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Every You, Every Me
Jonathan Farmer, David Levithan
Synopsis: In this high school-set psychological tale, a tormented teen named Evan starts to discover a series of unnerving photographs—some of which feature him. Someone is stalking him . . . messing with him . . . threatening him. Worse, ever since his best friend Ariel has been gone, he's been unable to sleep, spending night after night torturing himself for his role in her absence. And as crazy as it sounds, Evan's starting to believe it's Ariel that's behind all of this, punishing him. But the more Evan starts to unravel the mystery, the more his paranoia and insomnia amplify, and the more he starts to unravel himself. Creatively told with black-and-white photos interspersed between the text so the reader can see the photos that are so unnerving to Evan, Every You, Every Me is a one-of-a-kind departure from a one-of-a-kind author.
Publication Date: 09/13/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Mystery
A Plague Year
Edward Bloor
Synopsis: It's 2001 and zombies have taken over Tom's town. Meth zombies. The drug rips through Blackwater, PA, with a ferocity and a velocity that overwhelms everyone.

It starts small, with petty thefts of cleaning supplies and Sudafed from the supermarket where Tom works. But by year's end there will be ruined, hollow people on every street corner. Meth will unmake the lives of friends and teachers and parents. It will fill the prisons, and the morgues.

Tom's always been focused on getting out of his depressing coal mining town, on planning his escape to a college somewhere sunny and far away. But as bits of his childhood erode around him, he finds it's not so easy to let go. With the selfless heroism of the passengers on United Flight 93 that crashed nearby fresh in his mind and in his heart, Tom begins to see some reasons to stay, to see that even lost causes can be worth fighting for. 

Edward Bloor has created a searing portrait of a place and a family and a boy who survive a harrowing plague year, and become stronger than before.
Publication Date: 09/13/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
The Things A Brother Knows
Synopsis:

Levi's older brother Boaz returns from fighting with the Marines in the Middle East. He's safe. Levi's family has waited three long years for this. But Boaz is no longer the brother Levi thought he knew. Even if nobody else wants to see it, Levi can tell that Boaz has changed; something's wrong. When Boaz announces he's off to hike the Appalachian Trail, Levi knows he's lying. He's heading somewhere else. So Levi follows, determined to understand who his brother was, what he's been through, and how to bring him home again.

Publication Date: 09/13/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Under the Mesquite
Guadalupe Garcia Mccall
Synopsis:

Lupita, a budding actor and poet in a close-knit Mexican American immigrant family, comes of age as she struggles with adult responsibilities during her mother's battle with cancer in this young adult novel in verse.

When Lupita learns Mami has cancer, she is terrified by the possibility of losing her mother, the anchor of her close-knit family. Suddenly, being a high school student, starring in a play, and dealing with friends who don't always understand, become less important than doing whatever she can to save Mami's life.

While her father cares for Mami at an out-of-town clinic, Lupita takes charge of her seven younger siblings. As Lupita struggles to keep the family afloat, she takes refuge in the shade of a mesquite tree, where she escapes the chaos at home to write. Forced to face her limitations in the midst of overwhelming changes and losses, Lupita rediscovers her voice and finds healing in the power of words.

Told with honest emotion in evocative free verse, Lupita's journey toward hope is captured in moments that are alternately warm and poignant. Under the Mesquite is an empowering story about testing family bonds and the strength of a young woman navigating pain and hardship with surprising resilience.

Publication Date: 09/09/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Poetry
Married Mom, Solo Parent
Carla Anne Coroy
Synopsis: Who knew a married woman could feel like a single mom?

Bookstore shelves are full of parenting resources for single moms. But where do moms turn if they feel like a single parent--but they're not? Whether he is away on business, deployed in the military, or obsessing over a hobby, families face unique and difficult challenges when dad is unavailable. Moms who parent in these situations need help and don't necessarily relate to the advice given in divorce recovery or single parenting resources.

Married Mom, Solo Parent is a common-sense, down-to earth look at the struggles wives and mothers face when their husband is not actively involved in family life. Writing from her own experience as a "married solo mom", Carla Anne addresses tough questions such as:
How do I overcome loneliness, insecurity, and anger? How do I raise kids to honor a father who's not around? How do I avoid emotionally checking out of my marriage? How do I find some time just for me? With practical suggestions, anecdotes, and biblical teaching, this book encourages moms to see their position as a high calling, to find healing amidst their worries and frustrations, and to tap into God's strength for help in facing the daily challenge of being a married mom, solo parent.
Publication Date: 09/09/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Nonfiction
My Feet Aren't Ugly
Beck Debra
Synopsis: Do you ever feel bad about yourself or have trouble being yourself while still fitting in? Do you have tough questions you are afraid to ask?In this funny, honest book, teen mentor Debra Beck provides personal stories, quizzes, journaling exercises, and thoughts from teens themselves to help you develop your self-confidence. Learn how to make healthy decisions in the face of peer pressure, have strong relationships with family and friends, and respect and love yourself for who you are. This revised and updated edition also has new chapters on bullying and internet safety.
Publication Date: 09/09/11
Age Level: Any Age
Genre: Nonfiction
The Adventure Begins
Roderic L Waibel
Synopsis: You are Zach, a 10 year old boy who constantly gets into trouble at school for daydreaming. But one day you discover a portal that leads into a fantastic new world of magic and monsters. A world where all of your daydreams have come to life. Do you choose to enter the world, or play it safe and go back the way you came? The Adventure Begins is the first book of the “Your Choice” stories. These are stories in which you, the reader, are given options throughout the book on which way you proceed. Can you make the right choices? It’s up to you.
Publication Date: 09/07/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fantasy
One Salt Sea
Seanan McGuire
Synopsis: New York Times-bestselling October Daye series • Hugo Award-winning author Seanan McGuire • "Top of my urban-paranormal series list!" —Felicia Day

