Breathing Underwater by Alex Flinn

When Ashley suggested this book for our blog, she described it as, "the story of a young relationship gone wrong." The story starts with Nick in a courthouse where his ex girlfriend is getting a restraining order against him. Talk about love gone wrong! Nick is rich, an honors student, a football player, the most popular guy in school. How did it come to this? His father hits him, so he knows better than to ever hit someone in return, right? Especially not Caitlin, his one true love. But somehow he did. Through court mandated family violence councelling and keeping a journal where he recounts his relationship with Caitlin, we grow to understand how he got to where he is and where he can go from there.

You can find this book at Y LIN

Chu Ju's House by Gloria Whelan

Teen guess blogger Sarah recommended Chu Ju’s House. She said, “this book shows the life of a Chinese girl who needs to leave home so her parents will be allowed to have another child. I love Chu Ju’s courage and endurance throughout all of the adverse situations she lives through. This novel helped me understand the difficult situations many girls in China must live through."

In China, families are limited to two children so when fourteen-year-old Chu Ju's mother gets pregnant again the entire family prays for a boy. When a girl is born, Chu Ju overhears her grandmother trying to talk her mother into sending the baby to an orphanage so they can try again for a boy. To save her sister, Chu Ju runs away and thus begin her adventures in modern day China. She explores her country as she travels from one place she think might be her new home to the next, finally being taken under the wing of the gentle farmerwoman Han Na.

Find this book shelved under Y WHE

The First Part Last by Angela Johnson

Bobby's sixteenth birthday brings change to his life, but not the usual sort of change. His girlfriend, Nia, is pregnant. The book alternates chapters between now, where Bobby is struggling to raise his baby Feather on his own, and then, the story of Bobby and Nia and how their family and friends deal with Nia's pregnancy. Bobby's love for Feather is achingly beautiful, and his attempts to balance school, work, a social life, and being a father are realistic, poignant, and provocative.



Find this book shelved under Y JOH on the Coretta Scott King shelf.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman

Coraline and her parents have just moved to a new house. The house is very large and has been divided up into four seperate apartments, so the door in her living room now opens up onto a boarded up wall. One night Coraline opens the door in the middle of the night and finds, instead of a wall, another apartment with another mother and another father. These creepy parents have shiny black buttons sewn on their eyes and want Coraline to stay with them. When she escapes back to her apartment she discovers that the Other Mother has kidnapped her real parents and she must go back over there and use all her cunning to rescue her parents. Coraline is a creepy, pulse pounding ghost story that will have you gripping the book and reading the whole thing in one sitting. Just be sure not to read it alone!

Find this book shelved at Y GAI.

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.