Billie Standish Was Here

Author	Peter W. Hassinger
ISBN	0060284676

Susanna Shakespeare finds the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon much too quiet and provincial. She yearns to travel to London to see her father's world of players and poets, and to follow a secret dream of her own. Once Susanna arrives in London, nothing is quite as she expected it to be -- least of all...

Author	Joyce McDonald
ISBN	0385731078

This book was fabulous! A real page turner, and a real position that people go through; knowing who to trust. I really sympathized with the characters in this book, and I enjoyed the easy read!

Devil on My Heels by Joyce McDonald (this review was my February 2010 book report, I got an A!)

Dove...

Author	Martha Brooks
ISBN	0374349851

Seventeen-year-old Odella is haunted by family secrets. Why doesn't her great-aunt Gloria visit anymore? Why does her mother, Sally, drink so much? Sally's tragic car accident on a frozen lake when she was sixteen seems to have cast a spell over her life that no one can break. Odella tries to hold her...

Author

Pnina Moed Kass

Set in contemporary Israel, this powerful novel is narrated in real time by many voices: Sixteen-year-old Thomas, from Berlin, seeking answers to questions about his grandfather, a Nazi officer in World War II. Vera from Odessa, reclaiming her Jewish heritage. Baruch Ben Tov, a Holocaust survivor....

Author	Susan Shaw
ISBN	0525478299

Safe. To Tracy, safe means having Mama close by. Years after her mother's death, Tracy still feels her presence. But the moment Tracy is forced into a car as she is walking home from school one day, safe is ripped away. In the aftermath of an unspeakable crime, thirteen-year-old Tracy must fight her way...

Author	Jackie Lee Miles
ISBN	1581825706

In 1963 rural Georgia, with the Vietnam War cranking up, pregnant seventeen-year-old Adie Jenkins discovers the diary of pregnant seventeen-year-old Tempe Jordan, a slave girl, begun as the Civil War wound down. As Cold Rock River comes to its surprising, shocking, endings, questions of family,...

Author

Ellen Yeomans

Typical teenager Kit lives a happy, normal life of friends,boys, and loving family. She and her younger brother, Buddy, are incredibly close despite their eight-year age difference, bonded by a shared love of baseball and math. But when Buddy is taken suddenly by cancer, Kit and herparents struggle...

Author	Sherryl Jordan
ISBN	0689860455

Terrified, a young Navaron child watches helplessly from his hiding place as a young Shinili woman is brutally beaten and abused by a group of drunken Navaron men. Too frightened to answer her pleas for help, the child runs away, taking with him the sacred bone carving of the Shinili people. In doing so,...

Author	Karlijn Stoffels
ISBN	0545069297

Mee was born with a great gift: the ability to sing other people's stories and heal their pain. But Mee also carries his own pain -- his failure to reach his deaf mother and heal her grief at his father's death. As he travels the country, he eases many people's sorrows, but he cannot connect with anyone himself....

Author	Margo Rabb
ISBN	0385734026

"If she dies, I'll die," are the words 15-year-old Mia Perlman writes in her journal the night her mother is diagnosed with cancer. Twelve days later, Mia's mother is dead, and Mia, her older sister, and their father must find a way to live on in the face of sudden, unfathomable loss.

For Mia, this...

Author	Julius Lester
ISBN	0061558907

There are times when a tree can no longer withstand the pain inflicted on it, and the wind will take pity on that tree and topple it over in a mighty storm. All the other trees who witnessed the evil look down upon the fallen tree with envy. They pray for the day when a wind will end their suffering.

I...

Author	Beth Ann Bauman
ISBN	0385737351

A wonderful YA debut full of drama for two very different sisters.

It's off-season at the Jersey shore, when the boardwalk belongs to the locals. Rosie is 15 and her sister Skate is 16. Their dad, an amiable drunk, is spending a few weeks in jail while their cousin Angie looks after them in their...

Author	Brent Runyon
ISBN	0375844465

The cottage on the lake is always the same, but Luke is changing. At thirteen he’s excited. At fourteen he’s cool. At fifteen he’s pissed off. At sixteen he’s in love.

Through four summers’ worth of trips to the emergency room, campfires and house fires, parties and feuds with neighbors,...

Author	Andrew Smith
ISBN	0312375573

The summer before Troy Stotts turns seventeen, his mother dies. Troy and his father barely speak, communicating instead by writing notes on a legal pad by the phone. Troy spends most of his time with his closest friends: Tom Buller, brash and fearless, the son of a drunk; Gabe Benavidez, smart enough...

Author	Laura Bowers
ISBN	0152057641

Abbey Garner has a plan: to earn a million dollars by the time she's thirty-five. Financial independence will allow her to break the cycle of unhappiness endured by the women in her family. Determined to fulfill her dream, Abbey works at Granny Po's struggling beauty shop, where the feisty Gray Widows...

Author	Nora Raleigh Baskin
ISBN	1416935584

I put my fingers up to my throat and touched the pointy Star of David, my grandmother's necklace, a delicate chain made up of countless tiny links. If I wear this, will people think I am Jewish? Is that what I want to be? Seventh-grader Caroline Weeks has a Jewish mom and a non-Jewish dad. When Caroline's...

Author	Cynthia C. DeFelice
ISBN	0374400148

A Matter of Life or Death

It's 1849, and twelve-year-old, Lucas Whitaker is all alone after his whole family dies of a disease called consumption which has swept through the community. Lucas is grief-stricken and filled with guilt. He might have saved his mother, who was the last to die, if only...

Author	Mary Ann Rodman
ISBN	0374337039

It’s September 1943, and eleven-year-old Ellie McKelvey’s older brother, Jimmy, has just been drafted. Jimmy has a joyful heart and a kind word for everyone, and he’s the only person who thinks Ellie is smart and funny and as beautiful as Lana Turner, the movie star. Ellie can hardly stand to see...

Author	Beth Kephart
ISBN	0061470481

Georgia knows what it means to keep secrets. She knows how to ignore things. She knows that some things are better left unsaid. ...Or are they? When Georgia and her best friend, Riley, travel along with nine other suburban Pennsylvania kids to Anapra, a squatters' village in the heat-flattened border...

Author	Robin Stevenson
ISBN	1554699592

It's 1963, and Jack's family is still reeling from the SIDS death of his baby sister. Adrift in his own life, Jack is convinced that setting a world record will bring his father back to his senses and his mother back to life. But world events, including President Kennedy's assassination, threaten to overshadow...

Author	Hannah Roberts McKinnon
ISBN	0374324697

"Rings on a tree tell a story," Franny Parker tells Lucas Dunn. "They tell you about its seasons, if they've been plentiful or not." So far, the rings of Franny's life have been marked by her family, their farm, their dusty little Oklahoma town – all of it so familiar. But in the summer of her thirteenth...

Author

Kiera Stewart

A crew of middle school nobodies secretly use dog training techniques on their classmates to go from eighth-grade underdogs to leaders of the pack, only to discover being top dog isn’t all they expected it to be..

Author	Stephanie Black
ISBN	1608610136

Having the song, "Cold as Ice", by Foreigner, in my head as I read Stephanie Black's thriller of the same name was not a bad thing at all. In fact, it was perfect. The song lyrics couldn't be more appropriate, and the villain(s) in this thriller mystery made me shiver in the summer heat.

As Black...

Author	Penni Russon
ISBN	0060793899

Undine gets along well with her unconventional mother, she adores her baby brother, and she has a devoted kindred spirit in her best friend and next-door neighbor, Trout. It's inconvenient that Trout has a sloppy crush on her, but Undine tries to overlook this. Undine is basically satisfied . . . until...