Rain May’s life seems to have fallen apart, as revealed in the opening line of Stranded in Boringsville: “When Dad moved out of our home and into Julia’s apartment, Mum changed her name to Maggie, put our house up for sale and had a huge clean-out.”

Rain May and her mom leave Melbourne, Australia, and move into her deceased grandmother’s old house in a small town. She’s a city girl suddenly adrift in the country, but luckily there’s a boy next door to keep her company. Daniel is a bit younger, and the unlikely pair forge a friendship. Both are sensitive and isolated (Rain May, by the way, gets her name from a line of poetry by e.e. cummings). Daniel is a brain who is shunned by his peers, but he takes refuge in chess and Star Trek. Rain May tries to figure out how to enjoy new friends at school without being disloyal to Daniel.

Author Catherine Bateson is a poet and children’s writer in Australia, where this novel was first published as Rain May and Captain Daniel, capturing a Book of the Year Award from the Children’s Book Council of Australia. The plot moves quietly but quickly along, as Rain May goes back and forth between her mother and father and tries to comprehend her father’s new life and significant other, Julia.

The Australian setting adds interest and universality to the everyday joys and sorrows. Rain May slowly starts to appreciate her new surroundings, especially when she and Daniel spot a platypus after days of failed watching attempts. Daniel’s father, a busy physician, tells them: “You’ve joined an exclusive club, kids. Not many people these days have seen a platypus in the wild.”

Stranded in Boringsville is a lovely account of trying to comprehend the many changes of adolescence. Rain May and Daniel are believable characters who tackle their problems with grace and humor. How lovely, too, to see a book about a deep friendship between a lonely boy and a lonely girl that has no sexual overtones, and is simply a story of giving and caring.

Alice Cary writes from Groton, Massachusetts.

If your teen prefers short stories to novels, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens, edited by Jane Yolen and Patrick Nielson Hayden, offers a range of excellent choices culled from stories published in 2004. In the first such collection especially for teens, the 11 entries cover the gamut from high fantasy to hard science fiction and everything in-between. From fairies living in handbags to augmented super dogs, flying islands, dark changelings and baby dragons, there is something for every reader’s taste. The contributors include many authors already popular with kids today, such as Garth Nix and David Gerrold, as well as some who might be new to teenage readers, including Theodora Goss and Kelly Link. A bonus story by Rudyard Kipling, first published 100 years ago, gives historic range to the collection. With suggestions for other books to read and a list of Honor Stories that came out in 2004, this anthology can lead the reader to even more wonderful tales. Colleen Cahill is Recommending Officer of Science Fiction and Fantasy at the Library of Congress.

In Stephen Baxter’s The Web: GulliverZone we are shown what teenagers might do for entertainment in the near future. Sarah is delighted to be spending World Peace Day by spinning into the Web and visiting the hot new theme park GulliverZone, which is based on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. She is not amused that her little brother and the most unpopular girl in school are tagging along, but sometimes older sisters have to pay a price and this one is not too high for the latest Web entertainment spot. Sarah and her companions had hoped for cool rides but instead stumble into a dark plot, one that could lead them to become slaves of an evil force that is trying to take over the entire Web. Only three kids stand between chaos and saving the whole computer network. This exciting book is especially good for those interested in computers and virtual reality.

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

The word Siberia conjures up images of hardship and grueling labor in snowy wastelands. Rosita and her mother are banished to such a place in Ann Halam’s Siberia, her third science fiction novel for young adults. Once a scientist, Rosita’s mother now makes nails from scrap metal and tries to keep her daughter alive in a challenging environment. Both mother and daughter share a secret in their treasure box of seeds: these are seeds not of plants, but of animals, a cache of species that are endangered or extinct. In this repressive society, Rosita finds that even small mistakes can be dangerous; her mother disappears and she is sent away to a prison school. Toughened by life, Rosita sets out on a journey to reach sanctuary, not just for her own sake, but also to save her mother’s treasure. This compelling story is science fiction but has the atmosphere of a fairy tale, which makes it attractive to fans of either genre. Colleen Cahill is Recommending Officer of Science Fiction and Fantasy at the Library of Congress.

