Dean Schneider

“Another line crossed. And you didn’t even notice.” It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Maybe it’s Zack’s fault, or Kyle’s own fault, but that doesn’t matter now. He wonders, “When did it all go wrong?” The story opens with blood, and it ends with blood.

Choices made or not made have determined who 15-year-old Kyle Chase is and where he’s heading. He’s a slacker, a hoodie, at Midlands High. He could have studied harder in eighth grade and made it into a good school, but he chose to be “morphed” to his Xbox instead. He chooses to set a low bar for himself—missing assignments, failing tests, getting low grades. Friends go for math help; Kyle goes to detention. The theme of his school existence is “don’t get caught,” though he knows he’d be better off if he were caught sometimes; not getting caught leads to riskier choices.

His choices carry him into the orbit of bad boy Zack McDade. He didn’t have to go to that party, but walking up to Zack’s house and ringing the bell “changes things, crosses another line,” and it’s the relationship with Zack—who has been kicked out of Crestwood, a private school—that brings Kyle down.

Not many writers employ the second-person point of view, but in You, his first novel for teens, Charles Benoit uses it to great effect in allowing Kyle to explain his life; he doesn’t just narrate his story, he comments on it as he goes along his downward-spiraling path to his shattering fate. Often he sees his bad choices too late, and often readers will see more than Kyle sees, limited as he is in his own point of view. The voice is fresh and original, the prose simple, accessible and poetic. Think Cormier and Crutcher, think an edgier A Separate Peace or Catcher in the Rye, and you’ll get the significance of Benoit’s debut.

Times are bad for 17-year-old Wyatt Lathem. All extracurricular activities at East Canton High have been cut due to the poor economy, so Wyatt’s baseball season is over before it begins. His coach advises Wyatt to get out—out of the school, out of the town—since there’s no future there, a move made more urgent by a violent clash between Wyatt and his volatile stepfather.

What Wyatt really wants to do is put his life in order, like those nicely aligned bullet points on his English teacher’s blackboard. So, after the fight, he heads to Silver City to live with his Aunt Hildy. Right off the bat, he meets sexy and mysterious Greer, a 19-year-old girl with a reputation; soon they are sleeping together, and Wyatt doesn’t quite seem to realize he’s in over his head.

It turns out that Wyatt and Greer have quite a bit in common. Their stepfathers are both jerks, and their fathers are both inmates at the nearby prison. Greer’s father is in for committing arson, Wyatt’s dad for murder. Greer says her father thinks Wyatt’s is innocent, and when Wyatt begins getting phone calls from his father, after years of hearing nothing from him, a plan begins to percolate: He will help his father escape and prove his innocence.

It’s fitting that Wyatt Lathem’s last name is an anagram for Hamlet: His father has been a ghostly presence in his life, and he is about to look into his father’s past to become the stuff of tragedy. By the end of the tale, no lives are left unaffected. Death looms, but so does reconciliation in this thrilling tale of family, bad decisions conceived with earnest good intentions, love and hope. Abrahams devises his tale meticulously, creating a believable teenaged protagonist with the right mix of earnestness, innocence and naiveté. Like the Shakespearean tragedy that lends it an undertone of menace, this tale quickens its pace as the players come together to take their fated roles, and Wyatt is forever changed by it all.

“Much depends on a best friend,” Will Grayson says. And when that best friend is Tiny Cooper, friendship is a big deal. Literally. Tiny is 6'6", so huge that when he sheds a tear, it could drown a kitten. So huge that one of his sobs measures on the Richter scale in Kansas (and he lives in Chicago). Will believes that Tiny may just be “the world’s largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world’s gayest person who is really, really large.” Tiny and Will have been friends since fifth grade, and Will stood up for Tiny when a school-board member argued against gays in the locker room. But recently Will has become too disengaged from life. He lives by two simple rules that have helped him to survive high school: “1. Don’t care too much. 2. Shut up.”

Will Grayson is not gay, but in one of many funny scenes in his first-person narrative, he meets another Will Grayson in a Chicago porn shop who is gay, and who begins a dramatic relationship with Tiny. This Will’s story forms the other half of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan, who each wrote one of the Wills.

