Book picks similar to
Voices In My Head by Cindy J. Smith
poetry
not-for-me
giveaways-from-other-sources
authors-helping-authors
Nevermor
Lani Lenore - 2013
Wren and her brothers, Henry and Max, are orphans. They wish to be adopted, but no one wants to take in all three of them. Wren won’t be separated from her family, but no matter how hard she fights to keep them together, she fears she will lose them nonetheless. She wants more for both of them - for herself. She wants an escape. Prompted by a world she sees in a dream, Wren begins to tell her brothers stories of a place where they can be carefree forever - a place called Nevermor. It is an island at the edge of the universe, where all dreams go. There is a boy who guards it, and he is known only as the Rifter. Wren believes that this place truly exists and desires her own life there, where she can keep her family together without anyone tearing them apart. Wren gets more than she bargained for when she is kidnapped by the arrogant and volatile Rifter and taken to Nevermor against her will. It is not completely unwelcome, however. The land is beautiful and there is freedom. The Rifter and his pack of wild boys accept her, and she feels that her brothers will be happy in this place too. Wren falls in love with Nevermor - and with the Rifter - and yet the more she learns of the conflict between the Rifter and a wicked man called the Scourge, the more she comes to realize that Nevermor is not a place for children. Nevermor is a dark fantasy based on the legend of Peter Pan.
The Polaris Uprising
Jennifer Ibarra - 2013
For nearly four decades, people have known exactly what’s expected of them. Obey the rules, follow the path that’s been laid out, and everything will be provided for: food, shelter, education, safety. No need goes unmet.But the cost is steep: you lose all rights to make your own choices in life.In seven years, eighteen-year-old Ryla Jensen will come of age and take over for her father as president of this idyllic nation. Groomed since childhood to take on a role she’s not even sure she wants, Ryla’s only escape from the pressures of duty is her sister, Alanna. But when her eyes are finally opened to the oppressive regime her father built, she begins to question everything she’s set to inherit—and finds herself at odds with her sister’s blind allegiance to their father.Torn between loyalty to her family and the fight for freedom, Ryla must decide just how far she’s willing to go to make a stand and risk losing the person she loves most in the world: Alanna.
Blitzball
Barton Ludwig - 2018
A predominantly white Reichfield High has lost every game in the last few years to the North Prep, a school with mostly Mexican, Brazilian, and Filipino students. For the first game of the season, however, Addie and his teammates are confident that they will win—because they’ve personally made sure the lead player of the opposite team will be unable to play.Addie and his supremacist and misogynistic friends are ill-prepared for what comes next, though. They are defeated by Shaylee, the best soccer player North Prep has ever seen—who also happens to be a girl. Given an exception, Shaylee is allowed to compete in a team of all boys.Unable to accept defeat, Addie is convinced that Shaylee must be using illegal methods to beat the Reichfield team. He sets out to expose her, but discovers instead that he has secrets of his own…Learning the dark history of his own origin and of the powers that be, Addie and his unlikely new friends must work together to challenge the corrupt, racist and fascist ruling class who could destroy society as they know it.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Katherine Webber - 2018
An unexpected boy. A perfect love story . . . until it isn't perfect at all.Sometimes a broken heart is all you need to set you free...Reiko loves the endless sky and electric colors of the Californian desert. It is a refuge from an increasingly claustrophobic life of family pressures and her own secrets. Then she meets Seth, a boy who shares a love of the desert and her yearning for a different kind of life. But Reiko and Seth both want something the other can't give them. As summer ends, things begin to fall apart. But the end of love can sometimes be the beginning of you...
Thousand Star Hotel
Bao Phi - 2017
Thousand Star Hotel confronts the silence around racism, police brutality, and the invisibility of the Asian American urban poor.From “with thanks to Sahra Nguyen for the refugee style slogan”:They give the kids candy to bet.My daughter loses the first four rounds,she’s a quiet wire as they take her candy away, piece by piece.When she finally wins, I ask if she wants to play again.No! she shouts, grabbing her candy, I want to go home!True refugee style:take everything you got and run with it.