Sorcery is usually seen as a great power, but in Justine Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness magic can be a dark curse. Reason Cansino has had an unusual childhood, as her mother Sarafina keeps the family traveling through Australia, trying to outrun Esmeralda, an evil witch and Reason’s grandmother. After Sarafina tries to kill herself, Reason finds she is now in the custody of her grandmother. If she had any doubts about Esmeralda working spells, one trip to the basement cures her uncertainty and sends the girl on a search for answers about her family background. Magic runs throughout her family tree, and Reason seems to have a choice of using the evil power or going mad. With the help of her neighbor Tom, Reason tries to escape her grandmother’s grasp and goes through a door that sends her to New York. Some hard lessons are learned as Reason searches for a way to make her life more than a choice between two unhappy paths.

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

Carol Emshwiller is an award-winning writer whose new book for young adults, Mister Boots, is a fantasy, but don’t expect fairies, elves or magic wands. Ten-year-old Bobby is more familiar with California’s arid ranches and the poverty of the Great Depression than Oz or Narnia. While exploring one night Bobby discovers a naked man sleeping under a tree, a man who claims to be a horse. It is soon clear that Mister Boots is sometimes a man and sometimes a horse. He asks Bobby to keep his secret, something Bobby is good at because unbeknownst to all but her mother and sister, Bobby is actually Roberta. This disguise is not to fool the locals, but to protect her from an abusive, often absent father who obsessively desires a son. When her mother dies and Bobby’s father returns, it takes all of Mister Boots’ and Bobby’s magic to face the challenge.

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

How would you feel if your country was attacked, suddenly, without warning? How would you feel if you were put under suspicion, regarded with contempt, even afraid for your life, because you were of the same nationality as the attackers? How would you feel if you were still viewed with prejudice even after you had volunteered to serve your country? If you think we're referring to 9/11, it only serves to reinforce the adage that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The attack in question here wasn't on the island of Manhattan, but on the island of Oahu Pearl Harbor, to be exact. Graham Salisbury's new book for teens, Eyes of the Emperor, deals with the effects of the attack on a Japanese-American teen, his efforts to prove his loyalty to his country and the strange and dangerous pathways prejudice can take us down in a time of war.

Eddy Okubo isn't like his dad; the old man builds boats for his customers, both Asian and haole (white), taking equal care with each. Pop Okubo wants his sons to attend university in Japan some day, but 16-year-old Eddy just wants to play baseball and be like his two buddies who have enlisted in the Army. He alters his birth certificate and does enlist, much to his father's consternation, but shortly after he finishes boot camp, America is attacked and Eddy's life changes drastically. He and other Asian soldiers are held at gunpoint, then put to work doing menial tasks. Even so, they manage to prove themselves loyal. Eddy's desire to serve his country is put to the test when he, along with the rest of his Japanese-American squad, are shipped out to the unlikeliest of places to serve as guinea pigs in the unlikeliest of experiments, and he'll need all of his courage and wits to survive.

Eyes of the Emperor may be a novel, and quite a good one at that, but the story is based on actual events. When you read it, you'll think to yourself, could this really have happened? Yes, it did, and Salisbury's meticulous research brings Eddy's story to life in a remarkably immediate way.

In Valerie Hobbs’ new novel, Defiance, we are introduced to two people from different worlds. Pearl is 94, born before television or computers or cell phones. She milks cows, grows tomatoes and writes poetry. She grew up in a time when reading was a pleasure and reading together could be romantic. But now she is going blind, though her milky blue eyes still see much in her new friend. Toby is 11, a skinny, bald boy with eyes too big for his face. He watches television, surfs the Web and gets scanned by magnetic resonance imaging. Toby has cancer. Yet, Toby muses, None of these differences mattered, they were friends just the same. Toby meets Pearl while spending time at a cabin in the country with his mom. Out riding his bike one day, he sees a crazy, witchy woman screaming at the crows threatening her garden. Toby ends up helping her around the house learning to milk Blossom the cow, tend her garden and read poetry. Both have given up on life in some way, and the friendship they share affects them deeply. Toby has noticed that a lump has recurred, but so horrifying were his treatments that he vows not to go through them again, knowing his life is at stake. Pearl’s life got too dark, not because of her incipient blindness, but because her husband was shot and killed coming out of a florist shop, carrying yellow tulips. A senseless thing, and so she stopped writing. Yet other poets’ words are still important to her and she shares them with Toby.

