Very rarely in life do we understand blessings when they arrive. Blessings are misunderstood or scary until we have had time to process them. This is the main theme in Jerry Spinelli’s latest offering, Stargirl. When Stargirl Caraway enters Leo Borlock’s life, her impact is both disturbing and permanent. Stargirl is a ukulele-strumming, plain-faced, costume-donning character that enters a cookie-cutter student body at an Arizona high school. Her antics range from annoying to amusing, and the prevailing attitude is clearly defined by her peers as her fame rises and falls, time and again.

Middle school students will enjoy comparing and contrasting the characters, but high school students can delve much deeper into theme and application. This is not just another ‘underdog makes good’ story; in fact, a probing question is whether Stargirl’s actions are positive at all. She is an anti-teenager, if ever there was one: She’s not cool, she shuns the attentions and opinions of others, and offers her heart in completely constructive ways. Very few bother to discover what motivates this strange creature, and Stargirl’s effect lingers long after she vanishes. Stargirl is a the type of book that is ripe for multi-level discussion.

"Nate stood up. He was very still, but I knew from dance how stillness could explode into movement.” That tension, between the threat of violence and the act, is at the heart of Strings Attached, the latest thriller by National Book Award winner Judy Blundell.

Kit Corrigan is a struggling chorus girl in New York City, having fled her home in Rhode Island for a shot at life onstage. It’s 1950, the Korean War is just beginning, and Kit’s ex, Billy, has enlisted in the Army. She’s surprised when Billy’s father, Nate Benedict, offers her a leg up. He provides her with an apartment, tailored clothes and connections leading to bigger and better jobs. In exchange, Kit must keep tabs on Billy and do occasional favors for his dad. Easy enough, right? But Nate Benedict is a lawyer with mob connections, and his favors have potentially fatal consequences.

If that wasn’t enough, there’s something not quite right about how close Billy was with Kit’s brother Jamie. And the family is still smarting from a falling-out that sent their aunt so far away that nobody can find her.

Strings Attached sets a murder mystery, love story and rich family history in a meaty stretch of American history. Between two wars, the anti-Communist blacklists, air-raid drills, automats and a thriving nightclub scene largely run by the Mafia, Blundell weaves a complex story. Readers will get a generous dose of history here, but it’s the glamour and mystery, along with concern for Kit and her family, that will keep them hooked. Strings Attached is a winner.
 

Seventeen-year-old Cassia Reyes lives in a futuristic society that is ruled by unforgiving Officials who tightly control birth, housing, jobs, marriage and even death. No one dares defy the government for fear of punishment; in fact many, including Cassia, happily comply in order to live comfortable, stable lives. So on the night of her Match Banquet, Cassia is elated that Officials have selected her best friend Xander as her future husband. But then someone makes a mistake and briefly pairs Cassia up with Ky Markham, a boy with a mysterious past. Suddenly Cassia is drawn to Ky, and the two begin an innocent, yet subversive, romance. As Cassia falls in love, she defies the Officials, leading to danger not only for herself, but for her family and Ky as well.

Told in first-person point of view, Cassia’s narration is riveting as she describes life without liberties. On losing her grandfather, she notes, “Today is Sunday. It is Grandfather’s eightieth birthday, so tonight he will die. . . . Things didn’t use to be this fair. In the old days, not everyone died at the same age and there were all kinds of problems and uncertainty.” As Cassia changes and embraces all that’s forbidden—first love, poetry, free will—readers will be captivated by her desperation and rebellion. Her poetic voice and struggles will stay with readers long after the last page.

Despite the violence characteristic of dystopian favorites such as The Hunger Games, there is no overt bloodshed in this novel. Just as Cassia is unsure exactly what the Officials are capable of, so is the reader, who anxiously expects the Officials’ cruelty at every turn.

Ally Condie is a masterful storyteller whose latest novel will ignite meaningful conversations about the power of free will in a totalitarian society. An impressive work, Matched joins the ranks of classics such as Brave New World and 1984. Destined to be a classic for teens, Matched is also a compelling read for adults—and readers of all ages will eagerly await the impending sequel.

Delilah Hannaford’s life is a complete mess. She is caught stealing lipstick, she is caught sneaking around with her “non-boyfriend” and her grades are tanking—not that her career-obsessed mother has even noticed. However, when her estranged grandmother dies, Delilah and her mother must spend the summer in Red Falls, Vermont, for the first time in eight years, to settle the Hannaford matriarch’s estate. They are reunited with Delilah’s aunt, a tarot reader who avoids the issue of the eight-year-old fight just like everyone else. The air between the three women is tense and unforgiving, and no one seems willing to budge.

Delilah’s summer suddenly becomes maple syrup-thick with unanswered questions—about the Hannaford sister who died long ago and about the sudden silence between the remaining Hannaford women—and Delilah cannot seem to let any of it go. As they rummage through the piles of junk in the old house and unearth a treasury of family history, the women start to get along. Nevertheless, some secrets are just too difficult to tell.

