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J. Liddy is old enough to realize that his family is unique, but young enough not to appreciate that uniqueness. The 15-year-old Irish boy is a fiddler, and a good one, having been raised around music. He and his mother who plays the concertina join up with other musicians on Saturday nights in the Irish coastal town of Kinvara and play late into the evenings. This weekly ritual comes to an end when J.J.’s adolescent yearnings and his family history intersect; he learns to his chagrin that his great-grandfather is believed to have committed a murder, and worse, that the victim was a priest! Kate Thompson’s teen novel The New Policeman opens as this news is imparted by J.J.’s best friend on the school playground. To find out the truth, J.J. must talk to his mother, Helen, and that conversation leads the boy on a quest to find the perfect present for his mother’s birthday more time.

The town of Kinvara is suffering from an ailment all too familiar to denizens of the modern world: There’s not enough time for the good things in life anymore. Some people in the village particularly those attuned to the old ways suspect that the lack of time is more than an illusion. J.J. begins his search for this lost time when he enters the ruin of an ancient Irish ring fort and emerges in the land of the fairy folk, the Tir an n’&andOacute;g.

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J. enlists the help of a mysterious and enigmatic faerie named Aengus, who hints that his quest may have bigger implications that he thought possible; the fate of worlds may depend on his actions, if only he has enough time! Winner of Britain’s Whitbread Award for Children’s Book of the Year, Thompson’s novel catapults the reader into a Brigadoon-like world where nothing is exactly what it seems and where the only thing that really matters is music the music we create, and the music that is life. The compelling plot is full of more twists than an Irish jig (complete with sheet music for those skilled enough to play one), and the well-drawn characters jump off the page. The New Policeman will take you to places, both real and imagined, that you’ve never been before.

James Neal Webb believes that if you’re lucky enough to be Irish you’re lucky enough.

More than a year after suffering a debilitating brain injury, 17-year-old Jersey Hatch is finally headed home from the hospital, ready to pick up the broken pieces of his life. Jersey, whose neurological injuries have left him clumsy, impulsive and partially blind, has entirely forgotten the last two years of his life. He returns home to a father who handles him like a china doll, a mother who retreats from him, and former friends who treat him with hostility and even hatred. Looking at old photographs of himself the ROTC officer, football player, straight-A student and golf star even Jersey can't understand what happened, what made him pick up his father's gun that day and try to kill himself. With the help of his few allies and his carefully constructed memory book, Jersey struggles to reintegrate into his old life while delving into his own barely remembered past, trying to understand what drove him to a failed suicide attempt. Trigger is a provocative, challenging novel that vividly illustrates the damage caused by suicide, not only to the direct victim, but also to his or her entire community. Told in Jersey's own voice, at times barely coherent due to his mental impairment, the novel also dramatizes the difficulties faced by a young person with brain injuries. Author Susan Vaught is a practicing neuropsychologist, and her sensitivity toward the subject brings a heartbreaking realism to the story.

Trigger is not an easy novel to read its style and its dark subject matter make it most appropriate for mature teens but it is an important one. Jersey's unsteady journey into his past will give readers a better understanding of the causes and wide-ranging effects of teen suicide, and should help promote discussion of this ongoing problem.

In this National Book Award finalist, 13-year-old Lakshmi lives in a hut, perched on a mountainside in the Himalayas. She loves the stunning beauty of the mountain's long purple shadows, the tallow pumpkin blossoms that close in the evening as the white jasmine open. On nights when the moon is full, the hillside is bathed in a magical white light, the glow of the perpetual snows that blanket the mountaintops.

This beauty, however, contrasts with the ugliness of Lakshmi's fate as a young woman in that world. Children's lives are precarious, but girls' lives are expendable. Lakshmi's lazy stepfather does little work and spends his days gambling away money playing cards at the tea shop. The family is unprepared when monsoon rains come and wash away any hope of good crops and a better future. Lakshmi finds herself in Calcutta in the Happiness House, where she is forced into prostitution. At first, she believes she can do this despicable work and pay off her debt and return home, only to realize later that believing is stupidity, hope an affliction.