When Blossom dies and the fact of death is before them, Pearl and Toby come up with an unspoken challenge, to be warriors and do what must be done: it’s not Toby’s time to die, and Pearl must write her poetry. As Pearl says when teaching Toby how to read a poem, Poetry is all about stopping at the right places. Just because you come to the end of a line doesn’t mean you have to stop there. Stop at the periods, just like you do anywhere else. Now begin again. And so they begin again, realizing their lives are not at the proper stopping places yet.

This brief, poetic novel an ode to life, friendship and the power of words will linger for a long time in the minds of its readers.

Heller Highland is aptly named; he careens on his bicycle through the steaming streets of New York City like a bat out of the proverbial underworld, dodging trucks, avoiding policemen and frightening pedestrians. It’s his job. Heller works for Soft Tidings, a messenger service with an angle the message, whether good or bad, is delivered in person, verbally. Burning City, a new novel by the father-son team of Ariel and Joaquin Dorfman, tells the story of Heller’s summer, when one boy takes the first steps to becoming a man. It’s 2001, the summer before the Twin Towers apocalypse, and Heller has been abandoned by his parents, globe-trotting relief workers, to live with his grandparents in a small, second-story walk-up. For a 16-year-old kid who dreams of one day competing in the Tour de France, being a bike messenger might seem like a dream job, but like all dreams, there’s more here than meets the eye. For one thing, it’s Heller’s job to deliver bad news; he has a knack for empathizing with his clients and somehow seems to know the right thing to say to ease the pain of the message, whether it be a sudden death, a lost opportunity or, in the case of Salim Adasi, a lover’s rejection.

Heller knows all about rejection. He’s madly in love with a girl he’s too shy to approach, but things change when he meets Salim. The Turkish immigrant takes the boy under his wing and gives him some unusual life lessons as they wind their way through the multicultural streets of the city. When Salim’s dubious book business, an irate cop and Heller’s adolescent drives result in tragedy, the boy must grow up fast.

Burning City, like many coming-of-age novels, deals with immersing one’s self in the unknown. Widely traveled but sorely lacking in social skills, Heller is no different than any other adolescent on the verge of adulthood, and with the help of Salim and his friends, he learns the delights and responsibilities of growing up. While adult in tone and language, Burning City is an excellent choice for teen readers. It admirably evokes the streets of the big city and the angst of every teen with big dreams.

Navigating the halls of high school is a hard enough challenge for a teenager. Add to that a parental breakup, a move from a distant location and a school where the rules of normality are thrown out the window and you’ve got the makings of The Rise and Fall of a 10th-Grade Social Climber, a new novel for teens by Lauren Mechling and Laura Moser.

The co-authors, who met while sharing acne medication in a company ladies’ room, share an eye-opening glimpse into the life of Mimi Schulman, a 15-year-old Texas transplant who finds herself in the heart of New York City’s eclectic scene. Shortly after her arrival, Mimi is goaded into making a bet with a childhood friend in which she pledges to become friends with the Coolies, the most popular and seemingly shallowest girls in her class. Though initiated as a joke, the wager soon becomes the bane of Mimi’s existence. As she grows closer and closer to the Coolies, Mimi learns that although the Coolies seem egotistical and uncaring, they are actually a closely knit group of sympathetic friends. Their perceived egotism comes not from feeling better than those around them, but from a desire to protect each other from the various traumas of their lives. Once she is let in on each of the girls’ secrets a battle with drug addiction, a habit of shoplifting, a mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown, an inability to make the grade Mimi struggles to admit her own little secret: that her friendship with them is based on lies and deceit. But before she can come clean to her newfound friends, Mimi’s ill-conceived scheme is exposed. The Coolies turn on her and she is left to sort out who she is on her own. The authors present a no-holds-barred look at the realities of being an adolescent in today’s society: parental breakups, peer pressure, drugs, alcohol and sex. And though not every teenager will be confronted with these issues, it is clear from this glimpse into the adolescent world that the challenges of being a teenager today are more complex than most of us realize.

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.