I used to play football, but not anymore. I haven’t had a friend in a long time. Thankfully, real friends can see the real you, even when you can’t clearly see. Flint loves to draw. In fact, he’s furiously trying to finish his comic book so he can be the youngest winner of the “Find a Comic Star” contest. He’s also rushing to finish because he has keratoconus—an eye disease that could eventually make him blind. McKell is the new girl at school and immediately hangs with the popular kids. Except McKell’s not a fan of the way her friends treat this boy named Squint. He seems nice and really talented. He draws awesome pictures of superheroes. McKell wants to get to know him, but is it worth the risk? What if her friends catch her hanging with the kid who squints all the time? McKell has a hidden talent of her own but doesn’t share it for fear of being judged. Her terminally ill brother, Danny, challenges McKell to share her love of poetry and songwriting. Flint seems like someone she could trust. Someone who would never laugh at her. Someone who is as good and brave as the superhero in Flint’s comic book named Squint.Squint is the inspiring story of two new friends dealing with their own challenges, who learn to trust each other, believe in themselves, and begin to truly see what matters most.

    "I dare you, Jade Elsie Brooke, to break into Trystan Woods's house and steal a pair of his boxers without him finding out." Jade Brooke was the daredevil who had never turned down a dare, no matter how bad it was. So when a simple game of truth or dare ends up flipping her life upside down in the form of a dare, she has no one to blame but herself. Trystan Woods was the boy out of reach for most, who stood at the top of the high school food chain. Everyone loves him, and he was the football team captain. Jade had never interacted with him, until the day she was dared to break into his house and steal his underwear. The only flaw in the plan? When he catches her in his room holding his boxers.

    Twelve-year-old Susan is shocked to find that she was switched with another baby in the hospital and that the parents who have raised her may have to give her up to her true biological parents.

    She has just lost her mother Tess and brother Mikey, her marriage to Joe is coming apart at the seams and her thirty-year friendship with Karen is on the rocks.While clearing out her childhood home, Carmel discovers that her mother gave birth to a baby in an Irish Mother and Baby home when she was sixteen, a place notorious for its mass burial of babies and illegal adoptions.Carmel goes on a quest for the truth about her troubled mother’s past. Her roller-coaster journey takes her from her comfortable Manchester home to the west of Ireland and to London's theatre land. It’s a journey that leads her to ask: Can we ever escape our own family history or is our destiny in our DNA?

    Things are good or bad. Anything in between is confusing. That’s the stuff Caitlin’s older brother, Devon, has always explained. But now Devon’s dead and Dad is no help at all. Caitlin wants to get over it, but as an eleven-year-old girl with Asperger’s, she doesn’t know how. When she reads the definition of closure, she realizes that is what she needs. In her search for it, Caitlin discovers that not everything is black and white—the world is full of colors—messy and beautiful.Kathryn Erskine has written a must-read gem, one of the most moving novels of the year.

    Meet Lizzie and Kim as they grow from small-town adolescents to women on the hedonistic stage of London in the early eighties. There they join Kim's older sister, Vonnie, an untameable force of nature who is everything they'd like to be. Or is she? Told with an infectious energy, My Vintage Summer is for those who remember dressing up for their first night out, the first song they danced to with their best friend, their first love - and their first life-altering mistake. It's a story of what happens when life doesn't turn out as you had expected.

    Katie O'Connell does--a Wish List actually. Because she longs to be someone new, the kind of girl you take notice of and remember. Someone who isn't just a part of the background. Unfortunately, Katie has no idea how to make that happen, but her outspoken best friend does: a Junior Year Wish List of goals, starting with earning a role in the senior play, and bookish Katie reluctantly agrees. Now she has barely ten months to meet all five goals that will transform her from a bookworm to a butterfly. Wish List in hand, Katie draws her motley crew of dramatic friends closer for support to launch her Junior Year with a fresh (somewhat anxious) attitude. Until the boy who was her first childhood friend, the boy who disappeared right before her tenth birthday, shows up on the first day of school pulling her quiet life into an emotional tailspin. His reappearance will start Katie's junior year with more questions than answers. Why did he leave? Where has he been all this time? Can friendships last after a seven-year break? Is achieving her Wish List possible now? Most importantly, will he be the one to make Wish Number Five a reality?Author's NoteFeminism is about equality and the freedom of choice. The choice to: wear makeup or not, to wear loose fitting clothes or tight fitting clothes or not give a damn about my clothes at all, to like boys or girls or both or neither. It’s about women having choices based on equality of the sexes. There’s no wrong way or right way to be a woman. Just like men, women can care about their appearance or not care, women can be thin or curvy, short or tall, women can be smart or ignorant, women have the freedom to be whatever type of human they want to be at every stage of their life.High school is the next step in a teenager’s life that allows them the time to explore those choices in greater detail just like college, or trade school, or their first paying job, or their fifth, or their 20th will. High school students are dealing with real life adult issues but with little autonomy—stress of home life, relationships, figuring out who we are, what we want to do, who we want to be, how we’ll change, how we deal with change, our sexual identity. High school is all about self-discovery, and, unfortunately, having to do it all weighed down by society’s pre-conceived notions and subjective judgments about our choices and the tiny cramped boxes they think we belong in.If you think it will make you happy, try being a drama geek, try being a cheerleader, student government, a mathlete, an athlete, a bookworm, a scientist, a journalist, a singer, a dancer, an artist, or an observer of life. Dress up, dress down, dress comfy…just be safe and be happy.Please, please, please don’t let anyone tell you who or what you should be, or how you should act, but also please listen to advice from others that's given respectfully with the hope that your path will be a little less bumpy than theirs was. Be and do what makes you happy, dip your toes into the waters of our beautiful diverse world, or cannonball in and explore every nook and cranny you want to until you find the perfect fit, and don’t be afraid if you outgrow what fits and want to try something new. That’s the beauty of life, we don’t have to be stagnant. We have the freedom to change.Katie wanted to explore and try something new, be someone different for a while to see how it fit, but she never lost her true self, she was-and always will be-a book-loving artist devoted to her family and friends.

