A smell of cologne wafts through the air. A frame inexplicably falls from the wall. All these unexplained events, including seeing her dead brother, are beginning to haunt Lex. Is she going crazy? Or is she just trying to reconnect with Tyler, her younger brother who recently took his own life?

The guarded Lex has been meeting with a therapist, who is trying to convince her to write down her thoughts. It doesn’t help that Lex’s mother believes her own life is over, or that Lex’s absentee father may be, in part anyway, responsible for Tyler’s suicide. Grief is tricky business, especially in the wake of an unexpected tragedy and especially for a teenager from an already dysfunctional family. But facing her grief is the only way Lex can go on—and to convince her mother to go on as well.

This well-plotted novel includes some masterful plot turns and mysterious happenings that impact Lex’s breakthroughs and road to recovery. Alternating between Lex’s cathartic journal entries, her all-too-real dreams of Tyler and her day-to-day dealings with her friends and boyfriend, this is an authentic look at the struggles a teen might face when life comes at her from all angles. But it also shows triumph when Lex is able to face her demons, connect the dots of her brother’s tragic last days and help her mom in the process.

It may be nothing like her previous teen novels in the Unearthly trilogy, but The Last Time We Say Goodbye shows Cynthia Hand's impressive skill at connecting with a teen audience.

Creek View is a blink town—as in, if you blink when driving down California Highway 99, you miss it. Skylar cannot wait to leave it behind. Just three more months, and she’ll be at school in San Francisco. In the meantime, Skylar will continue working at the quirky, rundown Paradise Motel and struggling to get her unemployed mother back on her feet.

As summer begins, former Paradise co-worker Josh Mitchell returns from Afghanistan. Josh proves to be a huge distraction for Sky, although she isn’t sure if it’s because she pities him or because she gets lost in his beautiful eyes. Their romance is tentative, and readers learn from brief but powerful interjecting chapters that Josh is suffering deeply from his war experiences. He is wracked with shame, guilt and a curious longing to return to battle, where life at least made sense. Skylar interprets Josh’s skittishness as rejection; why would he want to be with the inexperienced girl living in a sad trailer with her mess of a mother?

Author Heather Demetrios creates two realistic characters poised at turning points in their lives. By overcoming the disappointments and betrayals of past experience and learning to trust again, they find the resilience they need to move on. As in her earlier realistic fiction novel, Something Real, Demetrios tackles headline issues through individual stories rich with characterization. Like Trish Doller’s Something Like Normal, this book is a study of young people redefining their place in the world.

Diane Colson works at the Nashville Public Library. She has long been active in the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Association (YALSA), serving on selection committees such as the Morris Award, the Alex Award and the Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Award.

Gayle Forman, whose previous books include If I Stay and Just One Day, specializes not only in three-word titles but also in novels that combine emotional intensity with moral complexity. I Was Here opens with a gut-wrenching wallop as Cody relates the suicide email she received from her best friend, Meg.

Meg always admired Cody’s strength, and Cody admired Meg’s fearlessness and originality. But the girls have grown apart since high school graduation. Meg escaped to college in the big city, and Cody’s still living with her mom, cleaning houses for a living and quietly flunking out of community college. Their emails grow increasingly sporadic until they stop altogether—that is, until that final email marking the end of Meg’s life and the beginning of agonizing questions about why this vivacious young woman would choose to die. Tasked by Meg’s parents with the unenviable job of cleaning out their daughter’s apartment, Cody encounters computer files that hint at a bigger, darker story surrounding Meg’s suicide.

Thrilling and introspective, I Was Here will prompt readers to reflect profoundly on their own friendships.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

African-American twins Maya and Nikki and their neighbor Essence have always had their lives completely planned. They’ll date the right boys, attend historically black all-female Spelman College and be best friends forever. 

But as their senior year starts, their surety gets shaky. Nikki appreciates the freshness and variety that gentrification has brought to their neighborhood, but Maya resents the lack of local black-owned businesses. Essence and her perpetually drunk mother move across town, and a wealthy white family—including a cute boy and his racially ignorant sister—move in. As student council president, Maya finds herself constantly at odds with the new Richmond High principal, an outsider whose vision for the school doesn’t match that of many students. As the year progresses, the three friends find that relationships can evolve, goals can shift and the past can help inform the present as well as the future.

There’s never been a better time for author Renée Watson’s YA debut. Narrator Maya is perceptive, whether participating in an ongoing hallway-postering campaign or explaining why a celebration of “tolerance” shouldn’t replace Black History Month. A single racial slur appears in a particularly tense moment, but otherwise this is a gentle yet powerful reflection on choices, changes and contemporary African-American teenage identity.

