Does My Head Look Big in This? By Randa Abdel-Fattah

Over winter break, Austrailian teen Amal makes the biggest decision of her life. She decides to wear a hijab, the Muslim head scarf, full time. The decision was hers and hers alone, yet nobody seems to understand that. Many people, her principal included, are convinced that her parents are forcing her into it. Going to her snobby prep school day after day, while enduring classmates who ask her to give a speech to the whole school why terrorists do what they do and how Islam justifies it, is bad enough, but she also has to deal with all the other realities of being a high school girl. She has her first, serious mad crush on a boy, she fights with her parents, goes shopping with friends, and learns more about herself than she thought she would when she first put on the hijab.

Find this book shelved under Y ABD

Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems by John Grandits

Is poetry just for old people and chumps? Never! These poems are fun and inviting, with strange shapes and a fantastic narrator. Jessie falls in love with blue lipstick, but decides it isn't for her, flashes with her brother, ends up with the worst of all possible bad hairstyles, turns in homework to her English teacher that her cat ate then ... "coughed" up, and still manages to write poetry with style and confidence.

Find this book shelved under Y 811 GRA.

Runaways vol. 1 Pride and Joy by Brian Vaughan

Alex, Karolina, Gert, Nico, Chase, and Molly are thrust together once a year when their parents get together to choose which charities to send their extra money to. This year their lives take a turn for the surreal when they decide to spy on their parents boring cocktail party only to discover that their parents are actually mass-murdering super villains who call themselves "The Pride."

When they call the police to try and report the murder they witnessed, their parents are immediately notified and they discover The Pride has the entire city of Los Angeles under their thumb. The 11 - 16 year olds go on the run and discover that many of them have special powers or talents that their parents have kept hidden from them; Nico absorbs the Staff of One during the knock-down drag-out fight that inevitably ensues; Gert discovers a genetically altered dinosaur that her time travelling parents had created to be her body guard (and that was supposed to be given to her upon her parent's death); Karolina takes off the medic-alert bracelet her parents made her promise never to remove and she discovers that she is a rainbow-hued, flying alien; Chase puts on some gloves his parents invented and when he can't get them off he learns to use them as weapons; Alex, the brain, can think his way out of anything; Molly comes from a family of mutants and discovers a stregnth she never knew she posessed.

And so our six heroes set out to try to stay safe and perhaps right some wrongs, but is there a traitor in their midst?

Grab this book from the Teen Graphic Novels section under call number Y VAU Graphic Novel.

TH1RTEEN R3ASONS WHY by Jay Asher

In Thirteen Reasons Why, Clay Jensen comes home from high school one day to find a shoebox with 7 tapes in it. When he starts to listen to the first tape, he is floored - Hannah Baker's voice is speaking too him. Clay had had a crush on Hannah since she moved to town, but two weeks ago she swallowed a handful of pills. Now her voice is on his stereo telling the story of why she did it and, worst of all, "if you're listening to these tapes, you're one of the reasons why."

Clay spends the rest of the night following Hannah's words around his small town from house to coffee shop to diner to house learning the stories of incidents and people that made her think she had no other choice but to end her life. With Clay, the reader will oscillate between fear, anger, and sadness as Hannah tells her story. "Everything affects everything," she says, and indeed the actions of others that seem to involve her only barely pile up with other events in her life to create a world that she does not feel is livable.

Find this book shelved under Y ASH