Bronwen Oliver is certain she was switched at birth. What else could explain her aversion to ketchup when the rest of her family slathers the condiment on almost anything edible? Or her gift for journalism amid a family that doesn’t write (and she’s not counting her great-uncles’ self-published The Onderdonk Reliable Method for Preventing Most Diseases of the Rectum)? Since her father died in a plane crash when she was six, her mother stopped talking about difficult topics, her brother Peter became equally reticent, and her stepfather dismissed her adoption request, she has dreamed of being rescued one day by her “real” family.

After breaking up with Chad, who only wanted to take their relationship to the next level (i.e., have sex in her basement after prom), Bronwen is surprised to run into Jared Sondervan, one of Peter’s former high school friends. Only this new romantic boyfriend can evenly match Bronwen’s impeccably timed, quirky humor and observations on life. As she enters her senior year of high school and her boyfriend his senior year at a nearby college, their love blossoms (and readers wistfully sigh) until Jared unexpectedly asks Bronwen to marry him. It’s an opportunity not only to be with the guy she loves but to become a member of Jared’s seemingly perfect family and start fresh by forming a family of her own.

But if her wedding day is supposed to be the happiest day ever, why then does Bronwen begin to feel depressed and like she’s losing her freedom already? Maybe she’s not the only one in her house who needs to learn to open up about her feelings. With scenes that prompt both laughter and tears, I Now Pronounce You Someone Else reveals Bronwen’s doubts, healing and discovery that her true family may have been surrounding her all along.

Fifteen-year-old Mason has never met his father. His responsibilities at home include picking his mother up from the local tavern when the bouncers set her on the curb, then sobering her up for another shift at the nursing home, and occasionally sneaking in to help her complete a shift. One day when he’s at the nursing home he pops in a DVD—footage of his father, his face obscured, reading a children’s book—and a previously comatose teenage girl wakes up at the sound of his voice. She turns out to be part of an experiment in genetic engineering intended to turn kids into self-sustaining life forms who can survive without food or water. She’s also gorgeous, which motivates Mason to err on the side of running away with her in a valiant but dangerously misguided attempt at saving her. The only thing standing in his way is the faceless man behind this plan, known only as the Gardener.

Retta Lee Jones is an aspiring country singer from Starling, a small Tennessee town. Everyone in Starling knows Retta is talented, but a beautiful voice cannot fix her parents’ marriage or pay the bills. All she clings to is a dream to make it in Nashville.

Following her high school graduation, and despite her mother’s objections, Retta scrapes together her limited savings to spend the summer working in Music City. Some unfortunate circumstances (a parking ticket, a fender-bender, a mugging) force her to sleep in her car, but they also put her in the path of kind-hearted people. She meets a mechanic who offers her a job answering phones in his auto shop to pay for the repairs, and a bookstore clerk befriends her and lends her books about the country music business. When Retta gets a poor-paying job singing at a shabby hotel, the hotel manager’s young son lets her sleep in a vacant room for free. The hotel bartender, a fellow musician, offers her valuable advice: Quit imitating country legends and sing your own music. Before long, her luck changes when she catches the attention of a well-known local columnist. But the path to fame is often paved with potholes, and Retta must decide if becoming a Nashville star is even possible.

As in her previous book, Artichoke’s Heart, Suzanne Supplee peppers Somebody Everybody Listens To with a lush Southern setting, endearing characters and honest first-person narration. Retta is a hard-working soul who just needs a lucky break, and readers will root for her to rise above her humble circumstances. In addition, Supplee precedes each chapter with a brief biography of a country legend, such as Patsy Cline, Shania Twain and Dolly Parton. These entries highlight the difficult road to stardom and complement Retta’s own struggles and successes. After reading that Dolly Parton was one of 12 children or that Shania’s real name is Eileen Edwards, teen readers might be motivated to do their own research and learn more. And although the country bios add a fun touch to the novel, teens do not need to be fans of country music to be fans of Suzanne Supplee.

Devi Banks is nearing the end of her senior year in high school, and her boyfriend of three years, Bryan, just broke up with her. She’s hurt, angry and confused about where her life is headed. When she accidentally drops her phone into a wishing well at the mall—right after wishing she could go back in time—the phone is broken, seemingly useless, only able to call her own number. But that number reaches Devi . . . three and a half years ago.

As Senior Devi and Freshman Devi come to the realization that they are indeed talking to themselves, Senior Devi begins to instruct Freshman Devi on what to do to save herself future heartache—starting with never going out with Bryan in the first place. She then realizes she could rescue lost friendships, keep her friends from making decisions that turn out badly, concentrate on school more and get accepted to a better college. But the pressure of fixing the future starts to get to Freshman Devi as she tries new activities, fights her impulses to have fun and gets to know cute and sweet Bryan. Both Devis learn that they should focus on living in the present, and the reader learns a lot about wishing instead of living.