RELATED CONTENT: Read a Q&A with Watson about This Side of Home. 

Jill Ratzan teaches research rudiments in central New Jersey. She learned most of what she knows about YA lit from her terrific grad students.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Teen Top Pick, February 2015

If you discover a magical world through some kind of portal, that’s one thing. Wardrobes and rabbit holes make it easy to believe you’ve left the real world behind. But what if you live in a normal house with normal-enough parents and attend school with other normal kids, and something starts to change, to twist even as you go about your daily life? That would be a bit harder to accept.

Sarah’s life had only a tinge of the weird: Her parents fought a lot; her mother wasn’t very affectionate; and they moved more often than the average family, or at least for no good reason that Sarah could see. The night her mother leaves for good, however, is the final push that changes everything. Sarah’s father seems to fall apart and ends up taking her to live with grandparents she didn’t even know she had. It’s just a long drive in a car—no special doors or portals needed—but the world is definitely different.

As Sarah comes to acknowledge that things are not what they seem—that her father is not falling apart so much as changing into a beast, that her grandfather already is one and that her grandmother’s anger is a powerful thing—she decides to find out the truth about this magic, this curse, this story of love and revenge. Her determination to remain human through it all is the heart of this wonderful, compelling story. Beastkeeper is highly recommended for lovers of fairy tales with a twist.

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Laura Rose Wagner’s debut novel tells the heartfelt, gritty story of a girl living through the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Sixteen-year-old Magdalie and her cousin, Nadine, are like sisters, both raised by Nadine’s mother, who dies in the quake. The boredom, poverty and filth of the makeshift refugee camp are made bearable by the girls’ friendship, but then Nadine’s father procures an American visa, and she moves to Miami. Nadine promises to send for Magda, but as the months drag on, Magda stops expecting a reunion and must rediscover her connection to the people and opportunities that remain in Haiti.

Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go is an excellent choice for readers searching for a diverse narrative. Wagner worked in Haiti for three years, including the year of the earthquake. She is sensitive to reductive and sensationalist portrayals of Haiti, and she tackles these issues in a particularly compelling moment between Magda and an American photographer. There is darkness, anger and despair in what Magda endures, and Wagner is harsh when she needs to be, depicting the hazards faced by young women through moments that are difficult to read. With a realistic balance between righteous anger and sardonic humor, Wagner produces an empathetic and enlightening portrait of a teen’s life in Haiti.

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Marcus Sedgwick’s latest offering is the perfect book for readers who are still pondering the multiple paths in his Printz Award-winning Midwinterblood and are seeking something new to captivate and astound them.

The Ghosts of Heaven is divided into four parts, which might be four different stories or four parts of the same story. In settings as varied as a prehistoric cave, a gossipy village, an insane asylum on the cusp of modernity and a spaceship en route to other worlds, readers meet a series of eager but flawed characters. A girl yearns to make her mark with charcoal and powder; a teenage herbalist is helpless to stop the accusations of witchcraft that surround her; a doctor’s fears are echoed in his patients; and a space sentinel faces decisions that might affect all of eternity. The four stories are linked through a motif of spirals and helixes, geometric shapes that carry mathematical, artistic and spiritual significance.

Sedgwick advises readers that the four stories can be read in any of 24 different combinations. Like the spirals that follow humanity through space and time, readers of this unusual novel will find themselves turning in apparent circles, yet always ending up in a slightly different place from where they started.

Jill Ratzan teaches research regiments in central New Jersey. She learned most of what she knows about YA lit from her terrific grad students.

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Teen Top Pick, January 2015

Rural Russia is not a kind place for Jews in the early 20th century. Miserable, powerless peasants make their Jewish neighbors the scapegoats for everything that goes wrong—and things go wrong all the time. For teenager Clara, the repression tightens as she watches her father and brothers spend their days studying the Torah, while she sweeps floors and prepares meals. As a girl, Clara is forbidden to learn how to read, write or speak Russian—but secretly, she does all three.

When violence explodes against the Jewish villagers, Clara’s family immigrates to New York City. There, Clara feels trapped by the same Jewish traditions that bound her in Russia. While the men continue to read and study, Clara works 10-hour days in a sweatshop. But she will not be caged, not by tradition or injustice. Learning about the formation of unions to protect workers, Clara risks her life to join the crusade.

