Realistic Fiction

Realistic Fiction genre

Notes from the Teenage Underground

Seventeen-year-old Gem loves movies, her feminist mom, and Dodgy, her coworker in a video store (at least she thinks she loves Dodgy).  When a school trip inspires Gem to make an underground film, her best friends Lo and Mira are quick to join the project, taking on the roles of producer and star. The film is intended to cement the girls’ friendship as well as their superiority over their sucker high school peers. But when the fragile balance of their friendship begins to falter, and intentions lead to betrayals big and small, it will take great movies, bad haiku, and a pantheon of great voices—from Dostoyevsky to Emerson to The Beatles—to help Gem find the meaning of love, friendship, and being true to herself.

Looking for X

Smart and independent, 11-year-old Khyber lives with her mom, Tammy, a former stripper, and her autistic twin brothers in a poor Toronto neighborhood. Though she doesn’t have a lot in common with her classmates, Khyber does have wonderfully eccentric friends: Valerie, Toronto’s meanest waitress, and X, a homeless woman in hiding from “the secret police.” Despite having to deal with pompous social workers who make her mother cry and ignorant kids who make remarks about her brothers, Khyber manages to enjoy herself, poring over atlases, planning exotic journeys, and taking peanut butter sandwiches to X. But when Tammy decides to move her sons to a group home for proper care, Khyber’s world starts to crumble. She fights with her mom and then gets expelled from school. To make matters worse, X suddenly disappears. Khyber sets out to find her in a wild all-night odyssey of self-discovery.

Garage Band

When Giuliano’s father loans him the family garage, he and three of his friends form a band. Playing their battered secondhand instruments, the four teenagers find something they love to do, and they find in their friendship and music a refuge from difficult and turbulent home lives.  But when their only amp blows a fuse, a desperate search for some new equipment lands them in more trouble than they ever saw coming. Graphic novels with stunning watercolors by the renowned Italian artist Gipi.

Jennifer’s Diary

Jennifer’s aunt has given her a beautiful rainbow-colored diary. The trouble is, Jennifer can’t think of a single thing to write in it. Her friend Iola is just bursting with ideas to fill the glossy blank pages of a new diary – stories about rescuing drowning victims and eerie ghosts in pink dresses. So what if none of the stories are true? Iola wants that diary. But how can she convince Jennifer that it should really be hers?

Junk Collector School

Junk is the world’s best free stuff. Anybody who’s part detective and part collector can put together a collection in no time. Jake really knows his junk. His house is filled with the most amazing collections of it. Andy wants a collection of his own, which is why he goes to Jake’s Junk Collector School.

Time to Say I Love You

In this sweet, touching story, a mother tries to choose a time to tell her little girl how much she loves her. Over the course of a beautiful day at the seaside, the two roam over sandy beaches and grassy hills as the mother searches for just the right time and spot.

Yoruba Girl Dancing

For Remi, growing up in Nigeria is a celebration of love and family, eccentricity and old ritual. She feels confident in her privilege and grounded in the heart of her culture. But when she turns six, she is sent to faraway England, to a posh all-girls’ boarding school where she will stay for what seems like a desolate, lonely eternity. There she’s left to find her own way – the only black in a school full of upper-class English girls whose rituals are as foreign to Remi as her’s are to them. Through sheer inner exuberance, Remi triumphs over the dismal climate, social anomalies, and glaring affronts that are her English experience. She endures foreign holidays celebrated with strangers, and navigates the labyrinth of race, caste, and culture, taking nothing lying down, and emerges victorious – if changed forever.

Yoruba Girl Dancing is the story of a girl’s exile from her homeland and her metamorphosis into someone that even she at times hardly recognizes.

Captives

Martin and his family are enjoying a sun-filled vacation on a beautiful Caribbean island–until they are stopped at gunpoint, blindfolded, and bundled into a truck that heads for the dense forest of the island’s interior. Pushed to their physical and emotional limits as they are forced deeper into the wild terrain, the hostages come to understand something of the harsh political backdrop of life on sunny Santa Clara, and the events that have shaped the lives of their captors and fueled their actions.

I Very Really Miss You

Sam’s big brother Ben is going away on a school trip for an entire week and Sam is thrilled: for one whole week he can play with all the toys and have the whole bedroom to himself. What’s more, he certainly won’t be getting squirted by Ben’s water pistol. But it’s too quiet without Ben, so Sam writes his brother to say he “very really” misses him.