In Patricia McCormick's beautifully crafted free verse novel, each poem is a hotline to the mind and voice of Lakshmi, and accumulations of detail delineate her circumstances and her inclination toward hope. Readers might see in her the fate of other survivors. When she looks in the mirror and sees a corpse, she might remind readers of Elie Wiesel at the end of Night, witnessing the same reflection after his time in concentration camps. When Lakshmi is told, If they find out you can read and write, they will think you are planning to escape, the story of Frederick Douglass learning to read might come to mind. And when she realizes she will always be in debt, always cheated out of her earnings, hers is a sharecropper's experience, her own body the bartered crop.

When Lakshkmi asks her mother, Why must women suffer so? her mother replies, Simply to endure is to triumph, a resounding reminder of survivors of slavery and genocide in cities all over the world. Lakshmi's story of survival is told in poetry that will reach right into her readers' souls.

Dean Schneider teaches middle school English.

2008 Printz Award Winner

Fourteen-year-old Symone (Sym) knows just about everything there is to know about the coldest, bleakest place on earth: Antarctica. Socially awkward, suffering from a hearing impairment, painfully shy, Sym finds solace in an imaginary companion, legendary polar explorer Titus Oates, who died in an ill-fated 1911 expedition to the South Pole. Absorbed by books about Antarctica, Symone dreams of traveling there someday, of finding herself as a result: It was so empty, so blank, so clean, so dead. Surely, if I was ever to set foot down there, even I might finally exist.

When a weekend jaunt to Paris with her brilliant Uncle Victor leads to a surprise ticket on a three-week polar expedition, Sym is thrilled. At last, she will be able to see the land of her dreams, the place where Oates disappeared almost a hundred years before. When Sym and her fellow travelers land on The Ice, though, she gradually recognizes the true extent of Uncle Victor’s obsession with Antarctica, a mania that goes beyond mere fascination and borders on madness. As Victor embarks on an odyssey to find Symmes’s Hole, a supposed entryway to a hollow earth, it seems he is willing to sacrifice anything and anyone even Sym to reach his goal.

Accomplished, prolific, always surprising author Geraldine McCaughrean has produced another remarkable story in The White Darkness, her first contemporary novel for young adults. With its brutal but beautiful setting, scenes of captivating drama and anguished violence, the narrative deeply probes Sym’s troubled mind. Even as the teenager fights for her life among the dangers of the polar desolation, she questions her own sanity, and her experiences challenge readers, too, to read between the lines and discover her hidden strength and courage, buried not only beneath her outer vulnerability and weaknesses, but also beneath thousands of feet of deadly ice.

Norah Piehl is a writer in the Boston area.

Seventeen-year-old Dalton Rev is a private eye who dresses like a hipster and rides a scooter to school. When Wesley Payne, one of Salt River High School’s most popular students, is found murdered and duct-taped to the goal posts, his sister, Macy, hires Dalton to take on the case. Not one to say no to a pretty girl (and a hefty fee), Dalton transfers to Salt River to investigate, but soon finds himself at the mercy of greedy cliques and a corrupt principal. For Dalton to sleuth out Wesley’s killer, he must infiltrate the powerful cliques and hit them where it hurts the most—their rackets.

While Dalton appears to be confident and in control, his personal life is in shambles. His father is unemployed and his oldest brother is fighting overseas. Meanwhile, his attraction to Macy is clouding his judgment and hurting his case. Dalton’s only help is Lexington Cole, a literary detective whose impossibly close-call exploits offer Dalton lots of inspiration, but little actual help.

Author Sean Beaudoin’s talent is impressive as he intersperses several elements throughout Dalton’s story, including a clever and elaborate clique chart that takes the stereotypical high-school social hierarchy and turns it on its head (“Scam Wows: Members wear matching Bluetooth headsets and tight polo shirts. They’ll buy or sell your mother.”); the ingenious and valuable rules in The Private Dick Handbook (Rule #8: “Never fall for a girl named after a constellation or a European city. Especially not twice.”); and the hilarious snippets of Dalton’s own detective short stories.

You Killed Wesley Payne is a quirky combination of literary noir and satire that deftly merges the hard-boiled detective romp with the absurdities of high school, sure to be a hit with fans of Anthony Horowitz’s Diamond Brothers Mysteries and the TV cult favorite “Veronica Mars.”

