“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.

Ring the bells of Redwall Abbey—there’s another chronicle of Mossflower Wood! For those not familiar with the series, the Redwall novels are set in a fantasy world inhabited by intelligent mice, hares, shrews and more. Each tale almost invariably involves a conflict between “good” animals and various evil “vermin”—rats, stoats, weasels, ferrets and so on. It’s a formula that fans adore, which Jacques has great talent for exploring in surprising variety.

The Sable Quean begins with an evil plot by the self-proclaimed “Sable Quean,” a black-furred weasel name Vilaya. Rather than storm the well-protected abbey, Vilaya sends her lieutenant, the vicious weasel Zwilt the Shade, to kidnap the “dibbuns” (or children) of Redwall Abbey. Her scheme is to ransom the children for control of Redwall, thereby capturing the entire realm without a fight. But Vilaya does not expect the arrival of Blademaster Buckler Kordyne and his friend Diggs, two soldier hares sent to Redwall with a gift for the current abbess. Naturally, the two heroes discover the plot, and set out to rescue the missing little ones—who are already proving that capturing the “dibbuns” is an entirely different thing from keeping them captive.

The Sable Quean stands on its own; you need not have read the series to jump into this one. Redwall lovers will delight in little tidbits from the other books woven throughout, while newcomers may have their appetites whetted for more. Jacques peppers his stories with unusual characters, and this is no exception, from the first ever “warrior mole” to an insane hedgehog. Some readers may find his dialects a challenge (mole speech is particularly obscure), and the frequent poetry tends to interrupt the action, though Redwall fans will likely enjoy these bits of woodland culture. Typical of the series, there’s not a lot of subtlety—the villains’ motivations are rudimentary at best—nor is there much character growth. But there’s plenty of adventure with engaging plot twists, as well as likable characters to delight fantasy fans young and old. In the end, The Sable Quean is an enjoyable addition to a popular series, and a treat for Redwallers everywhere.

Howard Shirley is a children’s writer and lifelong fantasy reader. You can visit his website at www.howardshirleywriter.com.

Like last year’s critically acclaimed Marcelo in the Real World, Francisco X. Stork’s The Last Summer of the Death Warriors is the story of a teen faced with difficult choices before the start of a new school year. Kicked out of his foster home and recently orphaned, 17-year-old Pancho Sanchez has one more chance at St. Anthony’s, an orphanage in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Unable to find a construction job for the season, he becomes the aide to fellow resident Daniel Quentin, known as D.Q., who is dying from a type of brain cancer known as diffuse pontine glioma. The immediate allusions to Don Quixote give depth to the quiet steadiness of the novel.

D.Q. has another round of treatment, which he knows he can bear because it will give him one more opportunity to confess his heart to Marisol, a young worker at Casa Esperanza, his outpatient home. And he’ll even endure the two-week recovery period with the bipolar mother who turned him over to St. Anthony’s as a child—if afterwards he can be legally emancipated, allowing him to die where he chooses and to follow the tenets of his Death Warrior Manifesto, a declaration to “love life at all times and in all circumstances.” (“‘Life Warrior’ is probably more accurate because the manifesto is about life,” admits D.Q., “but ‘Death Warrior’ is more mysterious-sounding.”)

Their journey out of town provides the angry, depressed Pancho with a way to avenge the death of his mentally challenged older sister after the police, claiming she died of natural causes, filed away the case. He is also a boxing fan, and the author takes great care jabbing boxing imagery into the Hispanic teen’s own fight for life. Like his literary predecessor, Pancho’s observations of D.Q. illuminate his friend’s idealism and his attempts to claim love in spite of the disease attacking his body and mind. In an unflinching ending, Pancho must decide between carrying out a certain death sentence or finding faith and his place in humanity—and becoming a true Death Warrior.

Angela Leeper is a librarian at the University of Richmond.

Meet Mary Quinn: 12-year-old orphan, thief and pickpocket, sentenced to die for her crimes. Saved from the gallows, she’s transformed from a street urchin into a fine young example of womanhood, thanks to Miss Scrimshaw’s Academy For Girls. On the cusp of her 17th birthday, she learns that the Academy is a front for Victorian London’s top secret women’s detective agency—and she is invited to join.

