Fourteen-year-old Nate Chance knows that times are hard on his 400-acre Montana dairy farm. His dad has been having a streak of bad luck: if it wasn’t milk virus, it was drought, or the need to buy expensive equipment. And it doesn’t help that Poppa, his mother’s father, seems to think this is all his son-in-law’s fault for not being a better farmer. On top of all this, Mom and Dad’s fights are getting worse all the time.

Still, Nate and his little sister, Junie, are able to appreciate many things that make their father special: his ability to build anything, rattle off batting averages and answer just about any question in science. So when Nate comes home from school one day to find police officers leading his father away with blood pouring down his face, he finds his world shattered and his loyalties torn. At last, he learns that his father, after a botched suicide attempt, has been left blind and sent to a mental institution.

In the coming months, Nate and Junie find themselves confronting the prejudice of classmates and their families. Despite the trauma at home, Nate tries to focus on something close to his heart: the eighth-grade science fair. He dreams of winning first prize and showing his father the trophy. Paired with a girl named Naomi, who struggles with her own difficult family situation, Nate determines to build something called a cloud chamber, an apparatus to make atomic particles visible to the naked eye.

Nate, Junie and Naomi are appealing characters. Maynard shows us their attempts to balance the world of school and peer relationships, while at the same time trying to sort through the tumultuous events in their families. Somehow, by the end of this difficult year, Nate and Naomi succeed in building the cloud chamber. As it turns out, Nate does not achieve the public recognition of which he had dreamed. Still, he finds a way to use the cloud chamber to come to a better appreciation of both of his parents, and an acceptance of the future. Deborah Hopkinson latest book for children is Who Was Charles Darwin?

For National Book Award-winning author Pete Hautman, the experience of writing his latest young adult novel, Invisible, was an intense and unusually speedy one.

The author says most of his books take several years to write, but when he got the idea for Invisible, I wrote the first draft in five weeks. I was almost obsessed. He adds, In a sick, depressing way, it was a joy to write. That’s quite a caveat, but an understandable one: the narrator of Invisible is Doug Hanson, a witty kid with a knack for model-railroad building and a host of disturbing hobbies and behaviors, including an unhealthy fascination with fire and an unsavory habit of spying on a female classmate. Despite Doug’s moral lapses and odd behaviors, Hautman succeeds in making him a sympathetic character. Young readers will surely relate to Doug’s feeling of adolescent invisibility, his exasperation with the seemingly clueless adults he encounters daily and his singular focus on his best friend, Andy. Nearly every kid has someone they call their best friend, Hautman says. As you get older, friendship becomes more complex, it changes. I wanted to write about that kind of pain, about a kid who lost his best friend and couldn’t make that transition. Hautman launched his writing career in 1993 with a mystery, Drawing Dead, and followed it with a series of crime novels. His first book for young adults was Mr. Was (1996), and he went on to write four other inventive teen novels, including Godless, the National Book Award-winning story of a boy who starts a religion by worshipping the town water tower. The author says his young adult works come from a different emotional and intellectual place than his adult books. In my adult books, I’m writing for the reader I am when I read a popular novel, I demand to be amused, and that justice is done in the end. I don’t want to have to ponder the book after I’m done with it. In writing for young adults, Hautman has a different goal: When I’m writing YA [young adult] books, I’m interested in vicariously experiencing the emotions and drama the world has to offer. As a teenager, I wanted ambiguous endings, books that perplexed and made me think. He adds, I think of YA as coming-of-age stories about kids taking on adult responsibilities for the first time, in terms of friendship, sex, violence, any number of things. It’s about discovering your personal power, and how you can affect the world. The collision of Hautman’s curiosity about personal power and a wrong turn in a shopping mall resulted in the creation of a key element of Invisible Doug’s intricate, time-consuming model railroad, made from thousands of wooden matchsticks. In a mall somewhere in Arizona, late at night, I ended up in a room filled with an enormous model railroad, Hautman recalls. I talked to the three old guys there, members of a model train club. They were so proud of what they’d done. The experience stuck with Hautman. I became fascinated by the kind of mind that embraces this hobby and the notion of imposing yourself on a miniature world, making yourself God. It is just this sort of imposition that proves impossible for Doug to maintain. His destructive actions are ultimately revealed, culminating in a scene that is at once astonishing, sad and thought provoking but definitely not for the faint of heart.