Sarah Mlynowski’s Gimme a Call is chick lit for teens, but the focus on a very pertinent life lesson makes it more than just a fun read. Readers will think about their own past mistakes in a new light as they see what can happen when the present is informed by the future. Mlynowski manages to make the reader root for two heroines in one, and the result is a delightful story that answers the age-old question, “If I knew then what I know now, would I change anything?” It’s up to the reader to decide as Gimme a Call offers a fun new perspective on the classic conundrum.

Ship Breaker, the new novel from highly acclaimed author Paolo Bacigalupi, poses a challenge to critics: How do you explain how good it is without a dozen “spoiler alerts”? One of science fiction’s pleasures is the dislocation it confronts readers with, sometimes from page one. Reading along and finding yourself in outer space, under water or in a future you never envisioned creates the sense of wonder the best sci-fi inspires. To give away too much would be cruel, but here are the basics:

The story follows Nailer, a teenage boy and one of the “ship breakers” of the title, as he scavenges for copper wire inside the ductwork of grounded oil tankers, off the Gulf Coast of an America sometime in our future. He has cruel bosses, difficult quotas and a dangerous job which he’ll soon grow too big to do anymore. So when he stumbles upon a clipper ship washed ashore in a hurricane, it seems as though he’s hit the jackpot. Instead, what he finds inside the ship forces him to reconsider his life so far—and his chances for a better, and happier, future.

The novel has surprises in store, not least among them the juxtaposition of a bleak landscape (including forced labor, grinding poverty and drug addiction) with a nautical adventure story, and ultimately a touching discussion about the families we surround ourselves with for comfort and survival, whose ties run deeper than blood. Bacigalupi’s seeming ease in tying these themes together, and interweaving them with a dark take on the consequences of oil scarcity, is evidence of his talent. He paints a vivid portrait of the scavengers’ culture with perfectly chosen details: Facial tattoos that serve as work permits, glowing LED face paint to illuminate the darkened ducts, the luxury of rat on a stick and the scary amphetamine-like drug “crystal slide” all bring their world to life. Ship Breaker is definitely worth exploring, and offers much for readers to take away.

Heather Seggel reads and writes in Ukiah, California.

While 17-year-old Scarlet Ellis has always been the nice one in her family, her moody, selfish older sister, Juliet, has always been quick to dump a long line of boyfriends. Although they were once close as children, their now-tenuous relationship becomes even more difficult when Juliet returns to their Pacific Northwest island home, married to gorgeous, romantic Hayden—and pregnant.

As Juliet pushes away her new husband and chases after her one serious high school boyfriend, Scarlet is trying hard not to fall in love with Hayden. She dedicates herself, as always, to rescuing those around her, including her eccentric neighbors: a retired mailman who has started checking his mail wearing nothing more than his slippers, an artistic Goth girl who wants a date to the prom and an older couple selling their home to answer the email pleas for money from a plantation owner in the Ivory Coast. But eventually she begins to realize that she needs to follow a gift from Hayden: the “Rules of Maybe,” a set of directions to achieve her own dreams, wants and wishes.

Scarlet’s spot-on musings about high school and her elaborate network of relationships lead her to see that she can still be nice while taking care of her own needs and desires. She also begins to understand her relationship with Juliet better, and she may even find a little romance that she doesn’t have to share. These discoveries tug on the heart in all the right places.

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.

Margaret McMullan returns to Mississippi and its history in the gripping Sources of Light. After her father’s war-hero death in Vietnam, Samantha Thomas and her mother relocate to Jackson, Mississippi, near her father’s hometown. While her mother teaches art history at the local college, Sam begins her freshman year of high school in 1962, simply wanting to fit in like the popular Mary Alice, eagerly awaiting her first dance with Mary Alice’s older brother and hoping to fill out her new bra.

After her mom’s friend Perry gives her a camera and ongoing photography lessons, Sam begins to notice and document the racial tensions in Jackson: the violence that spurs from a lunch counter sit in and the deterioration of her community as energy is spent on the “black problem” rather than schools, houses and roads. The town deems Sam, her mother and Perry “agitators” when they take an interest in racial equality, including registering blacks to vote.

When Sam’s family is the target of threats and vandalism from a white supremacist group, they must decide whether to continue helping local African Americans. Adding to the dilemma is Sam’s desire to keep her first boyfriend, even though he may be involved in the violence. A regular girl with bold ideas, Sam realizes that like her father, she is caught in the crossfire of war—and she wonders if she will come out a hero, too. Her keen observations on both adolescence and the racial divide will teach readers about the Civil Rights Movement and growing up in the early 1960s.

Using photography as a metaphor, McMullan shows how Sam looks for the sources of light and good amidst the hatred that surrounds her. Inserting elements of her own childhood and even alluding to her previous Reconstruction novel When I Crossed No-Bob, she seamlessly blends fact and fiction and portrays this turbulent time in American history with candor and grace.

Angela Leeper is a librarian at the University of Richmond.