As Delilah goes head to head with the mysteries of Red Falls, her life gets even more complicated. She discovers some inconvenient butterflies in her stomach when she runs into her childhood friend Patrick, who has over the years turned into a sexy musician with the ability to challenge Delilah’s previous notions of love and relationships. He forces her to rethink yet another personal connection she has forfeited, but Delilah is never without a fight, and sometimes close is just too close.

Sarah Ockler follows up her debut novel, Twenty Boy Summer, with another story of great emotional depth and empathy. Fixing Delilah contains multiple levels of teenage heartbreak, and Ockler captures the small-town atmosphere of one lazy summer from the perspective of a lost teenage girl with too many holes in her past. With a multigenerational touch, she has whipped up a story with a vast emotional range and plenty of challenges to test the bonds of mother and daughter.

“We all long for what could have been,” Ockler writes, but as Delilah discovers, it takes a real family to move on from what has been lost.

When their mother dies suddenly, hit by a drunk driver, Will’s brother Adam finds refuge in friendships and “getting on with life.” Will’s father throws himself into his work so that he doesn’t have to face lonely nights. But as for 17-year-old Will, he isn’t content with picking up his life where it fell off a cliff that day. He’s always approached life from an unusual perspective; and now he’s approaching death the same way.

Will’s many questions—”Why do some get to live, and others die?” “What is my life worth?” “Can one life replace another?”—lead him on a wide-ranging journey, as he discovers the ways in which ancient and modern philosophers, Eastern and Western religions and ordinary people have sought their own answers to these fundamental questions. Along the way, Will also experiments with alcohol, drugs and sex, hoping to find in his body the answers to the questions that plague his mind.

At times, Will’s actions border on self-destructive, even as he falls in love for the first time. Will’s approach to his budding relationship may have readers asking their own questions, such as, “Is it possible to open yourself to love when you’re closed in by grief?” Will’s behavior is not always sympathetic or likable, but his process—both the things he does and the questions he asks—is a genuine, honest portrayal of how a thoughtful teenager might approach loss.

At times, the brief quotes from philosophers that Hills interweaves into the narrative can seem like sound bites, a superficial Cliff’s Notes version of Philosophy 101. When Will considers a book of aphorisms, however, he dismisses the sort of shallow satisfaction promised by a single sentence. What Will’s story demonstrates most successfully is the ongoing relevance of life’s greatest questions—and questioners—to today’s problems. Like countless thinkers before him, Will doesn’t find answers to every question, but that’s okay. His thoughtful approach to life and death might inspire readers to continue considering these fundamental questions, or even to come up with a few of their own.

Before even glancing at chapter one of Battle Dress, Amy Efaw’s sharply observed novel about the six weeks of New Cadet Basic Training at West Point (a ritual also known as “the Beast”), turn directly to the back of the book. There you’ll find a glossary of military terms and cadet slang that will be your life raft once the story gets under way.

For Andrea “Andi” Davis, the Beast is a ticket away from her miserable home life and a shot at something better, not just in terms of education but self-worth. Her crazy family is shown in the briefest of scenes, and it’s a relief when they leave the campus, for us as well as Andi. She immediately takes to the intense discipline and focus required of new cadets, and exceeds expectations as a scholar, athlete and potential soldier. But the transformation doesn’t take place overnight.

The first few days on campus are similar to those in other books and movies set among new recruits to the military: lots of being awakened in the middle of the night, punishments for seemingly ridiculous infractions and wildly theatrical insults screamed in ALL CAPS, all in an attempt to drive someone to quit or break down. Coming from a highly dysfunctional household, Andi takes to this regimen faster than most; when a cadet punishes her to the point of tears, then asks tauntingly, “Homesick?” her response is telling: “I shook my head from side to side. ‘No . . . sir . . . It’s . . . too much . . . like home.’ ”

Author Efaw attended West Point herself; as a Beast survivor, she captures the intensity of basic training in artful strokes, and keeps front and center the fact that this training is intense, meticulous and repetitive for a reason: The ultimate purpose of a soldier is to kill. Mistakes equal death. Precision, and personal accountability, are paramount in building trust on the battlefield, and that’s where Andi finds her biggest challenge. A star performer on her own, she needs to prove her leadership skills in a group where she’s one of only two girls. When her plan fails in a training exercise, harming a colleague, she’ll need to summon the ego needed to give orders and see them carried out. It brings a smart novel to a gripping conclusion. Battle Dress is a hoo-ah read from start to finish (look it up!).