Shoes on the Stairs
Jan Steele - 2019
She takes the reader on a journey of both laughter and tears while learning even the smallest of gestures can make a significant and lasting impact.* * *Claire Blackwell can’t find that damn white light. Thanks to a mishap at an intersection, she’s dead and stuck somewhere between Heaven and what seems like Hell as she is forced to watch her husband and children unravel without her. While she struggles to find answers for her limbo state, her family begins to see her, offering what she believes, is a gift of second chances. As she navigates through this new, untouchable world and the challenges it creates, she is forced to face some sad and potentially dangerous truths. Determined, she works to mend her relationship with her family, but her stubborn teenage son refuses to acknowledge her, and when tensions escalate with his long-time bully, her inability to control the physical world around her leaves her fearing for her family’s safety. With her time running out, she must find a way to save them before the progress she has made is lost and she fades from this world forever.
The Age
Nancy Lee - 2014
A coming of age novel for today, The Age will appeal to readers of Annabel Lyon, Lisa Moore, Heather O'Neill.Set in Vancouver in 1984, as Soviet warships swarm the North Atlantic, The Age follows Gerry, a troubled teenager confronted with her single mom’s newest relationship. When she takes solace in a ragtag group of activists planning a subversive protest at the city’s upcoming peach march, her fascination with the group’s leader, and her struggle with sexual identity creates a rift between Gerry and her best friend, Ian. Bolstered by her grandfather, an eccentric ex-news anchor in the throes of a bitter divorce, Gerry tries to put herself at the centre of the protest group’s violent plot. When the demands of these complex relationship become too difficult, Gerry escapes to the role she knows best, survivor in a post-nuclear dystopia of her own creation. Gerry’s real life and fantasy life alternate and accelerate until a collision of events and consequences forces her towards life or death decisions in both worlds.Electric and engaging, with piercing observation, subversive wit, and the same fearlessness that caused a sensation amongst critics and fans of Dead Girls, The Age is at once a startling post-apocalyptic drama, a harrowing journey through adolescent recklessness and desire, and a dark portrait of a generation molded by nuclear anxiety. Its arrival confirms Nancy Lee as one of Canadian Literature’s most thrilling and compelling voices.
Lost Girls
Merrie Destefano - 2017
She wears nothing but black.And she can fight.She’s not the only girl to go missing in the last year, but she is the only one to come back. She desperately wants to unravel what happened to her, to try and recover the rest of the Lost Girls.But the more she discovers, the more her memories return. And the thrill of what she remembers—of what she can’t resist—might still get her killed.
Untethered
Katie Hayoz - 2013
In fact, there are times she can’t even manage to stay inside it. Junior year is off to a less than stellar start for Sylvie: Her parents are splitting up, her little brother is sitting at her lunch table, and she’s the target of the school bully. Plus, she accidentally astral projects, slipping out of her body again and again at all the worst times. Sylvie is cast as the class freak and a medical misfit. She wishes she were somewhere else. Someone else. But it's only when her best friend catches the attention of the boy Sylvie's loved in secret since the fifth grade that Sylvie makes up her mind to do something drastic. Sylvie intends to get Kevin by any means possible -- even if it involves treachery, deceit, and the dark side of the paranormal. After years of trying to ignore her ability to astral project, Sylvie finally decides to embrace it. But she also decides to embrace the shadows that accompany her on her out-of-body experiences. Opening herself up to the shadows and their evil, Sylvie comes up with a malicious plan. She is positive her scheme will give her what she wants, but she doesn’t count on it all spiraling out of control.Untethered by Katie Hayoz explores the intoxicating and dangerous world of jealousy and obsession when coupled with paranormal ability. It is a touching, sometimes funny, sometimes heart-breaking novel that speaks to the self-doubt lurking in us all. ****Indie B.R.A.G. Medallion ***Runner up in the Mslexia Children's and YA Novel Competition.