October "Toby" Daye is finally doing all right—and that inevitably means it's time for things to take a turn for the worse. Someone has kidnapped the sons of the Duchess Dianda Lorden, regent of the Undersea Duchy of Saltmist.

To prevent a war between land and sea, Toby must not only find the missing boys, but also prove that the Queen of the Mists was not behind their abduction. She'll need all her tricks and the help of her allies if she wants to make it through this in one piece.

Toby's search will take her from the streets of San Francisco to the lands beneath the waves. But someone is determined to stop her—and whoever it is isn't playing by Oberon's Laws. As the battle grows more and more personal, one thing is chillingly clear. When Faerie goes to war, not everyone will walk away. 
Publication Date: 09/06/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fantasy
The Truth of Valor
Tanya Huff
Synopsis: The thrilling final installment in Tanya Huff's military sci-fi adventure Confederation series

Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr was the very model of a Confederation Marine. She’d survived more deadly encounters than anyone in the Corps. No one who’d ever served with her could imagine her walking away from the Corps. But that was before Torin had learned the truth about the war the Confederation was fighting…before she’d been declared dead and had spent time in a prison that shouldn’t exist....
 
It was Salvage Operator Craig Ryder who had refused to believe Torin was dead. Craig who found and rescued Torin. And so, when her mission was complete, Torin resigned from the Marines to start a new life with Craig aboard his tiny salvage ship, the Promise.
 
But civilian life was a lot rougher than Torin had imagined. The salvage operators were losing cargo and lives to pirates. Because salvagers were an independent lot unwilling to turn to the OutSector Wardens for help, no one in authority seemed to take their ever-increasing threat seriously.
 
Then, on their first real run together, pirates attacked the Promise, kidnapping Craig and leaving Torin to die. But leaving Torin behind to die was never a good strategy. Against all odds, she survived, and certain—despite no evidence to prove her correct—that Craig was still alive, she decided to mount a rescue mission. When Craig’s salvager friends refused to join her, Torin had no choice but to call in the Marines—some very special Marines.
 
Then she discovered why the pirates had been trying to kidnap salvagers. And suddenly Torin’s mission expanded from saving Craig to stopping the pirates from changing the balance of power in known space....
Publication Date: 09/06/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Adventure
Coronets and Steel
Sherwood Smith
Synopsis: Too much imagination was tantamount to lying―that’s what my grandmother taught me. So when I first got the sense that someone was following me, I ignored it. Who’d waste time following me?

Me, being Aurelia Kim Murray, a grad student from California with a passion for ballet and fencing, and a hopelessly romantic vision of the world. I had some to Europe to track down my grandparents’ families, but so far I’d had no luck.

I couldn’t explain the sense of urgency that drove me, even to myself. It has begun that day four months ago when my grandmother lay restlessly in her bed, her eyes glittering with fever as she gripped my hand. “Your mother is too gentle,” she’s whispered in her aristocratic Parisian French. “I cannot send her to steal the breach.”

Breach? What breach? With her family? With my grandfather’s family? Neither Mom nor I knew anything about Grandmother’s family or the handsome man in the silver-framed photo that Gran always kept on her bedside table.

“She wouldn’t talk about her life before California,” my mom has said, as we waited in yet another specialist’s office, hoping to find out why, though Gran had recovered from her fever, she had not spoken since.

Nothing had come of my search in Paris, or Vienna, and no matter how fast I walked along the grand boulevards, I knew I couldn’t outpace my sense of failure.

And that’s when I met my first ghost.

But seeing ghosts wasn’t my biggest problem. I was being followed, and I was about to find out more about my lineage than I had ever imagined possible in my wildest, most fanciful dreams…or nightmares.
Publication Date: 09/06/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
Following Christopher Creed
Carol Plum-Ucci
Synopsis: Years later . . . what really happened to Christopher Creed?

