Deborah Hopkinson

“Your father doesn’t have any enemies. He’s an accountant.” Daniel Pratzer’s mom couldn’t be more wrong about her mild-mannered, potbellied husband.

Mr. Pratzer’s secret past begins to unravel quite by accident. Struggling freshman Daniel has joined the chess club because . . . well, he isn’t great at sports. When two popular seniors invite him to participate in a father-son chess tournament, he laughs. After all, he’s just a beginner, and his father doesn’t even play. But the seniors have done some research: Morris W. Pratzer was ranked a grandmaster of chess.

Mr. Pratzer reluctantly agrees to attend the tournament, but as the weekend unfolds, Daniel starts to understand the complex reasons why his father left the game: Competitive chess almost killed him, and he has an enemy who understands the depth of his weaknesses.

Grandmaster is a page-turning read, full of authentic details that offer a fascinating glimpse into tournament chess. It’s also a compassionate look at the choices we make, and how difficult situations bring families closer in unexpected ways.

Deborah Hopkinson lives near Portland, Oregon. Her most recent book for young readers is The Great Trouble.

Emma Lazar has laid claim to the title of “Emma the Good” for years. She has always been determined to be the perfect daughter to her widowed dad as he pursues his psychiatric career from city to city. Now a junior, Emma can think of nothing better than to land in sunny L.A and begin school at the prestigious Latimer Country Day. But something happens to Emma’s reliable moral compass from her first day in her new life: The more she seeks to make the transformation to the California girl of her dreams, the more she begins to lose her way.

The lies start almost immediately and soon become a way of life. Emma teams up with Siobhan, an intense, sophisticated and bored classmate who loves to skip class, party and flirt with increasingly risky behavior. Siobhan believes in pacts and lists, and she comes up with a list of experiences for Emma to check off before the infamous year-end Latimer Afterparty, guaranteed to put fear into a father’s heart: “Make out. Do shots. Get stoned. Climb out windows. Go to many many parties. Hook up. Hook up all the way. Finish and we go to Afterparty.”

But even as Emma crosses off the milestones on her list, and strays from the “Good Emma” of the past, she begins to gain confidence in setting her own course and making the decisions that are right for her. What she doesn’t anticipate is Siobhan’s violent reaction to what she perceives as Emma’s betrayal of their friendship pact.

Readers will root for Emma as she negotiates difficult choices and a first romance, and grapples with finding her moral compass. But in her heartbreaking portrayal of Siobhan, a young woman spinning out of control with no one able to catch her—not even her best friend—author Ann Redisch Stampler reminds us that losing a friendship can be just as painful as a failed romance.

“Will you forgive me if I tell you the ending? There’s a girl . . .”

So begins Karen Foxlee’s new young adult novel, a web of prose as lush and mysterious as the story’s Australian setting. Fifteen-year-old Rose Lovell and her alcoholic father drift into a trailer park in the beach town of Leonora. Moving to a new place is something they’ve done many times before, so Rose doesn’t expect anything to be different. Then she meets Pearl Kelly, who almost immediately begins to wear her down with unexpected kindness.

Dynamic and irresistible, Pearl sweeps Rose into her plans for the Harvest Parade, where all the girls wear beautiful dresses at the town’s celebration of the sugar cane harvest. At first Rose can’t imagine taking part. “Rose Lovell does not wear dresses. Rose Lovell does not need friends. Yet all she can smell, even with the huge sky and the evening storm clouds brewing, is coconut oil and frangipani.”

Unable to afford a dress, Rose visits the old dressmaker, Edie Baker, who is rumored to be a “dabbler in the dark arts.”  Here she falls in love with a dress, the color of midnight blue, which, under Edie’s tutelage, is painstakingly taken apart and made anew. On the night of the parade, Edie gives Rose some blue slippers, and Rose, transformed, decides, “I am someone else.”

In the end, though, this is no Cinderella tale. With rich, evocative language, Foxlee threads together a complex tale of friendship, murder and betrayal. The Midnight Dress is compelling, heartbreaking and, most of all, impossible to put down.

Step into any bookstore and you’ll likely see adults of all ages perusing the YA shelves. It’s not just fantasy or dystopian novels that attract this wider audience but the work of a number of incredibly talented contemporary authors. Among them is Trish Doller, whose 2012 debut novel, Something Like Normal, received numerous accolades. Doller’s new book, Where the Stars Still Shine, is an engaging, compulsive read and a thought-provoking look at a family under duress.

Callie has been on the run with her mother for 12 years. After her mother’s marriage fell apart and she kidnapped young Callie, both became survivors. Callie’s idea of “normal” includes hanging out in a Laundromat when her mother has men over, never going to school, avoiding her mother’s friends who might abuse her, pursuing casual sexual encounters and leaving one nameless town for another at a moment’s notice. All that ends when her mother is stopped for a missing taillight and is arrested.

The next day, Callie is claimed by her father and flies with him to Florida, where she suddenly finds herself thrown into a new family with a father she barely remembers, a stepmother and two younger half-brothers. Family life in close-knit Tarpon Springs, especially in the extended Greek community, comes with rules, responsibilities and expectations (like letting your dad know if you stay out until all hours). All this is a difficult adjustment for Callie, who is used to fending for herself. She also finds that forging real friendships and romantic relationships presents challenges—and rewards—she never dreamed of in her previous nomadic life.

Callie is a complex, fully drawn character struggling to make sense of who she is when everything she has learned about the world is turned upside-down. Where the Stars Still Shine is a compelling coming-of-age story and a portrait of an extended family seeking to move forward and heal. Remember Trish Doller’s name the next time you’re looking for something simply marvelous to read.

Elizabeth Wein’s previous WWII novel, Code Name Verity—which garnered multiple awards, including a 2013 Michael L. Printz Honor—is a singular reading experience. The story of Verity, a spy caught behind enemy lines, is intense, suspenseful and authentic. In this companion novel, Wein revisits the topic of women pilots in the war, and readers who loved Code Name Verity won’t be disappointed: Rose Under Fire is equally good. It might even be better.

Eighteen-year-old American pilot and amateur poet Rose Justice has pulled some strings to land a spot with Great Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). As the daughter of a flight school director, she has been flying since she was 12, and after three months with ATA, she can deliver new and repaired Spitfire fighter planes to airfields without batting an eyelash. But even Rose is surprised to learn that the death of a fellow ATA pilot might have been the result of an attempt to “tip” or ram a German V-1 flying bomb out of the sky. However, when given the chance, she can’t resist trying the same thing—an incident with disastrous consequences. Rose is captured in enemy territory and imprisoned in Ravensbrück, a Nazi concentration camp for women that holds many political prisoners and “Rabbits,” victims of heinous medical experiments.

Although the harrowing story of what happens to Rose and the other Ravensbrück women is fictionalized, Wein says in her author’s note, “I didn’t make up Ravensbrück. I didn’t make up anything about Ravensbrück.” But we, as readers, already sense this. It is impossible to read Wein and not understand that paying witness to the truth is essential to what she does.

Wein, an avid flyer herself, is a powerful, compelling storyteller whose work, like that of Suzanne Collins, will no doubt fly off the young adult shelves and find an eager general audience. As we near the 75th anniversary of the start of World War II in 2014, the timing couldn’t be better to remind ourselves that there are still hard aspects left to tell and to learn.