Sixteen-year-old Sydney Biggs is a girl in trouble and then some: not just pregnant, but grounded with good cause. When best bud Natalia “borrows” her mom’s car, it’s just to drive Sydney to inform the father-to-be, Tommy. But the car is reported stolen, and both girls are taken home by the police. It’s the last straw for Sydney’s mother; she turns Syd over to her father’s care for the summer, and he enrolls her in a wilderness camp, which Natalia ends up attending as well.

In Every Little Thing in the World, Nina de Gramont has given terrific authenticity and freshness to a common story and a setting rife with potential clichés. Syd’s parents are both so wrapped up in their own concerns that she needs to rely on friends and fellow campers to help decide what to do. But the summer will strain her friendship with Natalia to the breaking point, as revelations about Natalia’s own home life force her to rethink the meanings of “life” and “choice.”

Sydney is a great narrator, self-aware about her position in the social food chain and frank about her mistakes. (After losing her virginity to a long-term boyfriend with whom she practiced safe sex consistently, she slept with Tommy, as she says, “not because I especially liked him, but because I was flattered by how much he liked me.”) It’s easy to root for her to make a decision that will bring her some peace and self-preservation, and this smart and thought-provoking book doesn’t shy away from the consequences of each choice.

The power-hungry computer HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey seems like a harmless teddy bear compared to the truly horrific technological threat in Catherine Jinks’ latest novel, Living Hell. But as the novel begins, life aboard the space station Plexus is predictable and routine, even dull, and life on Earth is just a distant memory. For 17-year-old Cheney and his friends, born aboard the ship, Plexus is the only world they’ve ever known.

Soon the ship’s trajectory needs to be adjusted to avoid a dangerous band of radiation. But what starts as a fairly routine course adjustment turns into everyone’s worst nightmare, as Plexus gradually morphs from a self-contained, protective ecosystem into something resembling a living, breathing organism, a creature that sees the humans that occupy it as dangerous invaders to be annihilated. Not experienced enough to be a seasoned problem-solving specialist like his parents and their friends, yet not young enough to simply cower in a corner, Cheney must protect the younger kids while trying to figure out how—and why—Plexus seems so fixated on destroying them all.

With cinematic descriptions and nearly nonstop action, Living Hell begs to be adapted for the big screen. In the meantime, the large cast of characters—including the ominous Plexus itself—will play out their parts in readers’ imaginations, even as their adventures illustrate both biological concepts and philosophical concerns. “Life is a force that cannot be tamed,” observes Cheney, and readers will likely spend a long time—after their heart rates have gone back to normal—reflecting on just how true that is.

“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.

Karen Healey’s debut novel, Guardian of the Dead, takes place at a boarding school in New Zealand, where Ellie Spencer is living away from home for the first time. As the novel begins, she seems concerned with normal teenage pastimes—settling into a new school environment, getting a bit tipsy with her friend Kevin, becoming involved in a play and catching glimpses of handsome day student Mark Nolan, who inspires daydreams as she sits in her Classics class.

The fantasy elements of the story evolve slowly, and Ellie herself is surprised by her increasingly intense interactions with Mark. When she literally runs into him, she experiences a physical shock, realizing that “the perfect planes of his pale face had rearranged themselves into something frightening.” But as unsettling as her encounters with Mark become, Ellie finds herself turning to him for help when her friend Kevin seems to be in danger from a mysterious woman named Reka. In her efforts to save Kevin, Ellie must learn to trust her own emerging powers as well as the world Mark opens for her—a mythological world populated by mist-dwelling Maori fairy people, known as the patupaiarehe, who need human lives to gain immortality. The incredible battle that follows tests Ellie’s commitment to her friends, her country and her growing love for Mark.

Guardian of the Dead will appeal to readers who are fans of young adult authors such as Holly Black and Libba Bray. And without a doubt, Healey will soon have many fans of her own.

“TWO WEEKS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE,” promises a flyer at the local grocery store. Change is just what studious Georgia—whose piled-on academic and family responsibilities have resulted in secret panic attacks—needs. She recruits petite, artistic Riley, her best friend since kindergarten, and along with nearly a dozen high school students from their Philadelphia suburb, they travel to the border town of Juárez, Mexico, to give a squatters’ village called Anapra its first bathroom.

Beth Kephart’s lyrical new book, The Heart Is Not a Size, describes the community’s joyous interest in the Americans, their camaraderie and their survival amid poverty, harsh desert conditions and the increasing number of haunting, unsolved muertas—murders of young women and teens. Kephart’s gentle storytelling captures Georgia’s concerns, her “fuzzy collisions of optimism and despair,” as she tries to shoulder the burden of responsibility and confront the truth about Riley’s escalating eating disorder at the expense of their friendship.

Georgia’s secrets are also revealed with the help of fellow group member Drake, a privileged yet compassionate teen who shares her enthusiasm for the poet Jack Gilbert. While it takes the combined efforts of their team to transform the village, she discovers that one person can make a difference when it comes to friendship. Inspired by a trip the author took with family and church members to Anapra, The Heart Is Not a Size will encourage teens to open their hearts (no matter the size) in their relationships and give back to the Earth and its residents.