A pistol shot, a teenage girl falling from an abandoned pier, a police interrogation, Coast Guard searches. Casey Carmody is missing. Was she shot? Is she playing a practical joke? Where is her body? Seventeen-year-old Kurt Carmody, Casey’s older brother, tells the police he heard Casey laugh after the sound of the gunshot, but testimonies differ and no one heard a splash. As Captain Lutz says, We’ve got no body, no blood, and a whole lot of people claiming to have heard a pistol shot from a gun no one claimed to fire. The teens at the scene were the Mystic Marvels, residents of Mystic Island, a small beach community on an island barely wide enough to be inhabitable. These high school students are not too bad, not too good, not too smart, not too dumb, not too rich, not too poor, just Ômarvy around,’ as Casey would say. It seems as if the group is relatively inclusive, but it becomes apparent during the interrogation that this may be a witch hunt, a group’s attempt to go after an outsider. The witchy gossip and jealousies conspire against the reputation of Stacy Kearney, the new girl at school. Her too-sure-of-herself personality is just the kind that a coven of teenagers would like to bring down. And her family connections to old money in the town don’t help. The conformist, group-minded Mystic Marvels don’t marvel at Stacy; she is someone they love to hate. And it was Stacy who brought the gun to the party on the pier. What was the sense in that? Add in the dynamics of girlfriends and boyfriends, ex-boyfriends and the vagaries of group behavior in the dark, and this pretty girl with a tenuous connection to the group is in trouble. As the morality play comes to a dismal yet realistic conclusion, Kurt becomes a narrator readers will like, a player who knows the group and ultimately rejects it. Carol Plum-Ucci’s important young adult novel about conformity to groups is a good match with her Printz Honor-winning The Body of Christopher Creed.

If you’re looking for truly terrifying fare to read aloud on Halloween, look no further than Vivian Vande Velde’s book, All Hallows’ Eve. All 13 stories in the collection take place on Halloween night. In Pretending, Brian drives into the country to pick up his date for the evening and discovers that her parents seem a lot like vampires or worse. Janelle visits a cemetery with her ninth-grade class in Cemetery Field Trio, only to receive help from a most unexpected source when she is attacked in a mausoleum. And in the truly frightening When and How, Marissa and her friends make a trip to a psychic who has the power to predict the time and place of death.

Readers will find themselves in good hands here. Vande Velde, who won an Edgar Award for her medieval mystery, Never Trust a Dead Man, is an expert at crafting hair-raising suspense. Deborah Hopkinson’s latest book for young readers is Into the Firestorm, A Novel of San Francisco 1906.

Of course, scary stories have been with us for a long time. In a new anthology of horror stories, celebrated artist Barry Moser has created evocative and suspenseful wood block prints to accompany classic stories by such authors as Bram Stoker, H.G. Wells and O. Henry. Scary Stories is a handsome book and a gift that’s perfect for Halloween, featuring well-known stories such as Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and an excerpt from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving. Also included are contemporary tales by modern masters such as Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates and Ray Bradbury. Moser, the acclaimed illustrator of works including Just So Stories, In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, has created some magnificent artwork for this collection. There’s a gorgeous, frightening tiger for Stephen King’s Here There Be Tygers, as well as some truly ghastly illustrations, especially the title character in E.F. Benson’s The Bus-Conductor. Scary Stories is a volume that is sure to become a classic all on its own.

Deborah Hopkinson’s latest book for young readers is Into the Firestorm, A Novel of San Francisco 1906.

M.T. Anderson has become known for novels both playful (Whales on Stilts!) and thought-provoking (Feed). Uniting all his works, though, is a startling originality, a creativity and sensitivity to language that reaches new heights in The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing. The first volume, The Pox Party, is the beginning of a remarkably ambitious two-part work.

Octavian is, on the surface of things, a privileged young man. Dressed in clothing of the finest silks and satins, surrounded by the intellectual and artistic luminaries of 18th-century Boston, Octavian studies classical literature and excels at the violin. As Octavian grows up in the unusual surroundings of the Novanglian College of Lucidity, however, he begins to ask questions that have no easy answers: Why are Octavian and his mother, the foreign princess known as Cassiopeia, the only household members given names instead of numbers? For what purpose do the scholars study all of Octavian's bodily functions? What is the real nature of the experiments conducted behind locked doors?