On a lighter note, Hautman and his wife, poet Mary Logue, are co-authoring a series of middle-grade mysteries. Another adult mystery is due out next year, plus a YA book titled Rash. Hautman will work on these projects from his home in Golden Valley, Minnesota, which he shares with Logue and two toy poodles.

And, in the wake of his National Book Award, Hautman has been traveling and giving talks at schools and conferences. It’s really nice to be acknowledged as a writer. It’s given me a lot of new readers, he says. We writers are all desperate for attention. We hide in our rooms and hammer away on our keyboards . . . and we really want the world to come to us.

We do not know the stars. Civilization has illuminated the night, and we don’t know what a dark night really looks like; we haven’t for at least a century. “47” knows the night, though. He lives in an era when electricity is still a dream, and when the sun goes down the sky is as black as a lump of coal. He knows that the lights in the sky are stars, but he doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t know anything beyond the fact that he is a slave child in the Deep South, given a number instead of a name, and that he has been torn from the arms of the only mother he has ever known, cruelly branded and put to work in a cotton field.

Fate, however, has unexpected plans for 47, and they arrive in the form of Tall John, a mysterious runaway slave, who looks, talks and acts differently than anyone 47 has ever met. We learn all this at the beginning of 47, the first young adult novel by acclaimed writer Walter Mosley, who has created a wonderful, genre-bending exploration into life, destiny and what it means to be free.

Master Tobias Turner’s plantation is far from the false, happy vision of Gone With the Wind. Slaves are treated with offhand cruelty, on a par with animals. It is, in fact, when a slave is “put down” that young 47 inherits his “name.” Shortly thereafter he is running errands in the cotton field, and it is while he is so employed that he meets Tall John, a golden-skinned slave who seems to know him. Is he the “healer” who escaped from a nearby plantation? Is he an African god, as his friends speculate? Or is he something else? And what does Tall John mean when he calls 47 a “hero”? Mosley, best known for his Easy Rawlins mysteries, has penned a fascinating novel for young people, part historical fiction, part science fiction and part fantasy. The enigmatic Tall John leads both 47 and readers on a quest for freedom, and on the way takes readers to some startling places they won’t soon forget.

Lump, the title character in Michael Gruber’s remarkably original teen novel, The Witch’s Boy, is aptly named: he has a nose like a pig, yellow eyes, pointed ears and a lumpy body covered with coarse black hair. Abandoned as a baby in the woods, he is found by the Woman of the Forest, a mysterious witch feared by the country folk. She is not the kind of witch who inhabits fairy tales, but is more akin to something out of Celtic myth, a creature as much elemental as human, who lives in a cottage deep in the woods, along with a talking cat and a conniving genie.

The Witch’s Boy could be considered a handbook on how not to raise your children. Even witches have their duties, and “Mrs. Forest” has some big ones related to the seasons, the phases of the moon and the health and welfare of the land around her. But as many a busy parent has come to discover, neglecting your children can lead to trouble. The actual rearing of Lump is left to a bear that loves him tenderly, but the boy isn’t equipped to keep up with the rest of his nanny’s kind. When the witch then leaves the education of young Lump to her captive genie, he uses his na•ve young charge as a means of obtaining his freedom. Finally, the witch must face the most fearful consequence of raising a child watching him grow up. In Lump’s case, this means finding out that he’s not the beautiful boy he was led to believe.

