Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

At eighteen, Madeline Whittier remains a teenager who has never (within her memory) breathed fresh air, played outside, gone to school, or done anything a healthy teen might do.  Madeline has been diagnosed with severe combined immunodeficiency, or the "bubble baby disease."  She is allergic to many, if not most, things in the environment, any of which can trigger a fatal reaction.  So she reads, plays word games with her mom, and takes classes online.  Then Olly moves in next door.  What starts as sneaking peaks moves on to mime, then IM.  Madeline is falling in love.  The very things she wants--to meet Olly in person, to expand her universe, to live her life more fully, could also be her death warrant.  Beautifully told and illustrated, Everything, Everything is a moving love story.

The Doubt Factory by Paolo Bacigalupi

Alix Banks is a model teenager--successful in school, good at sports, responsible for her kid brother, and very, very rich.  The problem is, all of that wealth and privilege comes at a cost, the way her father earns his living.  Alix is stalked and eventually kidnapped by a group of kids--orphans--who want her to know about her father and to help them "get even" for the damage he has done to them and to others like them.  The book is a roller coaster of plots, back-up plots, con jobs, betrayals, and dangers as the kids take on the powers of the public relations industry, pharmaceutical companies, private security firms and more.  Bacigalupi wraps serious social problems in a plot filled with action and ethical dilemmas.  Great read!

Wildlife by Fiona Wood

Australian author Wood sets this drama about teen relationships and challenges in an isolated wilderness camp for privileged youth. There are two main protagonists who tell their stories in alternating chapters: Sibylla, newly popular but uncomfortable with the way her friend Holly pushes her to hook up with the school's most dreamy guy, and new girl, Lou, who is attending the program as a way to reconnect with the world following the death of her boyfriend. The girls' stories intersect as Lou observes how Holly manipulates Sib and wonders how or whether to intervene. Lou, in turn, is a mystery to others in her cabin, and Sib tries to protect her against Holly's bullying. Supporting characters Holly and Michael challenge Sib to learn what friendship really means. There's a lot of entertaining stuff about life in an outdoor education school--learning to get along with your bunkmates, griping about food and chores, and playing pranks on other cabins. The events and personal struggles ring true; I totally enjoyed Wildlife.

The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey

The girl in this grisly story is a member of the "hungries," zombies who are driven to feed on human flesh.  Melanie is different, however.  Like the others, she is drawn to humans by their scent and is gripped with an almost uncontrollable urge to attack.  However, Melanie, though just a child, understands who she is and has desires and values that go beyond her baser instincts.   The plot revolves around a small group of survivors fleeing from an attack by another band of killers, the junkers.  Two soldiers, a "mad scientist" who wants to cut up Melanie's brain, Melanie, and a beloved teacher are struggling to work their way across lawless and dangerous terrain to reach a place of refuge.  The tension is unrelenting and the consequences for being discovered are beyond nightmarish.  I couldn't put it down.

Challenger Deep by Neal Shusterman and Deadly Design by Debra Dockter

These two exciting books deal with death-defying challenges for two teens, one who is facing a complete psychotic breakdown and the other who knows his heart is programmed to fail and he won’t live beyond his seventeenth birthday.

In Challenger Deep, Caden Bosch is becoming increasingly unstable and unpredictable. In his more cognitively aware moments he knows his parents are really his parents, that no one at school wants to kill him, but forces beyond his control have created a bizarre world driving him further and further away from his family and friends. The author draws on the experiences in his own family with his own son to describe the descent into mental illness and the process of healing.

Deadly Design takes on the idea of genetic manipulation of eggs in a fertility clinic to create seemingly perfect children. Kyle McAdams and his identical twin brother (but born 2 years earlier) are two of these children. Connor becomes a star football and basketball player, track star and honor student while Kyle lags behind--spending most of his time playing video games. Then Connor and several other astonishingly beautiful and talented teens die of heart failure upon their eighteenth birthday. After tracing all of them back to the same fertility lab, Kyle needs to figure out why they died and how he can avoid the same fate. Full of intrigue and evil scientists,

Seeker by Arwen Elys Dayton

Seeker is a nail-biter of a book, full of action, hints of romance, and agonizing moral choices as three teens, Quinn, Shinobu, and John, struggle for control of time- and place-bending powers.  Quinn and Shinobu, upon taking their oaths as seekers, discover the darker side of their new responsibilities and want nothing more to do with them.  Escape is seen as betrayal and carries its own consequences, and John's desire to restore his family's legacy ultimately threatens to destroy Quinn, even though he loves her.  Great stuff!!

