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Star in the Middle
Carol Larese Millward
At 16, Star's life has changed drastically now that she's become the mother of a baby boy. To learn what's best for him, Star's taking parenting classes at a center for teen moms. But she's having trouble keeping up with the baby's demands, and her grandmother is threatening to force her to put the baby up for adoption. To top it off, Wilson, a popular star athlete, is in denial about being the father. He doesn't know about Star's terrible, painful secrets. But as Wilson's friends and family push him to accept his responsibility, he learns the truth about Star's disturbing past, facts that change his life forever. Told from Star's and Wilson's points-of-view, Star in the Middle reveals a compelling snap-shot of the difficult lives of teenage parents.
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Listen
Nancy Coffelt
Three lives intersect unexpectedly in this unique, compelling story. First there's Will, an eighteen-year-old living alone since his mother died and his drug- and alcohol-addled brother went to jail. Then there's Kurt, a troubled fourteen-year-old loner still reeling after the death of his mother's abusive boyfriend and from his part in it. And finally there's Carrie, a middle-aged schizophrenic who "hears" the thoughts of the abused and neglected neighborhood animals she rescues. When Carrie and Kurt meet, she offers to pay him for each "stray" cat or dog he delivers. But when Carrie's "rescuing" goes too far, events spiral dangerously out of control. Told from alternating viewpoints, Listen is the haunting story of people thrown together by fate, each struggling to come to terms with their harrowing past.
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Dear Big V
Ellen W. Leroe
Courtney Condon, a funny, off-beat junior, is caught smack in the middle of the war between the Lewds and the Prudes at Delaware-Valley High School. Court's the founder of an abstinence club at Dull-Val. But when she's assigned an Op Ed piece for the school paper that forces her to work with Lance, the major player and hottest guy at school, this up-close and personal contact with Lance throws her into a Whirlwind of Confusion over her chaste ideals. Meanwhile, Courtney's staunchly devout, strict-Catholic mom is pushing her own form of prudishness to the point of alienating the entire family, especially when Mom catches Court in a lip-lock with Lance in his car, right in her very own driveway! Laugh-out-loud funny, Dear Big V illuminates the conflict between hormones and values that teens face every day.
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Shattered
Kathi Baron
Teen violin prodigy Cassie has been tiptoeing around her father, whose moods have become increasingly explosive. After he destroys her beloved and valuable violin, Cassie, shocked, runs away, eventually seeking refuge in a homeless shelter. She later learns that her father, a former violinist, was physically beaten as a child by her grandfather, a painful secret he's kept hidden from his family, and the cause of his violent outbursts. With all of their lives shattered in some way, Cassie's family must struggle to repair their broken relationships. As Cassie moves forward, she ultimately finds a way to help others, having developed compassion through her own painful experiences. Written in lyrical prose, Shattered tells the moving story of how one girl finds inner strength through music.
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Eat Fresh Food
Phil Mansfield, Phil Mansfield, Rozanne Gold
Finally! Here is a visually stunning cookbook for teens who are interested in cooking food that goes beyond the boring old "kids" recipes, but is the kind of foods TEENS want to eat.With many recipes showing the step-by-step process of how the food is made, these recipes take old favorites for all times of day and year--from breakfast muffins, to mac-and-cheese lunches, to fish taco dinners, to chocolate desserts--and updates them with healthy, delicious new ingredients that are better for you (and much yummier) than fast food!Rozanne Gold's All-Star Team (who tested each recipe and who are pictured in the book) includes boys and girls ages 9-19, siblings and friends. The kids display an amazing energy for the food --whether it's buying fresh ingredients in a farmers' market, or cooking it in exciting new ways. With the emphasis on fresh ingredients, Rozanne Gold and her cooks keep their food healthful, gorgeous and fun to make.