Gruber has created a fairy tale turned on its ear; he re-imagines the stories we grew up with, cast in a landscape as real as our pre-history, but just as mysterious. There’s an obsessive-compulsive girl named Eyella, who’s convinced that a prince is in love with her; a former circus performer named Pinocchio; and a swordsman and his sister named Hansel and Gretel. Many more familiar names populate this incredible book, and most surprising of all is the name Lump is known by today.

Gruber, the author of two acclaimed adult thrillers (Valley of Bones, Tropic of Night), should find a receptive teen audience with this engrossing fantasy debut. James Neal Webb has two lovely portraits of his now grown children hanging in his library.

Once upon a time there was a girl who served pizza in a rat costume. That was me. So begins the fairy tale of Ashley Hannigan, keen observer of her kingdom. No, it’s not Cinderella and her stepsisters, and it’s not wretched work doing chores while stepsisters go to the ball. Ashley’s real-world torments include a lousy job at EZ-CHEEZ-E, a home life where noise tied the house together like duct tape around a busted water heater, and the road to the ball the prom is paved with a series of unfortunate events, related with such humor and good spirits that readers will attend her all the way to her fateful appearance.

Not that Ashley ever wanted to go to the prom, and not that she could go even if she wanted to; she has too many detentions, and the principal is on her case. But her best friend Natalia Shulmensky wants to go; she’s been waiting for this all of her life. And Ashley’s organizing abilities and expertise at bossing people around pull her into helping Nat plan the big night. Stolen prom money, a broken leg, an injured foot, a ruined dress, a missing grandmother and police at the castle gates make the best laid plans a challenge for the most earnest of planners. But Nat’s pink notebook contains a vision of grandeur brought to life, and Ashley is determined to pull it off.

Perhaps the girls puking in the bathroom or performing oral sex behind the bleachers detract from the aura, but overall it is a magical night for Ashley. Even if the underwear model is lured away by a girl whose dress was cut so low she was showing nipple, it is a night to remember, a celebration of the normal kids. As Anderson says in her acknowledgments, this books serves as a rowdy shout-out to all the Ônormal’ kids . . . nobody ever writes about. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Prom is laugh-out-loud funny, and older teenagers will find themselves passing this book around and reading the funniest scenes to each other. This novel is sure to be a big hit, though language and subject matter aim it at older readers.

As the only Bengali girl in a small Canadian town, 13-year-old Maya chafes at the crossroads of two cultures. She doesn’t identify with her Indian roots, but at school she’s ridiculed for the color of her skin and the strange-smelling food she brings from home. She just wants to belong and to be liked by a certain boy named Jamie.

“I don’t want to be ethnic,” she complains in Maya Running, Anjali Banerjee’s debut novel. “I want to run on the tundra beneath the northern lights, make igloos or snow angels, write to Anne Frank in my diary or clean my closet and find a door into Narnia.” Maya’s problems seem to be magically solved when her cousin Pinky arrives from India with a statue of Ganesh. The elephant-headed Hindu god comes to life, asking for Jelly Bellies to satisfy his sweet tooth, then granting Maya’s wish for a perfect life. She wakes up the next morning to find her skin free of blemishes, her faultless teeth no longer needing braces. Her parents agree to Maya’s every whim. Jamie trails her in a lovesick trance.

Perhaps Maya should have paid closer attention to the warning that the Remover of Obstacles is also a trickster. By the time Maya realizes “my wishes were a river with an undertow,” Ganesh is gone, returned to India in the suitcase of her cousin Pinky.

Maya must make a journey of both body and spirit to find Ganesh and beg him to make her world as it was before. When she overcomes the greediness of her own yearnings in sacrifice to another’s greater need, she discovers the true gift of Ganesh. The removal of what she thought were her obstacles also strips away illusions that were holding her back. Now, she understands, “I am special in a way that is bigger and older than this town.” In Maya, Banerji has created a character with an authentic, engaging voice and a poignantly familiar yearning to belong. Teenage readers will find much to identify with in her captivating journey of self-discovery.