When Torey Adams posts on his blog that a body has been found in Steepleton—four years after Christopher Creed disappeared—college reporter Mike Mavic sells his laptop and hops a plane to capture the story that will undoubtedly launch his journalistic career. But what Mike finds is a town suffering under a cloud of bad frequency and people with an underlying streak of meanness. To the teens of Steepleton, Chris is nothing more than history—but to Justin Creed, a teen obsessed with his older brother’s memory and balancing on the edge of sanity, discovering what really happened to Chris Creed is a matter of life and death.
Publication Date: 09/06/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Mystery
All These Things I've Done
Gabrielle Zevin
Synopsis:

In 2083, chocolate and coffee are illegal, paper is hard to find, water is carefully rationed, and New York City is rife with crime and poverty. And yet, for Anya Balanchine, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the city's most notorious (and dead) crime boss, life is fairly routine. It consists of going to school, taking care of her siblings and her dying grandmother, trying to avoid falling in love with the new assistant D.A.'s son, and avoiding her loser ex-boyfriend. That is until her ex is accidently poisoned by the chocolate her family manufactures and the police think she's to blame. Suddenly, Anya finds herself thrust unwillingly into the spotlight--at school, in the news, and most importantly, within her mafia family.

From Gabrielle Zevin--the author of the critically acclaimed Elsewhere--comes All These Things I've Done, a masterful novel about an impossible romance, a mafiya family, and the ties that forever bind us.

Publication Date: 09/06/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Fiction
City of Orphans
Greg Ruth, Avi
Synopsis: The streets of 1893 New York are full of life: crowded, filthy, dangerous. If you are a newsboy like thirteen-year- old Maks Geless, you need to watch out for Bruno, leader of the Plug Ugly Gang whose shadowy, sinister boss is plotting to take control of all the newsies on the lower East Side. With Bruno’s boys in fierce pursuit, Maks discovers Willa, a strange girl who lives alone in an alley. It is she, stick in hand, who fights off the Plug Uglies--but further dangers await. Maks must find a way to free his sister Emma from The Tombs, the city jail where she has been imprisoned for stealing a watch at the glamorous new Waldorf Hotel. Maks, believing her innocent, has only four days to prove it. Fortunately, there is Bartleby Donck, the eccentric lawyer (among other employments) to guide Maks and Willa in the art of detection. Against a backdrop alive with the sights and sounds of tenement New York, Maks, as boy detective, must confront a teeming world of wealth and crime, while struggling against powerful forces threatening new immigrants and the fabric of family love. 
Publication Date: 09/06/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Historical Fiction
Ashes
Ilsa J. Bick
Synopsis: It could happen tomorrow . . .
 
An electromagnetic pulse flashes across the sky, destroying every electronic device, wiping out every computerized system, and killing billions.
Alex hiked into the woods to say good-bye to her dead parents and her personal demons. Now desperate to find out what happened after the pulse crushes her to the ground, Alex meets up with Tom—a young soldier—and Ellie, a girl whose grandfather was killed by the EMP.

For this improvised family and the others who are spared, it’s now a question of who can be trusted and who is no longer human.
 
Author Ilsa J. Bick crafts a terrifying and thrilling novel about a world that could be ours at any moment, where those left standing must learn what it means not just to survive, but to live amidst the devastation.

Gripped me from beginning to end – dark, creepy and suspenseful.  James Dashner,
New York Times Best-Selling author of The Maze Runner and The Scorch Trials       
             
A haunting and epic story of survival in a shattered world, ASHES is a must read.  
Michael Grant, New York Times Best-Selling author of Gone
Publication Date: 09/06/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Science Fiction
The Best Teen Writing of 2011
The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers
Synopsis: The Best Teen Writing of 2011 is a collection of stories, essays and poems written by teen authors who won medals in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. The pieces in this book were selected not merely because they are excellent works of writing, but also because they are brave, risky and honest. They are united by a need to discover fundamental truths and mold them-through hard work and inspiration, sacrifice and empathy-into words.
Publication Date: 09/02/11
Age Level: Any Age
Genre: Anthology
Double Crossing
Elaina Lee, Meg Mims
Synopsis:
WINNER of the 2012 BEST FIRST NOVEL Spur Award from Western Writers of America AND a 2012 FINALIST for the USA BOOK NEWS Awards - for Fiction: Western

A murder arranged as a suicide ... a missing deed ... and a bereft daughter whose sheltered world is shattered. August, 1869: Lily Granville is stunned by her father's murder. Only one other person knows about a valuable California gold mine deed -- both are now missing. Lily heads west on the newly opened transcontinental railroad, determined to track the killer. She soon realizes she is no longer the hunter but the prey.

As things progress from bad to worse, Lily is uncertain who to trust--the China-bound missionary who wants to marry her, or the wandering Texan who offers to protect her ... for a price. Will Lily survive the journey and unexpected betrayal?
Publication Date: 09/01/11
Age Level: 12 and up
Genre: Adventure

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