Mary’s first assignment places her in the household of a wealthy merchant suspected of sabotaging his own cargo ships in an insurance fraud scheme. Employed as a companion for the Thorolds’ daughter, Mary must entertain the miserable girl while trying to unearth any incriminating data. As it turns out, she’s not the only one seeking this information . . . and the Thorold family aren’t the only ones with secrets to protect.

A Spy in the House is, by any yardstick, an excellent novel. A fine whodunit, with clues carefully rationed out as the story evolves, it also holds some great surprises likely to catch even the sharpest readers off guard. There’s keener plotting and more depth to the characters than in many “adult” mysteries, and the grit and grime of London in the midst of a summer heat wave is palpable. Issues of race, class and the world’s oldest profession are tastefully interwoven with the story; much is made clear from the context in which it appears, but parents should be prepared to answer a few questions if they arise.

Mystery novels for younger readers often rely on excessive humor or quirkiness to offset the scariness inherent to suspense. This can disappoint a reader looking for a “real” mystery. A Spy in the House is entirely true to the genre, full of thrills and danger and wonderfully sharp writing. That’s the good news. Even better is that this is just the first part of a planned trilogy, so those of us who are already hooked can look forward to two more novels. I, for one, can't wait. Long live The Agency!

Heather Seggel is a freelance writer. She lives and works in Ukiah, California.

Martin Stokes is a 17-year-old black high school student. Arrested on his own front stoop for “steering” an undercover cop to a drug dealer, he’s spent five months in jail at Rikers Island when this story begins. By turns bleak and funny, Rikers High follows Martin’s struggles with his overworked legal-aid attorney, the bullying of his fellow inmates, a complicated home life and his own burgeoning anger at the unfairness of his incarceration. The novel spans just two and a half weeks, but those few days feel as long as a lifetime.

Rikers High opens with Martin being cut in the face with a razor, and the story builds tension around whether or not he will seek revenge for the attack and jeopardize his chance for release. Author Paul Volponi taught adolescents at Rikers Island for six years, and he notes in a foreword that while the characters are fictitious, most of what transpires in the novel really happened at some point on his watch. That includes corrections officers beating up inmates and fighting with the teachers, kids beating up on each other and even one death, as well as seemingly endless hours of mind-numbing boredom. Volponi balances the excitement of the story’s various conflicts with a real sense of how long the days feel when you have nowhere to go and nothing to do—when fighting for the fun of it begins to seem like legitimate entertainment.

Martin is a smart kid with a good sense of humor (“I’d been sitting five feet from [the teacher] for a week, with a big cut on my face. But he still had no idea I was his student. He should have been a detective instead of a teacher. Then maybe the jail would be empty and some high school . . . would be full of kids.”), and readers will root for him to do the right thing. They’ll also have much to discuss with this engrossing and thought-provoking read.

Heather Seggel is a freelance writer in Ukiah, California.

It’s been almost two years since Melissa’s father lost his long-fought battle to cancer. She keeps him alive by remembering the unusual information he loved, like the fact that glass takes a million years to decay. These interesting tidbits offer the high school freshman a new way of looking at the world, but they don’t provide any guidance on how to grow up and work through her continuing grief.

While her older sister Ashley begins preparing for beauty pageants, following in the footsteps of their gorgeous mother, who has started dating again, plainer Melissa just wants everything to remain the same. At least she can depend on Ryan, her childhood friend who still likes to ride bikes in the river wash behind their Phoenix desert homes—until curvy, confident Courtney transfers to their school and immediately sets her sights on Ryan. And Melissa has always thought she could depend on her adoring father’s impeccable reputation, until she discovers clues about a woman from his past.

As she dates a popular senior athlete (as much a surprise to her as it is to the rest of the school), all the while hiding her envy of Ryan and his new girlfriend, Melissa achingly ponders beauty, jealousy, secrets and the signs of first love. Instead of seeking out the answers to her family’s mysteries, she realizes that she can fill in the gaps with her own stories. And taking her father’s facts and wisdom to heart, she also realizes that relationships are like glass: they may break into pieces around you, but those pieces stay with you forever.