Belinda Anderson writes from West Virginia.

What exactly happened that day after swim practice, when Darren Flynn accepted a ride home with Mr. Tracy, his English teacher? Did anything happen? Mr. Tracy had talked, in his “nervous, fluttery” manner, of the V-shape of swimmers’ bodies, of his desire for Darren to be less inhibited in class, of Darren’s close-knit family. He had asked Darren to call him Lowell. When he got home late, Darren had lied to his mother that he had been out with his friend Kevin. But did he have to lie? Was there anything to cover up? Afterward, Darren referred to “the thing” that had happened. But what exactly happened is the compelling mystery behind Joyce Carol Oates’ fast-paced novel Sexy. Her telegraphic prose style puts readers as close to the mind and thought process of a teenaged boy as a third-person narrative can. She creates an eerie, almost haunting, atmosphere of uneasiness and sexuality. There’s Darren’s sexy good looks, with his silvery blond hair and lithe swimmer’s body. There are the men at the swim meets who stare at him and take pictures, allusions to the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, and Darren’s father’s sex talk with him about the need to watch out for pedophiles. Add to all of this Darren’s curiosity about sex and the four-letter words that sprinkle his consciousness like so many flashy billboards. Oates has created a psychological page-turner for older young adults that explores perception, sexuality, peer culture and individual conscience. Darren’s friends plot revenge against Mr. Tracy for failing a team member. And what develops is a witch hunt, like something out of The Crucible, except now it’s not teenaged girls accusing supposed witches, but male athletes getting revenge on a teacher undermining their privileged status in the school. Eventually, tragedy strikes and Darren has a moral choice to make. Readers watch him follow his conscience and find his way. Fine young adult literature such as Sexy is an important vehicle for dramatizing stories about self and conscience in a group-minded world. Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.

At first you might think the subjects of this novel are off-putting: it features youth gangs running scams and a baby-snatching plot in a maternity ward. Never fear. Between the witty word-smithing of Irish novelist Colin Bateman and the engaging voice of his protagonist, Eddie, readers are in good hands. Poor Eddie. He and his parents were planning a vacation in Spain when his mother announces that his father has run off with a colleague, they are divorcing, and she and Eddie are moving to the city, where she will work in a hospital. Eddie’s mother tries to present this overload of changes in a good light, but Eddie doesn’t buy her spiel. He replies: “I have lost my father, my school, my friends, and my home, and I also have to move to the city, a city you have always said was dark and dangerous and never allowed me to go to.” Eddie is bored in his new home without any friends, so he starts nosing around the hospital. He realizes something is afoot when a celebrity named Alison Beech is about to visit the hospital and make a sizable donation.

Eddie’s situation goes from bad to worse when his mother starts dating Bernard Scuttles, head of security at the hospital, a man whom Eddie instantly hates. He believes Scuttles is behind a plot to kidnap Alison Beech, but it turns out that the problem is instead the kidnapping of babies. Eddie is the only witness, and apparently the only one who can save the babies.

If all of this sounds highly implausible, Eddie’s narration makes it riveting and funny, and the story always rings true. One does need a touch of black humor: for instance, Eddie meets a boy begging in a wheelchair who turns out not to have leg problems, and then another who indeed can’t walk and turns out to be a gang leader.

This is Bateman’s first book for young adults he has written several for adults and the first installment of a trilogy featuring Eddie. His writing is so engaging that you may find yourself seeking out his adult books.

Ann Brashares does it again. In her third book chronicling four adolescent girls and one pair of lucky pants they all share, Brashares taps into the teenage girl psyche with remarkable insight.

Brashares launched the Sisterhood phenomenon in 2001 with The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, a coming-of-age story that featured four girls and a favorite pair of thrift-store jeans. The book became a bestseller that spawned a sequel (The Second Summer of the Sisterhood) and a movie to be released this summer by Warner Bros.