As it turns out, the original Will still needs Tiny, too. Tiny is the one who does care, who always speaks his mind, who lives in larger-than-life drama and color. And when Tiny puts on a musical, it becomes the vehicle by which each character finds meaning and order in the universe. The musical is Tiny’s gift to the world, and his gift to the original Will Grayson is an appreciation of life and a repudiation of his anti-life rules.

Tiny will long live in readers’ imaginations—provided they have imaginations large enough to contain him. For an older young adult audience, this book about love, friends and what matters in life will be one of the best books of the year.

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Read our interview with John Green and David Levithan for Will Grayson, Will Grayson.

Liam Lynch’s father, a famous fiction writer, has often said that “the real world is the very very strangest of places.” Liam was out wandering with his friend Max when they found an abandoned baby girl with a scribbled note attached to her blanket: “PLESE LOOK AFTER HER RITE. THIS IS A CHILDE OF GOD.” Next to her was a jam jar filled with notes and coins. Mr. Lynch has always told Liam to “Live an adventure. Live like you’re in a story.” And now Liam does—in a story of wandering children, a strange baby, a message and a treasure. The story broadens to include a war refugee from Liberia, the local bully and a teenage girl who survived a fire in which her family perished.

Raven Summer is David Almond’s darkest novel yet, evolving from characters and themes in his previous works, with unsettling undertones of Lord of the Flies and Heart of Darkness. There is a narrative arc in Almond’s body of work, pointing the way to this beautiful and poetic look at the dark side of human nature. Almond’s Skellig was all about mystery and the feeling that “the world’s full of amazing things.” In Kit’s Wilderness, the theme of darkness and light is developed, reflected in Grandpa’s statement, “This is our world. Aye, there’s more than enough of darkness in it. But over everything there’s all this joy, too, Kit. There’s all this lovely, lovely light.”

Raven Summer shares with The Fire-Eaters a cast of characters trying to live in a world in the face of war. In Clay, a monster is created to get back at the local bully; in Raven Summer, we are the monsters, each of us capable of the “darkness at the heart of the world.” This is a Brothers Grimm mindscape of fairy babies and fairy gold; witches and monsters, foundlings and angels; ancient border raids and modern war; snake pits and caves, ravens and wanderers.

Still, what remains after this dark tale is an angel baby, an ordinary family and their familiar garden—a well-lighted home in a dangerous world. Almond is one of the finest writers in the world of children’s literature, a writer of uncommon vision and elegant prose, fully capable of plumbing the heart of darkness and the “lovely, lovely light” as well.

Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.

On his famous voyage on the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin traveled around the world, from the Cocos-Keeling Islands of the Indian Ocean to Australia, Patagonia, Brazil and Chile, collecting fossil bones, fish preserved in spirits of wine, rocks, plants, carcasses of dead animals, and beetles. Home for two years, he thought long and hard about another adventure: should he marry? Would marrying rule out future voyages? Would he miss the “conversation of clever men at clubs”? Most importantly, would he have time to develop his new theory to explain evolution—or transmutation, as it was called then—that would change the way the world thought about creation?

Darwin decided to marry his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. Where Charles was devoted to science, Emma was devoted to her Christian faith. Their love story—a true marriage of science and religion—became one of the greatest adventures of Darwin’s life, and readers will revel in the drama of the opposites captured by Deborah Heiligman in Charles and Emma. Darwin’s scientific work—his theory of evolution, in particular—was, indeed, a real test of their relationship.

Emma feared that Charles would go to hell and they would not be together for eternity. But they were a loving couple, their marriage a leap of faith that love could transcend differences. It’s a story for all time, a story of appreciating differences and getting along in spite of them.

Heiligman’s writing is so good—so rooted in particulars of time, place and Darwin’s scientific thought, yet so light and full of drama—that readers will care about Charles and Emma and their love story. The debate between science and religion continues today, but the relationship of Charles and Emma Darwin demonstrates that science and religion are not incompatible.