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Whaling Season
Peter Lourie
Not all scientists live where they work, harvest their own subjects, or use information passed down from generation after generation of Inupiaq Eskimos to help learn about the bowhead whale. Arctic whale scientist Craig George is the son of children’s author Jean Craighead George, and out on the ice with the whales and the whalers in Barrow, Alaska is where this Arctic whale scientist works. He has studied them for nearly thirty years and the mysteries these creatures hold never fail to amaze him. Join Craig at the top of the world, where the days and nights are long, the people full of stories, and the bowhead whale is at the center of it all
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Boys Without Names
Kashmira Sheth
For eleven-year-old Gopal and his family, life in their rural Indian village is over: We stay, we starve, his baba has warned. With the darkness of night as cover, they flee to the big city of Mumbai in hopes of finding work and a brighter future. Gopal is eager to help support his struggling family until school starts, so when a stranger approaches him with the promise of a factory job, he jumps at the offer.But Gopal has been deceived. There is no factory, just a small, stuffy sweatshop where he and five other boys are forced to make beaded frames for no money and little food. The boys are forbidden to talk or even to call one another by their real names. In this atmosphere of distrust and isolation, locked in a rundown building in an unknown part of the city, Gopal despairs of ever seeing his family again.But late one night, when Gopal decides to share kahanis, or stories, he realizes that storytelling might be the boys' key to holding on to their sense of self and their hope for any kind of future. If he can make them feel more like brothers than enemies, their lives will be more bearable in the shop—and they might even find a way to escape.
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Claim To Fame
Lindsay Scott hit the big time at age five, when she became the star of the television show "Just Me and the Kids." It seemed like she was set for life--until she had a nervous breakdown when she was eleven, because Lindsay had suddenly developed a very dangerous sense of ESP--the ability to hear what anyone was thinking about here, at any time, anywhere in the world. Lindsay's father whisked her away to her long-gone mother's house in small town Springdale, and Lindsay was amazed to discover that within the four walls of the house, she can't hear anything out of the ordinary. And so Lindsay has stayed hidden in the house, safe from other people's thoughts, doing her best to stay out of sight and let the world forget her. When the tabloids print a "where are they now" story about her, claiming that Lindsay's maniacal father has kept her imprisoned in her house for the past five years, a couple of well-meaning teens attempt to "rescue" Lindsay. For the first time in five years, Lindsay is outside the protective quiet of her house. And that's when she hears the one voice she never expected to hear: her mother's. When she discovers that perhaps her mother didn't leave voluntarily, she has a choice to make: will she risk everything to find the truth about her past--and the source of her ability?
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A Brief History of Montmaray
Michelle Cooper
“There’s a fine line between gossip and history, when one is talking about kings.”Sophie Fitzosborne lives in a crumbling castle in the tiny island kingdom of Montmaray with her eccentric and impoverished royal family. When she receives a journal for her sixteenth birthday, Sophie decides to chronicle day-to-day life on the island. But this is 1936, and the news that trickles in from the mainland reveals a world on the brink of war. The politics of Europe seem far away from their remote island—until two German officers land a boat on Montmaray. And then suddenly politics become very personal indeed.A Brief History of Montmaray is a heart-stopping tale of loyalty, love, and loss, and of fighting to hold on to home when the world is exploding all around you.“Once in a while, a special book will cross our paths and make us grateful for life and the ability to read. I’m talking about A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper. I’m calling her Australia’s next stroke of literary brilliance.”—Viewpoint
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The Golden Shrine
Harry Turtledove
Continuing the alternate-Bronze-Age epic begun in Beyond the Gap:The glaciers came and covered the world with ice. Now they are in retreat. North of the city of Nidaros, north of the forest, north of the steppes where the nomadic Bizogots hunt, a gap has opened in the ice-wall. And down through that gap come the men who call themselves "Rulers."Their terrifying cavalry rides wooly mammoths. Their bows can shoot arrows farther than those of the southerners. Their wizards wield power that neither the shamans of the Bizogots nor the wizards of Raumsdalian Empire can match, a magic that can melt the stone beneath a man's feet, call down blasting fire from the sky, or decimate a tribe with plagues that have no cure. Scattered survivors of the Bizogot tribes hide from the Rulers. The Empire is shattered. The feckless Emperor Sigvat II is in hiding.Against the Rulers stands Count Hamnet Thyssen and his small band of friends. Jarl Trasamund of the Three Tusk Bizogots. The adventurer Ulric Skakki. And, most important, Marcovefa, the female shaman of a cannibal tribe that lives atop the Glacier itself. Marcovefa has magic that the Rulers cannot counter.But there are many Rulers, and they have many wizards. Marcovefa is but one.Perhaps Hamnet and his allies can save their lands from the Rulers. But first they must seek out the legendary Golden Shrine – and the Golden Shrine has not been seen by human eyes since the time before the glaciers came.
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