In her newest title, Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood, Brashares again takes us into the hearts and minds of four teenage girlfriends, Tibby, Carmen, Lena and Bridget, whose mothers met at a prenatal aerobics class. This year, we find the girls facing what might be their last summer together as they prepare to head off to college. With love, sex and the fear of change on their minds, the four best friends share laughter, tears and life-changing moments as they help each other deal with the issues at hand. Whereas in Brashares’ two previous books, a pair of “traveling pants” played a major role in the stories, here Brashares focuses on the role of the sisterhood in helping the girls overcome their challenges.

Brashares’ easy writing style helps the reader understand the familiar problems each girl encounters. From experiencing true love for the first time, to accepting things beyond one’s control, to creating a new role in one’s own family, the girls deal with obstacles beyond their initial comprehension. And although they are fearful during the process, each of the “sisters” teaches us that as long as we are true to ourselves, whatever we decide will somehow work out perhaps not the way we have planned it, but it will work out nonetheless. With such candid treatment of important coming-of-age issues, it’s no wonder that Brashares’ books are so popular among the teen and pre-teen crowds. Where else can a girl find not one, but four best friends who truly understand her point of view? Heidi Henneman writes from New York City.

In a simply written, swift-moving narrative that won the 2004 National Book Award for Young People's Literature, Pete Hautman's Godless explores the nature of religion, belief, power, obsession and corruption. This is heady stuff for a short, young adult novel, but Hautman uses humor and snappy dialogue to leaven his weighty plot.

Teenager Jason Bock has started a new religion. He and his followers worship the Ten-legged One and call themselves Chutengodians, a word created out of Church of the Ten-legged God. Their god is the local water tower.

Why not worship a water tower? Jason reasons. What's more important to the life of the town? What is a more essential compound than water? Chutengodians have an immediate feeling of power and grace when they climb the tower and look down upon creation the lights of the town, the glow of the horizon, the night sky all around.

What starts as a whacko idea gathers momentum. A new religion calls for a bible, commandments, a High Priest, a Grand Kahuna, a Keeper of the Sacred Text and devotees. But when local bully Henry Stagg is admitted into the inner circle of the Chutengodians, the seeds of dissension are sown and the potential for evil unleashed. Hautman's funny interludes include Jason's fumbling phone conversation with the beautiful Magda, where Jason, leader of the religion, is reduced to Neanderthal grunts and silences. I'm glad I'm not trying to have a conversation with me, he thinks. It must be boring as hell. A late-night swim in the water tower, a near-fatal fall, arrests and a schism within the church shake up the members, and readers are left to wonder at the appeal of such an unlikely organization. What does each member get out of belonging to it? For Jason, it's the chance to be a leader. For Henry, it's an insidious opportunity for power. For Magda, it's an attraction to tough-guy Henry. By novel's end, Jason has changed only in an envy of other people's beliefs. I have a religion, but I have no faith, he says. Maybe one day I'll find a deity I can believe in. Until then, my god is made of steel and rust.

Moving to a new town and a new school can be a frightening thing. For Imogene, who has decided to leave her troubled ways behind, it is an opportunity to find a real friend. Looking for someone who is not part of a clique, she connects with Maxine, a loner who dresses in knee-length skirts and gets good grades. This could be a case of opposites attracting, since Imogene sports a few tattoos and doesn’t worry much about her grades. But both girls are smart, good-natured and have suffered from the hands of bullies, so as they learn from each other, their friendship blossoms.

Imogene does make a break with her past of gangs and other problems until she finds a new worry in the form of Adrian. It is not that he is a bully: he is a ghost. This would not be a big issue if he did not have a crush on her. His attention draws the notice of other supernatural beings, and Imogene begins to have strange dreams about her imaginary childhood friend, Pelly, and a band of weird creatures. These turn out to be fairies who are drawing an even darker force toward Imogene, one that threatens her very soul.