Think Greek mythology is a thing of the past? Feel as if you’ve read everything on the shelf? Don’t despair. Doris Orgel’s new book, We Goddesses: Athena, Aphrodite, Hera explains the differences between the gods and goddesses; outlines the Olympians’ family tree; describes the differences in their moral values; and focuses on the women in the myths, particularly the three goddesses listed in the title. Orgel does a superb job retelling the myths from the goddesses’ viewpoint; you’ll feel as if you’re hearing their actual voices. Full of beautiful illustrations, the book is written for the novice as well as those who are more familiar with the myths. Teachers will find it a useful resource for the classroom.

Jamie Whitfield teaches middle school English and literature.

Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Sister Went Crazy, a series of poems, is Sonya Sones’ poignant story of her teenage years, during which time her sister had a nervous breakdown. The poetry describes the initial shock and confusion she felt as her sister’s odd behavior became more profound, the initial embarrassment and fear the diagnosis brought, and the eventual acceptance of her sister’s condition. It also deals with the opposite sex and homework, issues all teens face at some point.

Jamie Whitfield teaches middle school English and literature.

Living in upstate New York with a name like Mohammed Sami Sabiri, Sami has always felt like an outsider—the school nerd, a member of his school’s “leper colony” and the subject of constant taunting. His father fled Iran as a young man because of the secret police and has worked hard to fit into his community, where the Sabiris have become a respected family: original members of the Meadowville subdivision, father on the golf club’s planning committee, mother in the Ladies’ Invitational golf tournament. They send Sami to one of the most elite private boys’ academies in upstate New York.

But Sami feels he doesn’t know his father, and when Mr. Sabiri takes a mysterious trip to Toronto, he begins to wonder if his father is having an affair. So he starts to do a little undercover investigation of his father’s email messages and online accounts. Before he gets too far, the FBI storms the Sabiris’ residence, arrests Mr. Sabiri and confiscates all records that seem to incriminate him as part of a terrorist cell led by one Tariq Hasan. The fact that Mr. Sabiri is the research director at Shelton Laboratories, where anthrax, smallpox and other viruses are stored, escalates the hysteria about potential cross-border biological attacks.

But is Arman Sabiri a terrorist or a victim of a latter-day witch hunt, akin to the Salem Witch Trials, the Holocaust and the McCarthy hearings that Sami’s history teacher, Mr. Bernstein, has been discussing in class? In the context of a thrilling suspense story, Stratton explores the many ways people are separated from each other—the yearning of people like the Sabiris to simply fit in, the distance that secrets create and the evil dance of persecutor and victim, whether the Nazis, the KKK or the bullies at school who torment Sami and maneuver the firing of Mr. Bernstein. All is not what it seems with Mr. Sabiri, and Sami’s quest to clear his father’s name will carry readers along for an exciting ride.

Dean Schneider teaches middle school English in Nashville.

There’s something you should know: You probably won’t like Samantha Kingston very much, at least not the first time you meet her. But by the time you’ve met her for the third, or fourth, or seventh time, you might start thinking about Samantha a little bit differently. Because she sure starts to see herself that way.

If you’ve seen the movie Groundhog Day, you’ll be familiar with the basic structure of Lauren Oliver’s debut novel, Before I Fall. Samantha relives the same day seven times. She is the only one who’s aware that her life is stuck on repeat—everyone else just keeps living life, moving forward, unaware that for Samantha at least, there’s no such thing as tomorrow. Before I Fall takes a darker, more serious tone than the Bill Murray comedy, however—because what prompts Samantha’s string of “do-overs” is her own death in a car accident.

For so long, Samantha was one of the queen bees, someone who, by her own admission, “just followed along” in the wake of her beautiful, charismatic and sometimes mean friends. But what might happen if she makes different choices—if she takes another look at the boy she’s written off, or reaches out to the outcast, or challenges her best friends’ cruelty? And what will flash before her eyes in the moments before she dies? Samantha hopes it will be the best moments of her life—but what if, instead, her final hours are replayed ad infinitum, giving her the chance to make the right choices, to make amends, even to save someone else’s life, if not her own?

It’s remarkable that Oliver can plot the same day seven times and make each retelling engaging. But Before I Fall is not just a fascinating piece of storytelling; it’s also a thought-provoking commentary on the unintended, and sometimes profound, consequences of even the smallest actions or remarks, and a powerful testimony to people’s ability to make real, meaningful changes in their own behavior and outlook—changes that can deeply affect others’ lives as well.

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

On the brink of a new millennium, teenagers everywhere have opinions about the world that they are inheriting. From Johannesburg to Kiev, Belfast to San Francisco, teens worldwide offer an honest portrayal of the state of things in Hear These Voices: Youth at the Edge of the Millennium. Author Anthony Allison is a photographer and youth counselor who has traveled to various points on the map, talking to at risk children about their experiences and their hopes for the future. Complete with striking black-and-white photographs, Hear These Voices presents gripping stories in a forthright and respectable manner. Perfect for educators, counselors, or anyone else who is concerned about today’s youth.