    But the bone begins to grow, reaching up out of the ground until it turns into a skeleton - a skeleton with an unusual interest in his unwell younger sister Miren.As time wears on, Miren's condition worsens, and the only time she is truly at peace is when she is playing with the skeleton. But Stanley is wary of him, especially when he finally manages to get a picture, and spots a scythe at the skeleton's feet. . .A whimsical, heartfelt story about a boy who finds a friend in Death with the help of an unusual tree growing in his back garden. With black line illustrations throughout by Victoria Assanelli."

    If no one notices her, then no one willnotice her uncle Punky either. Punky is a grown man with a child's mind. Delrita loves him dearly and can't stand people making fun of his Down Syndrome. But when tragedy strikes, Delrita's quiet life— and Punky's— are disrupted forever. Can she finally learn to trust others, for her own sake and Punky's? This story captures the joy and sorrow that come when we open our hearts to love. Author Biography: June Rae Wood lives near Windsor, Missouri.

    No one knows, and Mia wants to keep it that way. But when trouble at school finally forces Mia to reveal her secret, she must learn to accept herself and embrace her ability, called synesthesia, a mingling of the senses.

    One of seven children, Emma used to be the invisible kid, but now it seems everyone is watching her. And just as she's about to start high school and try to recover her friendships and former life, one of her classmates is found dead in an apparent suicide. Fifteen and blind, Emma has to untangle what happened and why - in order to see for herself what makes life worth living.Unflinching in its portrayal of Emma's darkest days, yet full of hope and humor, Rachel DeWoskin's brilliant Blind is one of those rare books that utterly absorbs the listener into the life and experience of another.

    We'd gone only a few yards when a voice sounded off to our left. 'What 'ave we 'ere, then?' it said. We turned our heads and say Bluey Lonnegan lifting himself up off a sandstone wall. 'You're lookin' at the Black Dog Gang,' said Mickey. 'No doubt ya heard a us?' The gang was Mickey's idea. We'd heard the rumours – rats were coming in off the ships and spreading disease. Then the government started offering tuppence a rat, so we decided to get stuck in. But we hadn't counted on someone getting sick. Or on Mickey's dad finding his rats chaining Mickey up. And what happened next . . . well, it would change things forever . . .

    In fact, he has a hard enough time keeping the peace between the drunks in the local saloon. But with tough Sheriff Mont Naylor to back him up he figures he can handle whatever comes his way.Jim-Bob's first real assignment is no piece of cake. He must escort a ruthless outlaw into the hands of justice. All seems well with the lawless killer firmly in Jim-Bob's custody. But nothing prepares him for an angry mob, determined to take the law into their own hands and provide their own brand justice: a hangman's noose.Shadow of a Star is a gripping tale by Elmer Kelton, voted one of the best Western Writers of all time by Westerns Writers of America, Inc.

    

    In Firekeeper's Daughter, debut author Angeline Boulley crafts a groundbreaking YA thriller about a Native teen who must root out the corruption in her community, for readers of Angie Thomas and Tommy Orange. As a biracial, unenrolled tribal member and the product of a scandal, eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, both in her hometown and on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. Daunis dreams of studying medicine, but when her family is struck by tragedy, she puts her future on hold to care for her fragile mother. The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, the charming new recruit on her brother Levi’s hockey team. Yet even as Daunis falls for Jamie, certain details don’t add up and she senses the dashing hockey star is hiding something. Everything comes to light when Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, thrusting her into the heart of a criminal investigation. Reluctantly, Daunis agrees to go undercover, but secretly pursues her own investigation, tracking down the criminals with her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine. But the deceptions—and deaths—keep piling up and soon the threat strikes too close to home. Now, Daunis must learn what it means to be a strong Anishinaabe kwe (Ojibwe woman) and how far she'll go to protect her community, even if it tears apart the only world she’s ever known.