Hard Hit

Author	Lisa Ann Sandell
ISBN	0670060283

Sarah, like every college-bound junior, deals with constant pressure from teachers, friends, and parents. Besides that, she’s a marching band geek and the only Jew in her class. So when she gets a chance to spend the summer on a kibbutz in Israel, Sarah jumps at the opportunity to escape her world....

Author	Thalia Chaltas
ISBN	0670011991

Home is supposed to be a place you belong. It's supposed to be parents who are there and siblings who bug you and a life that feels comfortable. It's not supposed to be an absentee mother or a drowned sister. But that's Vera's reality, and she can't stand it anymore. So she runs. She ends up in an old mining...

Author	Alma Fullerton
ISBN	0060778512

Your mother's suicide attempt has left her in a coma from which she's never waking up. You know that she wouldn't want to live like this, but could you really help her die? Here you are, making the hardest decision of your life and there's no one to help you: Your father has disappeared into depression. Your...

Author

Holly Thompson

After a classmate commits suicide, Kana Goldberg—a half-Japanese, half-Jewish American—wonders who is responsible. She and her cliquey friends said some thoughtless things to the girl. Hoping that Kana will reflect on her behavior, her parents pack her off to her mother's ancestral home in...

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	Ron Koertge
ISBN	0763629391

"This funny and poignant novel celebrates the power of writing to help young people make sense of their lives and unlock and confront their problems." - SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred review)

When MVP Kevin Boland gets the news that he has mono and won't be seeing a baseball field for a while,...

Author

Chris Lynch

If you do it right, it can be a life. The hothouse, the guys, the glory. But just like that, it can all go up in smoke. In the beginning it was strange, ya know, because of all that we had lost. But there was something about it that felt so good and so right, too: "I'm so proud of you, Russ." "We'll always be here...

Author	Helen Frost
ISBN	0374309620

Two sisters, Jeannie and Sarah, tell their separate yet tightly interwoven stories in alternating narrative poems. Each sister - Jeannie, who leaves Scotland during the Highland Clearances with her father, mother, and the younger children, and Sarah, who hides so she can stay behind with her grandmother...

Author	Walter Dean Myers
ISBN	0823418537

Acclaimed writer Walter Dean Myers celebrates the people of Harlem with these powerful and soulful first-person poems in the voices of the residents who make up the legendary neighborhood: basketball players, teachers, mail carriers, jazz artists, maids, veterans, nannies, students, and more....

Author	Maria Testa
ISBN	0763633666

"Rapt readers don’t need to know anything about Vietnam to understand love, loss, fear, and waiting. A tour de force." — KIRKUS REVIEWS (starred review)

When the six-year-old narrator of this lyric novel watches her father march off to serve a year in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, a year...

Author	Billy Merrell
ISBN	0439490367

PUSH continues to break new ground with this remarkable poetry memoir of growing up, coming out, and exploring love.This is a memoir that is lived in moments. The moments you know - when you see your parents' marriage dissolving, when you realize you're a boy who likes boys, when you speak the truth and...

Author	Charles R. Smith Jr.
ISBN	0763616923

A dynamic author-illustrator team follows the threetime heavyweight champ through twelve rounds of a remarkable life.

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. . . . I’m the prettiest thing that ever lived!"

From the moment a fired-up teenager from Kentucky won 1960 Olympic gold...

Author	Hope Anita Smith
ISBN	0805072020

So many unanswered questions weigh down thirteen-year-old C.J. as he struggles to understand why his father walked out. His father is back now, though C.J. is not as quick to forgive as the other members of his family. He still feels the weight of responsibility that fell on his shoulders when Daddy was...

Author	Susan Taylor Brown
ISBN	1582461805

When her mom runs away from home, Rachel is left behind with her emotionally distant father and many questions she cannot answer. Over time, she learns the truth about her mom. But it's only when she learns the truth about her dad, the rock- immoveable and always there for her to lean on-that Rachel can...

Author	Mel Glenn
ISBN	0060004819

Everyone has an image of Laura Li, the most popular girl in school: “stone hearted,” “warmhearted,” “conceited deceiver,” “humble achiever,” “a virgin,” “the hottest girl in the world.”

Award-winning poet Mel Glenn weaves a brilliant web of authentic voices...

Author	Margarita Engle
ISBN	0805089365

Daniel has escaped Nazi Germany with nothing but a desperate dream that he might one day find his parents again. But that golden land called New York has turned away his ship full of refugees, and Daniel finds himself in Cuba.

As the tropical island begins to work its magic on him, the young refugee...

Author	Robert Cormier
ISBN	0440228549

Eugene is remembering the summer of 1938 in Frenchtown, a time when he began to wonder “what I was doing here on the planet Earth.” Here in vibrant, exquisite detail are his lovely mother, his aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, and especially his beloved, enigmatic father. Here, too, is the world...

Author	Jen Bryant
ISBN	0375832599

Like her mother, Georgia McCoy is an artist, but her dad looks away whenever he sees her with a sketchbook. Sometimes it’s hard to remember what it was like when her mother was still alive . . . when they were a family . . . when they were happy. But then a few days after her 13th birthday, Georgia receives...

Author

Betsy Rosenthal

One of 12 siblings growing up in depression-era Baltimore, Edith isn't quite sure of who she is. Between working at her father’s diner, taking care of her younger siblings, and living in the shadow of her more mature sisters, Edith feels lost in a sea of siblings. When a kind teacher encourages...

Author	Wendy Phillips
ISBN	1550504118

Teen violence, bullying and the burning quest to fit in are presented in the poems of four unforgettable high school students: Natalie, Kyle, Tricia, Miguel. Their stories unfold in this explosive new book told in free verse. A story of teen angst like no other, it is based on fictional characters but...

Author

Eireann Corrigan

From the remarkable author of the PUSH bestseller YOU REMIND ME OF YOU, a searing novel in poems about a family falling apart after a violent assault.

It's about the aftermath. It's about what happens after a stranger breaks into a house and attacks a family. It's about the sisters who must barricade...

Author	Steven Herrick
ISBN	1932425756

One day, I'll find the wolf.
Face to face,
we'll see each other across Wolli Creek
and he'll know I've been waiting,
searching for him all my life.

Jake's dad saw the wolf before Jake was born. They say wolves don't live in this country, yet in the night Jake hears it howling, long...