This urban fantasy, set in writer Charles de Lint’s fictional town of Newford, is full of ingenuity and wonder. De Lint, who describes his work as “mythic fiction,” is a master at creating believable characters and placing them in strange and fascinating situations. Whether or not you ever changed schools or were one of the “weird” kids, there is something for you in this absorbing novel. Colleen Cahill works at the Library of Congress, where one of her duties is Recommending Officer of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

You have to give him credit. Christopher Paul Curtis could have stuck with writing the kind of books that have already brought him much acclaim. The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963 and Bud, Not Buddy are both historical novels for intermediate readers, and both have been hugely successful. Bucking the Sarge, however, is a contemporary novel for older readers. Its protagonist is 15-year-old Luther T. Farrell, who goes to Whittier Middle School, runs the Happy Neighbor Group Home for Men, has an illegal driver's license and keeps a condom named Chauncey in his wallet. Chauncey and that wallet had been together so long that "Chauncey had worn a circle right in the leather, and a circle ain't nothing but a great big zero, which was just about my chances of ever busting Chauncey loose and using him." And, thus, the comic tone of the novel is established.

If Luther seems older than he is and his voice seems a little worldly and swaggering for a 15-year-old, you just have to figure his mother made him that way for her own purposes; she's a very calculating woman. This is a wholly original, latter-day urban Robin Hood tale, where Luther discredits his reputation as a loser and sets out for revenge against his mother, aka the Sarge. Mrs. Farrell has become fabulously wealthy by creating an empire of slum housing in Flint, Michigan. Luther spends most of his time avoiding the Sarge's coffin smile and Darth Vader voice as she directs him and her hoodlum associates in a web of evil doings.

Luther wants out. He wants to be the world's greatest philosopher, not some spider in his mother's web. So, he sets in motion a plan to redistribute her wealth via a science fair competition. In a brilliant, comic series of events involving his mom's safety deposit boxes and a large-scale distribution of ice cream cones, $200 Air Jordans and Armani suits, Luther takes from the rich and gives to the poor before heading out of Flint in a Buick Riviera that, just minutes before, had belonged to the Sarge's partner. There's not another young adult novel like this one, and readers will cheer the high spirits and good nature of Luther T. Farrell, loser no more.

Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.

We think of gifted people as those with special talents, such as math or painting. But what if you had the talent to twist human bodies, cut flesh with a glance or destroy living things with a flip of a finger? These gifts give the peoples of the Uplands power but also shape their society in a dark manner.

For generations, the Upland people have had strange, magical powers. The gifts travel down from father to son or mother to daughter, and those with the strongest abilities become leaders, making decisions, settling disputes and most importantly, protecting their people from others with gifts of their own. It is a hard land, with poverty common even among the clan leaders. This dark world is where Gry and Orrec grow up, and since their parents have strong abilities, they are expected to become the next leaders of their clans. But both are uncomfortable with their gifts: Gry refuses to call animals to her just to have them hunted down and Orrec, who showed his ability late, has no control over his talent. Since his family gift is to unmake things, he binds his eyes with a cloth after several accidents demonstrate that his power needs direction.

In Ursula Le Guin's new young adult novel, Gifts, we see a society based on the most gifted demonstrating the worst and the best of human nature. Gry and Orrec must not only decide how to use their talents wisely, but also how to deal with family pressures, clan diplomacy, and their usefulness as political pawns. After a brief visit from a man from the Lowlands who wanted to see the witches of the hills, both have a growing feeling that there could be another way to live.

As always, Le Guin has delivered a story that captivates and draws the reader in. Anyone who enjoyed her Earthsea trilogy will relish this new work and fans of dark fantasy, such as Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, will want to check out this title as well. It is another of a long line of gifts from this talented author and well worth your time.

Colleen Cahill is Recommending Officer of Science Fiction and Fantasy at the Library of Congress.