All There Is
Violet Duke - 2017
Her next-door neighbor may have been the one to drag her out of the burning building that night, but it doesn’t exonerate him since he caused the fire. Not even when he shows up fourteen years later to help salvage her bakery.Jake Rowan may not have been able to save Emma’s brother from the fire, but at least he was able to save his own brother. By taking the fall and the punishment for him, Jake managed to protect his older brother’s future… but it cost him the girl of his dreams.Now Jake finds himself on Emma’s doorstep once again. Not to save her life this time, but to repair it. And more importantly, her heart, if she’ll let him.
Endless Blue Seas
Annie Dyer - 2019
The first time I saw Anya I was shirtless and holding an axe.It was June, the weather balmy and Anya was beautiful, but that didn’t matter because I was drowning in my own grief.Anya wasn’t meant to be my saviour.I wasn’t meant to be hers.A perfect summer, an idyllic island, a stream of stolen nights.All bandaids on an open wound.If we were going to live again, she deserved more than the fractured shards of the broken creature I’d become.She deserved love.Endless Blue Seas is a standalone summer romance, guaranteed to melt your heart and other items.
Sidelined
Suzanne Baltsar - 2019
When Connor McGuire loses out on his dream job of being the head coach of the local high school football team, he thinks life can’t get any worse. Then he discovers just who got the coveted position—it was a handout to the kid of a well-known, successful college coach. Connor’s sure this is just a publicity stunt, but the kid turns out to be not only a sharp strategist, but a driven and sexy young woman, too. Frustrated in more ways than one, Connor realizes that he might have to step up his game or risk losing altogether. Coach Charlotte “Charlie” Gibb calls a flag on the play when she finds out that her very male, very attractive, but definitely-rooting-for-her-to-lose assistant coach resents her for taking what he considers to be his rightful position. But never one to back down from a little healthy competition, Charlie is determined to prove her worth—both on and off the field. Baltsar’s “sweet, funny, witty, addictive writing,” (New York Times bestselling author Samantha Young) is not to be missed!
Break Any Woman Down
Dana Johnson - 2001
An eleven-year-old black girl from South Central LA discovers the strangeness of moving to the suburbs and falling in love with a white boy. A pair of enthusiastic middle-aged Iranian sisters debate whether or not their futures hold children. A punk musician falls for a girl out of his league. A black lap dancer gives up her job to move in with her Greek actor boyfriend, who hasn’t managed to get roles in anything but porn movies. Whether bold or rueful, salacious or sweet, each voice in Break Any Woman Down is vibrantly authentic; together they add a fresh and welcome chorus to American literature.
Poor
Caleb Femi - 2020
a landmark debut' Guardian'Oh my God, he's just stirring me. Destroying me' Michaela Coel'A poet of truth and rage, heartbreak and joy' Max Porter'Takes us into new literary territory ... impressive' Bernardine Evaristo, New Statesman (Books of the Year)'It's simply stunning. Every image is a revelation' Terrance HayesWhat is it like to grow up in a place where the same police officer who told your primary school class they were special stops and searches you at 13 because 'you fit the description of a man' - and where it is possible to walk two and a half miles through an estate of 1,444 homes without ever touching the ground?In Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth, and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives.Above all, this is a tribute to the world that shaped a poet, and to the people forging difficult lives and finding magic within it. As Femi writes in one of the final poems of this book: 'I have never loved anything the way I love the endz.'
The Boys Who Danced With The Moon
Mark Paul Oleksiw - 2018
Its only contents- an old newspaper clipping about a drowning twenty years earlier. Leaving career and friends behind, Kiran returns to the place of his youth to find the conjurer of his past.Kiran is a quiet and shy teenager with a taste for alternative music growing up in a suburban northern town during the mid-80's. The arrival of two students, the confident and rebellious Marius and the naive, cloak-wearing Moony, awaken Kiran. On the eve of graduation, fate turns the volume off in Kiran’s world and his memory fades to black.Returning to his hometown, Kiran is forced to confront the demons that haunt him. His future depends on whatever hope he has left and the life or death decision he must ultimately make. Will he hear the music again?The Boys Who Danced with the Moon is a coming of age tale of friendship, youth, and love.