Angela Leeper

When Griffin slips into the Cadillac Escalade, its keys left in the ignition at the mall parking lot, he only means to steal it as a gift for his father. Within seconds he realizes that he’s stolen a girl too. In April Henry’s suspenseful and well-researched Girl, Stolen, 16-year-old Cheyenne Wilder, resting in the backseat while her stepmother runs into the pharmacy to pick up her prescription, is not only suffering from pneumonia, but has been blind for the last three years. Is escape even possible for her?

The spine-tingling chapters alternate between the teens’ perspectives as Griffin delivers both the vehicle and the girl to his cruel father, Roy. While Cheyenne plots to outwit her captors, flee Roy’s home in a remote wooded area and gather as much information as possible to turn over to police when (or if) she’s rescued, readers learn more about the accident that took Cheyenne’s mother and sight. And as Griffin, a high-school dropout with a troubled background and grief of his own, begins to see his surroundings in a whole new light, he wonders if he’s as much a bad guy as Roy and his accomplices, who are busy plotting how to use and dispose of Cheyenne. Perhaps Cheyenne is not the only victim in this escalating dilemma.

Reminiscent of Gail Giles’ thrillers and tension-filled to the last sentence, Girl, Stolen will resonate with readers long after the cover is closed. With a thoughtful and eye-opening look at disabilities, it highlights Cheyenne and Griffin’s resourcefulness and resiliency as they save themselves—and possibly each other.

In Erin Bow’s first novel, Plain Kate, an enthralling fantasy set in a time and place much like medieval Europe, it’s the skara rok, or hungry time, and the folk of Samilae are eager to blame anyone a little odd for the town’s diminishing supplies and growing illnesses. With “one eye the color of river mud and one eye the color of the river” and a gift for carving popular talismans that surpasses her teenage years, orphan Plain Kate Carver knows she’ll be accused of witchcraft soon.

When a “witch-white” stranger offers to grant Plain Kate her heart’s secret wish in exchange for her shadow, the lonely girl begrudgingly accepts the bargain as a way to flee the town. Feeling as if she’s lost a part of her soul, she secretly departs the only home she’s ever known with Taggle, a talking cat, as her companion. Plain Kate is soon taken in by the Roamers, a traveling, Romani-like clan, and befriended by Drina, whose mother, a healer and a witch, was sentenced to death for her practices.

This elaborate story takes on more twists and turns as Drina begins to teach her the rules of magic and the friends conspire to reclaim Plain Kate’s shadow. But things don’t always go according to plan when Plain Kate discovers the witch-white stranger’s true identity and his diabolical plot.

Plain Kate’s natural talents and bravery will endear her to teen readers. Her cat Taggle, who’s willing to claw any man or beast to save his beloved owner, also adds light humor to this tale of dark magic. As the pair travels together, finding friendship and saving their small world in the process, the novel’s fantastical elements come together to create a spellbinding ending.

While 17-year-old Scarlet Ellis has always been the nice one in her family, her moody, selfish older sister, Juliet, has always been quick to dump a long line of boyfriends. Although they were once close as children, their now-tenuous relationship becomes even more difficult when Juliet returns to their Pacific Northwest island home, married to gorgeous, romantic Hayden—and pregnant.

As Juliet pushes away her new husband and chases after her one serious high school boyfriend, Scarlet is trying hard not to fall in love with Hayden. She dedicates herself, as always, to rescuing those around her, including her eccentric neighbors: a retired mailman who has started checking his mail wearing nothing more than his slippers, an artistic Goth girl who wants a date to the prom and an older couple selling their home to answer the email pleas for money from a plantation owner in the Ivory Coast. But eventually she begins to realize that she needs to follow a gift from Hayden: the “Rules of Maybe,” a set of directions to achieve her own dreams, wants and wishes.

Scarlet’s spot-on musings about high school and her elaborate network of relationships lead her to see that she can still be nice while taking care of her own needs and desires. She also begins to understand her relationship with Juliet better, and she may even find a little romance that she doesn’t have to share. These discoveries tug on the heart in all the right places.

Margaret McMullan returns to Mississippi and its history in the gripping Sources of Light. After her father’s war-hero death in Vietnam, Samantha Thomas and her mother relocate to Jackson, Mississippi, near her father’s hometown. While her mother teaches art history at the local college, Sam begins her freshman year of high school in 1962, simply wanting to fit in like the popular Mary Alice, eagerly awaiting her first dance with Mary Alice’s older brother and hoping to fill out her new bra.

After her mom’s friend Perry gives her a camera and ongoing photography lessons, Sam begins to notice and document the racial tensions in Jackson: the violence that spurs from a lunch counter sit in and the deterioration of her community as energy is spent on the “black problem” rather than schools, houses and roads. The town deems Sam, her mother and Perry “agitators” when they take an interest in racial equality, including registering blacks to vote.

When Sam’s family is the target of threats and vandalism from a white supremacist group, they must decide whether to continue helping local African Americans. Adding to the dilemma is Sam’s desire to keep her first boyfriend, even though he may be involved in the violence. A regular girl with bold ideas, Sam realizes that like her father, she is caught in the crossfire of war—and she wonders if she will come out a hero, too. Her keen observations on both adolescence and the racial divide will teach readers about the Civil Rights Movement and growing up in the early 1960s.

Using photography as a metaphor, McMullan shows how Sam looks for the sources of light and good amidst the hatred that surrounds her. Inserting elements of her own childhood and even alluding to her previous Reconstruction novel When I Crossed No-Bob, she seamlessly blends fact and fiction and portrays this turbulent time in American history with candor and grace.

Angela Leeper is a librarian at the University of Richmond.