In Jillian Cantor’s expressive, eloquently rendered coming-of-age novel, The Life of Glass, the broken-glass motif echoes throughout Melissa’s heartfelt story of love and resilience. Cantor’s pitch-perfect narration and spot-on depiction of emotional turmoil will remind readers of the exquisite fragility of adolescence.

Angela Leeper is a librarian at the University of Richmond.

Most adults would probably agree that the wisdom that comes with age is in large part due to having experienced both love and the death of a loved one. They’d also probably agree that while the former can be painful, the latter is infinitely more so, and it’s the one thing they wouldn’t wish on anyone else. In Jennifer R. Hubbard’s debut novel The Secret Year, Colt Morrissey isn’t so lucky: Julia Vernon, the girl he’s been secretly seeing for the past year, has died tragically, and to make it worse, he’s had to keep the grief bottled up. Then one day, Julia’s brother Michael confronts him with Julia’s journal, tells him he knows about their relationship and gives him the book.

In the days and weeks that follow, as he slowly relives their romance from Julia’s point of view, Colt will change the way he feels about Julia, his friends, his family and ultimately himself. It won’t be easy, though; Syd, the girl who’s been his pal since grade school, has suddenly taken an interest in him that is more than friendly, and Colt in turn is finding himself attracted to Kirby, Michael’s girlfriend. And at home, Colt’s older brother comes home from college with a startling announcement. All of these elements pivot around the dynamic of the culture clash between Colt’s lower-class neighborhood and Julia’s friends (and boyfriend Austin) from the “right” side of the tracks on Black Mountain.

Teen readers will see a lot of themselves in this book, and that includes some things that parents may find uncomfortable. Hubbard succeeds in avoiding the obvious clichés in The Secret Year; her characterizations are realistic, as is the plot. There are no easy solutions in life, and no storybook endings—we make the best of what fate gives us, and that is what Colt does.

James Neal Webb has more wisdom than he’d like, unfortunately.

“I don’t want ends. I want beginnings,” thinks Charlotte “Charlie” Steer when her single mother moves the two of them to a house in the country in Flightsend. After her mother’s recent delivery of a stillborn baby, Charlie reluctantly accepts the move to Flightsend, a fixer-upper that backs up to an abandoned World War II landing strip. But the 16-year-old can’t figure out why her mother would turn her back on her boyfriend Sean, the baby’s father and the only father Charlie has known for the last five years, especially when he’s eight years younger than her mother, attractive, funny and committed.

During the summer before Year 12, as Charlie finds her niche in the village as a waitress at a cultural retreat, she begins to understand relationships and the complicated forms and boundaries of love and friendship in this multilayered narrative. As she tries to rekindle the romance between Sean and her mother, she begins to wonder if her feelings for him as a stepfather have turned into a more mature love. Complicating her emotions are a young art teacher’s subtle yet inappropriate touches and encouragement when she decides to study art. Then there’s the German pilot who stealthily lands near Flightsend, knows the secret behind the hidden cross in the woods and stirs her mother out of her depression.

Newbery makes Charlie and her circle of loved ones the kind of people readers care about with her realistic yet quiet storytelling and vivid descriptions of their countryside environs. She gives the bright teen a new way to look at endings and lets her see that from loss comes healing, from goodbyes come new hellos and from a move comes a home.

Angela Leeper is a librarian at the University of Richmond.

When the world is threatened by a diabolical madman, the British Secret Service knows the name to call—Alex. Alex Rider. (What, you were expecting someone else?) The teenage super spy from Stormbringer and Snakehead is back to save the day in Crocodile Tears, the eighth installment in the popular action series from Anthony Horowitz. If you’re not familiar with the series, just think “James Bond in sneakers.” (At one point Horowitz even dresses the hero in a tuxedo and black tennis shoes.) Alex Rider is a perfectly normal British teenager, except that he’s been unknowingly trained as a spy by his uncle, an agent of MI6 (the British equivalent of the CIA). When his uncle is murdered in the first novel, Alex is recruited by the agency for both his talents and his age—because who would suspect a 14-year-old of being a spy?

