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.

Lump, the title character in Michael Gruber’s remarkably original teen novel, The Witch’s Boy, is aptly named: he has a nose like a pig, yellow eyes, pointed ears and a lumpy body covered with coarse black hair. Abandoned as a baby in the woods, he is found by the Woman of the Forest, a mysterious witch feared by the country folk. She is not the kind of witch who inhabits fairy tales, but is more akin to something out of Celtic myth, a creature as much elemental as human, who lives in a cottage deep in the woods, along with a talking cat and a conniving genie.

The Witch’s Boy could be considered a handbook on how not to raise your children. Even witches have their duties, and “Mrs. Forest” has some big ones related to the seasons, the phases of the moon and the health and welfare of the land around her. But as many a busy parent has come to discover, neglecting your children can lead to trouble. The actual rearing of Lump is left to a bear that loves him tenderly, but the boy isn’t equipped to keep up with the rest of his nanny’s kind. When the witch then leaves the education of young Lump to her captive genie, he uses his na•ve young charge as a means of obtaining his freedom. Finally, the witch must face the most fearful consequence of raising a child watching him grow up. In Lump’s case, this means finding out that he’s not the beautiful boy he was led to believe.

Gruber has created a fairy tale turned on its ear; he re-imagines the stories we grew up with, cast in a landscape as real as our pre-history, but just as mysterious. There’s an obsessive-compulsive girl named Eyella, who’s convinced that a prince is in love with her; a former circus performer named Pinocchio; and a swordsman and his sister named Hansel and Gretel. Many more familiar names populate this incredible book, and most surprising of all is the name Lump is known by today.

Gruber, the author of two acclaimed adult thrillers (Valley of Bones, Tropic of Night), should find a receptive teen audience with this engrossing fantasy debut. James Neal Webb has two lovely portraits of his now grown children hanging in his library.

Once upon a time there was a girl who served pizza in a rat costume. That was me. So begins the fairy tale of Ashley Hannigan, keen observer of her kingdom. No, it’s not Cinderella and her stepsisters, and it’s not wretched work doing chores while stepsisters go to the ball. Ashley’s real-world torments include a lousy job at EZ-CHEEZ-E, a home life where noise tied the house together like duct tape around a busted water heater, and the road to the ball the prom is paved with a series of unfortunate events, related with such humor and good spirits that readers will attend her all the way to her fateful appearance.

Not that Ashley ever wanted to go to the prom, and not that she could go even if she wanted to; she has too many detentions, and the principal is on her case. But her best friend Natalia Shulmensky wants to go; she’s been waiting for this all of her life. And Ashley’s organizing abilities and expertise at bossing people around pull her into helping Nat plan the big night. Stolen prom money, a broken leg, an injured foot, a ruined dress, a missing grandmother and police at the castle gates make the best laid plans a challenge for the most earnest of planners. But Nat’s pink notebook contains a vision of grandeur brought to life, and Ashley is determined to pull it off.

Perhaps the girls puking in the bathroom or performing oral sex behind the bleachers detract from the aura, but overall it is a magical night for Ashley. Even if the underwear model is lured away by a girl whose dress was cut so low she was showing nipple, it is a night to remember, a celebration of the normal kids. As Anderson says in her acknowledgments, this books serves as a rowdy shout-out to all the Ônormal’ kids . . . nobody ever writes about. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Prom is laugh-out-loud funny, and older teenagers will find themselves passing this book around and reading the funniest scenes to each other. This novel is sure to be a big hit, though language and subject matter aim it at older readers.

As the only Bengali girl in a small Canadian town, 13-year-old Maya chafes at the crossroads of two cultures. She doesn’t identify with her Indian roots, but at school she’s ridiculed for the color of her skin and the strange-smelling food she brings from home. She just wants to belong and to be liked by a certain boy named Jamie.

“I don’t want to be ethnic,” she complains in Maya Running, Anjali Banerjee’s debut novel. “I want to run on the tundra beneath the northern lights, make igloos or snow angels, write to Anne Frank in my diary or clean my closet and find a door into Narnia.” Maya’s problems seem to be magically solved when her cousin Pinky arrives from India with a statue of Ganesh. The elephant-headed Hindu god comes to life, asking for Jelly Bellies to satisfy his sweet tooth, then granting Maya’s wish for a perfect life. She wakes up the next morning to find her skin free of blemishes, her faultless teeth no longer needing braces. Her parents agree to Maya’s every whim. Jamie trails her in a lovesick trance.

Perhaps Maya should have paid closer attention to the warning that the Remover of Obstacles is also a trickster. By the time Maya realizes “my wishes were a river with an undertow,” Ganesh is gone, returned to India in the suitcase of her cousin Pinky.

Maya must make a journey of both body and spirit to find Ganesh and beg him to make her world as it was before. When she overcomes the greediness of her own yearnings in sacrifice to another’s greater need, she discovers the true gift of Ganesh. The removal of what she thought were her obstacles also strips away illusions that were holding her back. Now, she understands, “I am special in a way that is bigger and older than this town.” In Maya, Banerji has created a character with an authentic, engaging voice and a poignantly familiar yearning to belong. Teenage readers will find much to identify with in her captivating journey of self-discovery.

Belinda Anderson writes from West Virginia.

What exactly happened that day after swim practice, when Darren Flynn accepted a ride home with Mr. Tracy, his English teacher? Did anything happen? Mr. Tracy had talked, in his “nervous, fluttery” manner, of the V-shape of swimmers’ bodies, of his desire for Darren to be less inhibited in class, of Darren’s close-knit family. He had asked Darren to call him Lowell. When he got home late, Darren had lied to his mother that he had been out with his friend Kevin. But did he have to lie? Was there anything to cover up? Afterward, Darren referred to “the thing” that had happened. But what exactly happened is the compelling mystery behind Joyce Carol Oates’ fast-paced novel Sexy. Her telegraphic prose style puts readers as close to the mind and thought process of a teenaged boy as a third-person narrative can. She creates an eerie, almost haunting, atmosphere of uneasiness and sexuality. There’s Darren’s sexy good looks, with his silvery blond hair and lithe swimmer’s body. There are the men at the swim meets who stare at him and take pictures, allusions to the sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church, and Darren’s father’s sex talk with him about the need to watch out for pedophiles. Add to all of this Darren’s curiosity about sex and the four-letter words that sprinkle his consciousness like so many flashy billboards. Oates has created a psychological page-turner for older young adults that explores perception, sexuality, peer culture and individual conscience. Darren’s friends plot revenge against Mr. Tracy for failing a team member. And what develops is a witch hunt, like something out of The Crucible, except now it’s not teenaged girls accusing supposed witches, but male athletes getting revenge on a teacher undermining their privileged status in the school. Eventually, tragedy strikes and Darren has a moral choice to make. Readers watch him follow his conscience and find his way. Fine young adult literature such as Sexy is an important vehicle for dramatizing stories about self and conscience in a group-minded world. Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.