchild stands accused of not truly being a human at all, but of being a monster. Even the protection of Europe, the Branden Rose the most feared and renowned monster-hunter in all the Half-Continent might not be enough to save him. Powerful forces move against them both, intent on capturing Rossamund whose existence some believe may hold the secret to perpetual youth.

Sea

Despite recurring nightmares about her mother’s death and her own fear of flying, fifteen-year-old Sienna accepts her father’s birthday gift to fly to Indonesia with his team of disaster relief workers to help victims of a recent tsunami, never suspecting she would fall in love with an Indonesian boy, recently orphaned, who suspects his father is still alive.

Between Sisters

The future looks bleak indeed for 16-year-old Gloria. Living in a poor area of Accra, she dreams of becoming a dressmaker, but after failing 13 out of 15 subjects on her final exams it seems unlikely to happen. Then a distant relative, Christine, offers to move Gloria to Kumasi to look after her son. In exchange, Christine will pay for Gloria to go to dressmaking school. In Kumasi everything seems possible, and life is grander than anything Gloria has ever experienced. But Kumasi is also full of temptations, like the popular boutique where the owner takes a fancy to Gloria and encourages her to buy clothes on credit. There’s also the smooth-talking Dr. Kusi, who gives Gloria rides in his red Passat and invites her to bring food to his apartment. Eventually betrayed by those around her, Gloria must reconcile her future, her family, and her desires.

See the review at WOW Review, Volume 5, Issue 2