Scrivener's Moon

by Philip Reeve

Picking up where A Web of Air left off, this final installment in the trilogy won't disappoint Reeve's many fans. Fever Crumb returns to London, but the place where she grew up has been transformed into a city on wheels. The nomad tribes of the North are threatened by this new moving city and plan to attack. Meanwhile, Wavey hears of a black pyramid in the North Country that might contain useful information about the past. Fever meets Cluny Morvish, a member of one of the nomadic warrior tribes and travels with her. Fever's friendship with Cluny changes her perspective on many things, including raising questions about her own sexual identity, which Reeve handles delicately. Beautifully complex language and a fully realized, highly creative future world will draw in readers, although those unfamiliar with the previous books will struggle with characters and concepts. Fever's journey concludes with satisfying answers to long-standing questions about the basis for her society and her own heritage. For die-hard fans of science fiction, it doesn't get much better.

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The Sin Eater's Confession

by Ilsa Bick   
   

Bick crafts a powerful tale of bigotry and murder in small-town Wisconsin. High school senior Ben imagines he will go to Yale and become a doctor, just like his mother has always encouraged him to do. When a star athlete dies in an accident, Ben helps the boy's family out and befriends his younger brother, Jimmy, who dreams of becoming a great photographer. Jimmy's evangelical father fears that his son's hobby and friendship with Ben are indicators of homosexuality, and the rumors and conflicts that emerge over the following months result in Ben witnessing Jimmy's brutal murder. Ben's attempts to understand what he saw, as well as his uncertainties about his own sexuality (Ben's friendships with Jimmy and a classmate named Brooke are both sources of self-doubt), drive the rest of the novel. Told entirely in flashback from Ben's perspective as a medic in Afghanistan, Bick's story isn't a mystery in the whodunit sense. Instead, it's a potent examination of teenage emotions and reactions to peer and parental pressures, and to the evil that people are capable of.

 

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Splintered

by A. G. Howard

YA authors have used fairy tales and fantasy as a backdrop for contemporary stories for decades, and first-time author Howard is no exception. Relying on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as the infrastructure, as well as Tim Burton's fantastical movie landscapes for inspiration, Howard crafts a teenage skater girl, Alyssa Gardner, who feels compelled to throw herself down the rabbit hole in an attempt to cure her mother's madness and quiet the ever-increasing chatter in her own head. But Alyssa does not make this journey alone. Childhood friend Jeb enters Wonderland with her, a constant grounding to the real world as they encounter Morpheus (who sports a hookah), Rabid White, Chessie, the Red and Ivory Queens, and other iterations of Carroll's familiar characters. It's a deft, complex metamorphosis of this children's fantasy made more enticing by competing romantic interests, a psychedelic setting, and more mad violence than its original. With one test after another that she must pass, Alyssa soon learns that the only person she can rely on is herself.--

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The Other Wes Moore

by Wes Moore

Moore adapts his bestselling adult title, The Other Wes Moore, for teens in this thought-provoking and personal narrative about two men with the same name. Moore begins with his own story, which starts in Baltimore and moves to the crack-infested Bronx, military school, Johns Hopkins, and a Rhodes Scholarship. The second part of the book tells the other Wes Moore's journey, which also begins in Baltimore but leads to drug dealing, brushes with the police, and a life sentence for murder. Anecdotes from Moore's early years convey his struggle to form an identitywithin his violent and impoverished surroundings; his love for his family and his core optimism shine through even the darkest moments he recounts. The story concludes with Moore's questions and ruminations about how, regardless of limitations and societal expectations, the decisions an individual makes determine who he or she will become. Moore wisely opens the door for teens to contemplate their own answers and beliefs, while laying out his own experiences honestly and openly.
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How to Fight, Lie, and Cry Your Way to Popularity (and a Prom Date) :Lousy Life Lessons From 50 Teen Movies

by Nikki Rodey
Chronological lists of anything usually provoke yawns, not fits of giggles. For the most part, this book is the exception. Presenting 50 well-chosen teen movies from the 1950s to 2010, it includes a comical summary of each one; a photo (most are in color and look like grainy screen caps); a memorable quote, comical quiz, or thoughts; and a wry, witty "life lesson." Readers need not have seen the movies to enjoy the book. In fact, it is more fun when you haven't, as the summaries will make readers laugh and wonder how any studio green-lighted the projects or any actors agreed to star in such productions.

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Feynman

written by Jim Ottaviani ; art by Leland Myrick ; coloring by Hilary Sycamore

GRAPHIC NOVEL
Jumping from the Manhattan Project laboratories of Los Alamos, N.Mex., to the beaches of Rio, Ottaviani and Myrick's portrait of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist and general polymath Richard Feynman eschews chronology in favor of rhythm, and it's an approach that suits their subject perfectly. While Feynman's role in the creation of the atomic bomb and his contributions to 20th-century quantum electrodynamics are fascinating topics, they share equal time with his vaguely libertine (for a physicist, anyway) approach to romance and his tireless-and uneven-attempts to understand such nonscientific pursuits as art, language, safecracking, samba music, and cooking. Though he was indisputably one of the leading figures in the post-Einstein scientific landscape, Feynman's most enduring pursuit was making physics accessible to the layman, and several sections of the book illustrate how this impulse went beyond mere populism and came to dominate his scientific life. When he wasn't relaxing on the beach, he frequently chose teaching freshmen or lecturing to the general public over pure research. Myrick's light, sketchy inks keep the proceedings from bogging down, even in the lecture hall, and an extensive bibliography and sketchbook prove that the most dogged intellectual pursuit can still be a good time.

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Cornered :14 stories of bullying and defiance

edited by Rhoda Belleza
This fourteen-story YA fiction anthology delves into the experience of being bullied—socially, emotionally, physically, psychologically, and sexually. The school hallways, walks home, and house walls are no longer the boundaries for intimidation and harassment. With the rapid-fire response time of social media and smartphones, bullying has lost all limits, and the lines among truth, lies, and real accountability have become blurred.


Featuring some of the hottest voices in YA literature, both bestselling and on the rise, Cornered includes works from Kirsten Miller (New York Times bestseller The Eternal Ones), Jennifer Brown (Hate List), Elizabeth Miles (Fury), Jaime Adoff (The Death of Jayson Porter), Lish McBride (Morris Award finalist Hold Me Closer, Necromancer), Matthue Roth (Losers), Sheba Karim (Skunk Girl), Kate Ellison (Butterfly Clues), Zeta Elliot (A Wish After Midnight), Josh Berk (The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin), and James Lecesne (Absolute Brightness and founder of the Trevor Project).

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