Based on the true story of Clara Lemlich, Audacity throbs with the emotions of this exceptional young woman who fought for equal rights and improved labor standards in factories. Melanie Crowder’s verses spit out Clara’s rage, cradle her longing and soar like the birds that are her constant companions. Pair with Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Uprising or Elizabeth Winthrop’s Counting on Grace to get a full picture of early labor conditions for young immigrants.

Diane Colson works at the Nashville Public Library. She has long been active in the American Library Association's Young Adult Library Association (YALSA), serving on selection committees such as the Morris Award, the Alex Award and the Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults Award.

This article was originally published in the January 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In There Will Be Lies, a young girl and her mother are on the run from an untrustworthy past filled with unsavory characters, all the while protecting themselves from everything and everyone under a freshly woven blanket of lies.

Shelby Jane Cooper is 17 years old and knows nearly nobody in her home of Phoenix, Arizona. Since she is homeschooled by her uber-protective, overweight, painfully shy mother who’s scared of everything—especially men—Shelby doesn’t get out much, or even have the chance to talk with other people. But this has been her life for so long that it doesn’t even seem unusual to her. That is, until she gets struck by a car after leaving the library one afternoon. While lying on the hot pavement, Shelby has a vision of a coyote—considered cosmically dangerous and ominous by the local Navajo tradition—trot up to her and tell her, “There will be two lies. Then there will be the truth. And that will be the hardest of all.” As soon as Shelby can be released from the hospital, her mother uncharacteristically rushes her into a rental car packed with all their belongings. As they put some ground between them and Phoenix, Shelby’s mom finally begins to reveal what may be the truth about her father: He’s not dead after all, and he may be coming after them at this very moment.

Nick Lake is a publishing director by day and a Printz Award-winning YA novelist by night. In this emotionally charged thrill ride, he honors the existential through his masterful storytelling to remind us that life is what we make of it, and that it is meant to be lived fully, regardless of how terrifying it may at first seem.

Justin Barisich is a freelancer, satirist, poet and performer living in Atlanta. More of his writing can be found at littlewritingman.com.

This skillfully rendered novel traces Malcolm X's life through flashbacks, from his father's death to his imprisonment and eventual understanding of his father’s wisdom. X reads like a biography, in part because the author is Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz, written with the multiple award-winning Kekla Magoon.

Against the backdrop of the racist 1930’s, Malcolm is a promising student until a teacher tells him he won’t amount to much because of his color. This conversation sends 15-year-old Malcolm on a downward spiral across state and ethical lines.

The circular storytelling pattern works well as readers experience Malcolm’s struggles and insights right along with him. In Boston he is seduced by the underbelly of society and eventually moves to Harlem for more action. Wanted by a numbers racket boss, he flees New York, and when back in Boston, he engages in a hustle that lands him in jail.

Throughout Malcolm’s many tribulations, he searches for his true self. Eventually he, like the story, comes full circle, and Malcolm fully embraces his father’s words: “You can be and do anything you put your mind to.”

The book contains racial slurs, and readers will encounter episodes of alcohol and drug use, sex, violence, as well as a description of the aftermath of a lynching, though none are extremely graphic. The publication of this book marks the 50th anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination (February 21) and is a worthy tribute to the man.

Comparing a new young adult author to superstar John Green is risky business. Fans of Green’s work are bound to bring a certain set of expectations to their next read—expectations that All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven meets and even exceeds.

Theodore Finch is the school freak. He can rattle off statistics about suicide as easily as literary quotations, and he’s never bothered joining Facebook because he doesn’t have any friends. His fellow senior Violet Markey is a frustrated writer struggling to redefine her identity and reframe her future plans after the car accident that killed her older sister. When the two teens find themselves working together on a geography project, they soon discover that there’s much more to be learned on their “wanderings” than mere sightseeing. As Violet draws Finch out his shell and Finch teaches Violet to make peace with the past, their relationship seems headed toward long-term happiness. But some problems turn out to be too deeply entrenched to be solved.

Told in alternating perspectives, this heart-wrenching, deeply personal novel includes lots of motifs familiar to Green fans, like road trips, physics metaphors and even references to unusual Indiana landmarks. Niven expertly crafts both of her narrative voices to reflect her characters’ changing moods and perspectives, and she’s at her strongest exactly when her characters are at their most conflicted. In the end, as the two travelers learn, life isn’t as much about what you take as what you leave behind.

Jill Ratzan teaches research rudiments in central New Jersey. She learned most of what she knows about YA lit from her terrific grad students.