As Octavian's awareness grows, his insulated surroundings are penetrated by stirrings of revolution. When the college's most ambitious experiment goes horribly awry, an increasingly melancholy Octavian must make his own way in a rapidly changing world. Set in the earliest days of the American Revolution, Octavian Nothing not only probes the sometimes troubling philosophical and political fixations of the time but also preserves the language of 18th-century literature. Such prose may seem challenging and old-fashioned at first, but make no mistake this is a thoroughly modern novel. Historically grounded, emotionally and philosophically complex, Octavian Nothing will compel readers to think differently about history and its echoes in the contemporary world.

Norah Piehl is a freelance writer and editor in the Boston area.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s first young adult novel examines the all-too-common dark side of high school in which powerful groups of teens carry out cruel acts against students who threaten their reign of popularity and control. In Haters, the arrival of beautiful and confident Pasquala Rumalda Quinata de Archlete ( Paski ) at Aliso Nigual High threatens Jessica Nguyen, the leader of the haters. Jessica is especially upset when her boyfriend, Chris Cabrera, takes an interest in Paski.

Paski knew her life was about to change when her father returned home to Taos after a two-week business trip to Los Angeles dressed like a 20-year-old pop star. After slaving away as a starving artist for years, he gets his big break as the head of an animation team for a movie and announces that the family is moving to L.A. immediately. Paski loves her life in Taos, including her two best friends, her new boyfriend and her position as co-captain of the school’s mountain bike team, and she doesn’t want to leave.

Haters is a literary departure for Valdes-Rodriguez, who is known for her best-selling adult novels, The Dirty Girls Social Club and Playing with Boys. She creates a well-rounded and likable character in Paski, whose move to sunny Southern California thrusts her into an unfamiliar world filled with shiny cars, palm trees and shopping malls. Paski soon realizes that she doesn’t fit in with the ultra-thin, beautifully dressed girls who dominate the culture at her school. In a difficult balancing act, she struggles to find her place while maintaining her own identity. Fresh, original and ultimately heartwarming, Haters will be passed from teen to teen as word of mouth spreads about this courageous coming-of-age story.

Renee Kirchner is a freelance writer and an educator in the Dallas area.

"I guess I always felt even if the world came to an end, McDonald’s would still be open," 16-year-old Miranda says when her life suddenly takes a turn for the worse. The problems begin when a larger-than-expected asteroid hits the moon and sends it out of orbit. Tsunamis ensue, drowning Cape Cod and coastal cities, and washing the Statue of Liberty out to sea. Power goes out, gas prices go up, and food becomes scarce. Within two weeks, it’s hard to remember what normal was clocks with the correct time, lights that work, access to the Internet. The death toll is incalculable along the coasts, and inland, people begin dying when food gets scarce, wells run dry and a flu epidemic hits.

Susan Beth Pfeffer opens this gripping novel with a teenager’s everyday concerns: homework, tests and who’s going out with whom, and darn if a lunar disaster doesn’t ruin everything. Life gets gray and dingy, and even the snow isn’t quite white. As time goes on, families must decide which family member must eat more and stay strong so someone will be able take care of the others as they weaken. So, what do you do when your world is dying? You reinvent the world. Miranda’s mother makes all three of her children study something, even if there is no school anymore. They chop their own wood, melt snow for water, play Scrabble and even sing Christmas carols with their remaining neighbors. Readers will witness the incipient civilization that Miranda’s family creates for itself.

In this dying world, Miranda develops a series of philosophies of life to cope with the harsh times. Early on, it’s Why feel sorry for myself today when tomorrow’s bound to be worse. Later, it’s Don’t let me be the last one to die. But by the end of the novel, having survived so much, Miranda says, [T]oday isn’t a day to worry about the future. Whatever will happen will happen. Today is a day to celebrate. Though this is a powerful story about a freak lunar event and its consequences, it’s the spirit of appreciating day-to-day life that will resonate with readers.

Dean Schneider teaches English at Ensworth School in Nashville.