Now in paperback, award-winning author Melvin Burgess’s daringly honest and often hilarious account of contemporary teenage life, and the ups and downs that surround “doing it.”The controversial book on which the cult favorite ABC television series Life as We Know It (now available on DVD) was based, Doing It introduces us to Dino, Jon, and Ben, three teenage best friends who can’t stop thinking about, and talking about (and hoping to experience), sex.
Taylor, Sam, and Sophie have been best mates forever. But lately things have been changing. Taylor is starting to sense that maybe Sam and Sophie would rather hang out only with each other rather than with her. And she can’t talk to her mum about it — she’s been acting even more depressed than usual, spending the day watching the telly in her bathrobe and only eating when Taylor makes her dinner. Then Taylor meets Kat while out shopping one day. Kat is glamorous. Kat is planning on becoming a model. Kat has dozens of older blokes following her around. And suddenly Taylor’s life is looking brighter. Kat seems to understand exactly how Taylor feels and Taylor is willing to do anything to be friends with her. The thing is, Kat loves to go shopping and if Taylor wants to continue to be her friend, then she’ll have to come up with the money to keep Kat happy…even if that means going against everything Taylor knows is right. An emotionally-charged novel about what loneliness can drive you to do, and how a little credit card can lead to lots of trouble.
In her brilliant but argumentative family, Hero is different, because she doesn’t speak. Instead, she prefers the silence and solitude she finds climbing the trees high above her neighbors stately old house. But everything changes when Hero starts to do odd jobs for the neighbor — and discovers a shocking secret high up in the tower of the house. “Mahy is a writer who just keeps getting better with every book.”– Kirkus Reviews, pointer review “Mahys exceptional imagination and storytelling prowess will make it difficult for readers to leave this book behind themhers is a tale with staying power.”– Publishers Weekly, starred review New Zealand author Margaret Mahy won the Carnegie Medal for The Changeover and The Haunting. Her most recent novel for Viking is Tingleberries, Tuckertubs, and Telephones.
When his father runs off with his girlfriend and his distraught mother is admitted to an institution, thirteen-year-old Rits goes to live with his uncle and tries to make the best of his unusual circumstances.
Set in apartheid 1960s South Africa, twelve-year-old Emily Iris explains that her mother and father have always been eager to take in travelers and vagabonds, relying on the presence of outsiders to ease the tension between them. Emily has her gentle older sister, Sarah, and Buza, the old Zulu nightwatchman, for company and comfort. But her parents’ continuing discontent leads them to welcome some peculiar strangers. One spring, a family of wanderers—a wildlife photographer, his wife, and two boys—comes to stay, and their strange, compelling, and dangerous presence will leave the Iris family infinitely changed.
Hazel and Ned are home for summer vacation and looking forward to long, lazy days of sleeping late, shooting hoops, building stink bombs, and spending time with their art-dealer father. But when he disappears without saying good-bye, their summer plunges into chaos. The babysitter leaves town, their apartment is burgled, and two menacing thugs start turning up everywhere. Ned and Hazel try escaping to an island castle belonging to long-lost relatives, only to find there’s no escaping this adventure. As the siblings work to untangle the threads that ensnare their father, they learn of a second, darker secret—one that surrounds their mother’s death years ago. Only by solving both mysteries can they bring their father home.
Todd is living a very troubled life, which causes him to be involved with a gang and do poorly at school, but after he buries a dead fox, a fox-spirit offers him the chance to become a fox himself and Todd must decide what is the best thing for him to do in his situation.
NOT EVERYONE SEES THE WORLD THROUGH THE SAME LENS. From the author of Something Invisible comes this funny and poignant novel about the hues of friendship.Spunky Olivia and eccentric Hal are an unlikely pair. While Hal suffers from a neurological condition called synesthesia that causes him to associate things with colors, Olivia tends to see the world in black and white. Still, these two are friends through thick and thin, through rose-colored days and blue days, even when Hal’s plan to get rid of his mother’s boyfriend backfires by driving his mother away. Olivia’s honest, funny and always-opinionated voice tells this story with colorful perception.
A raw, poignant story of a band of Brazilian street kids who survive — if they can — by their wits alone. Asphalt Angels centers around a boy named Alex, a street child of 13 in Brazil who has been kicked onto the city streets by his stepfather after his mother dies. He is alone and scared. This is the story of how he adapts to life in the streets with a group of other children. Hazards are everywhere: drug-dealing, theft, glue-sniffing, harassment, brutality, even murder. It is not easy steering clear of them, yet Alex manages to survive, eventually making a home with 14 other boys in a house, working in an office, and attending evening school. This story grew from the real-life drama the author observed while on assignment. In an afterword, she reports that some 10,000 children sleep in Rio’s streets, and many more roam them by day, victims of inadequate nutrition, education, and shelter, and prey to drugs and violence. Alex does exist, but under another name.
Six years ago, when Declan Steeple was 10 and his sister was just a baby, his mother, Lindy, disappeared, searching for something better than the dusty family estate with its generations of clutter and memory. Now the Steeples live in a modern split-level down the hill from the Big House, but the mansion is still there, filled with a past that hides secrets. When a local man is found dead in the house, memories of Lindy and her unhappiness living there suddenly become a pressing weight on Dec, compounded by the fact that he and his sister were the ones to discover the body. The teen feels lost and suspicious; his father seems to be hiding something and Dec realizes how much has never been discussed.