By the time of Crocodile Tears, however, Alex is weary of the spy business. He just wants to be a regular schoolboy and spend time with his girlfriend, Sabina. He’s told MI6 and Sabina that he’s out for good. But when someone tries to kill Alex, Sabina and her father, Alex is swept back into action. In short order, Alex is infiltrating the laboratory of a bio-geneticist with a fascination for poisons and running afoul of a disaster-relief charity, and a penchant for showing up just a little too quickly after devastating industrial “accidents.”

As in the other books, the action is nonstop, the villains suitably villainous and the gadgets are just the sort of things any reader would love to get his or her hands on (what schoolboy wouldn’t want an exploding pen?). Horowitz’s background as a screenwriter is evident—it’s easy to imagine the tale as a blockbuster movie with exotic locales, explosions and death-defying stunts. And as always, Alex is both fully believable and easy to root for. Whether you’re already a fan of the series, or just jumping into the action, Crocodile Tears is another great ride.

Howard Shirley is a children’s writer living in Franklin, Tennessee. Visit his website at www.howardshirleywriter.com.

In Rebecca Barnhouse’s The Book of the Maidservant, Dame Margery Kempe is the most pious woman in Lynn, a natural candidate for undertaking a pilgrimage to Rome. The only problem is that her teenage serving girl Johanna must accompany her—and Johanna knows she won’t be a pilgrim, just a maidservant. She has never been far from the home she loves, and she has misgivings about traveling with Dame Margery, who is prone to lamentations and caterwauling, and insists that there be no laughing or joking. When Dame Margery abandons Johanna in Venice, she must summon the strength to continue on to Rome and find a new place in the world.

It is Johanna’s voice—at times longing for home, at times angry, fearful or sad—that will draw readers in and make them care about this memorable character. Johanna really did exist, though not by that name, in The Book of Margery Kempe, the first autobiography written in English. Barnhouse has taken the essence of Kempe’s story of the 1413 pilgrimage and brought it to life with sensory details about the journey across the Alps and the sights and smells of the markets of Venice. This moving volume may well lead interested readers to other excellent tales of medieval life, including two Newbery Medal-winning tales—Karen Cushman’s The Midwife’s Apprentice (1995) and Amy Laura Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village (2007).
 

Jock lives a seemingly idyllic life; it’s the summer between eighth and ninth grade and he spends his days working an admittedly easy job on his grandfather’s golf course. He does a little greens keeping, helps his Grampus work on adding holes (the course only has 13), and mans the front counter when his older sister Meredith ditches work to be with her boyfriend.

All is not peaceful in paradise, however. There’s his younger brother Egon, for one thing. He’s bigger than Jock, and as anti-social a personality as you’ll find. Egon would be an even bigger headache if it weren’t for the fact that he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Then there are the Noblett brothers, who have a major grudge against Egon, and by extension, Jock; dodging them takes some of the fun of summer away. And finally, there are Jock’s parents, Leonard and Peach—while Grampus is a little eccentric for an ex-Marine, Jock’s ex-hippy dad and mom are downright weird. Chris Lynch’s hilarious new novel, The Big Game of Everything, stirs all these ingredients into a perfect storm of trouble for Jock.

Trouble arrives one day in the form of two of Grampus’ ex-Marine buddies. They come to play a round of golf, but they leave with Egon, or at least they capture his greedy heart. Egon is assigned to caddy the two men, and by the time he returns, he has reached new levels of obsequiousness with the big tippers, including sporting a huge gold ring one has given to him. Then, when his Grammus arrives with a new boyfriend, things get even crazier, and Jock wonders if his family will ever be the same again—and if that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Lynch is an award-winning author who has written some serious novels, but this one takes a serious concept and stands it on its ear. The Big Game of Everything is a book full of laugh-out-loud humor, with a cast of crazy but believable characters. At its center, young readers will find an entertaining life lesson about discovering what really matters.

James Neal Webb once hit himself with his own golf ball.