The Messengers by Edward Hogan

Since her brother Johnny disappeared after injuring a policeman in a bar fight, Frances has been experiencing blackouts.  When she starts to regain consciousness,  she begins to draw.  At first the drawings are meaningless scribbles, but increasingly they have become detailed scenes containing particular people whom she has seen in town.   Then she meets Peter, who recognizes her as someone like him, a "messenger,"  doomed to create sketches of death scenes and deliver them to the people who are going to die.  If Frances refuses to pass along the drawings, someone close to her will suffer. The Messengers follows how Frances and Peter try to deal with this curse.  Creepy, thought-provoking, suspenseful.

The Impersonator by Mary Miley

Vaudeville and Prohibition in the Roaring Twenties form the setting for this murder mystery in a small town in Oregon.  A young vaudeville performer bears a striking resemblance to a missing heiress, and the heiress's devious and unscrupulous uncle plots to use Leah to impersonate Jessie Carr, who reappears on her 21st birthday to claim her inheritance.  Leah has been on stage since her childhood, so becoming Jessie is no great challenge, but what if her secret is uncovered?  She could go to jail or worse, face the same fate as Jessie, who is probably dead.  Leah, as Jessie, has to fool her aunt, cousins and grandmother while exploring the family estate and asking questions to figure out the truth before Jessie's murderer makes her his next victim.

Burn by Walter Jury and Sarah Fine

Burn takes up where Scan, the story of a boy's fight to protect his father's invention, the scanner that can tell human from alien, leaves off.  The scanner is now in the hands of the H2 (alien) forces, but the enemy needs Tate to decipher his murdered father's coded files on how to use the technology and save the planet. Burn is a rollercoaster of a book, with Tate, a teenage version of television's MacGyver, struggling to outsmart his foes while evading capture himself.  There are action scenes galore, betrayals at the highest levels in the Fifty (the humans), arson, torture, and discovery of a new, even more lethal threat to earth's survival.  Impossible to put down.  

the impossible knife of memory by Laurie Halse Anderson

High school senior Hayley Kincain lives every day on edge.  She must walk on eggshells around her father, a veteran haunted by his wartime experiences whose escape through drinking and drugs leave him moody and unstable.  Her own past has taught her to fear trusting others and caring about anything or anyone except her dad.  Then into her life comes a charming, funny, persistent and thoughtful boy who wants to be with her and make her laugh.  Can Finn bring love and thoughts of a better future to Hayley, or is he just another distraction from her full time responsibilities trying to save her father from the ravages of his PTSD?  Great story!

The Porcupine of Truth by Bill Konigsberg

New Yorker Carson Smith and  homeless Aisha Stinson meet at the Billings Zoo and strike up an immediate friendship.  Both teens are struggling to cope with their totally dysfunctional families, mainly with their fathers.  Carson's disappeared from his life when Carson was a young child and is now dying and Aisha's dad kicked her out because he cannot accept that she is gay.  The two of them decide to solve the mystery of Carson's grandfather, whom they suspect is still alive, although he deserted Carson's dad decades earlier. They embark on a cross country road trip which tests their ingenuity, their resilience, their sense of humor, and the strength of their relationship.

Spare Parts by Joshua Davis

Davis tells the story of four Latino teens  from a disadvantaged community and high school in West Phoenix who compete in a national underwater robotics competition in the college division.  With a budget a fraction of MIT's, the teens design "Stinky," a funny-looking but remarkably effective underwater robot built with such materials as PVC pipe, string, a balloon and a milk container.  Confronted daily with issues of poverty, violence, and, in one case, the reality of being illegal, Oscar, Luis, Cristian and Lorenzo combine their various talents with the support of two dedicated teachers to qualify for the championship in Santa Barbara.  Alternately inspirational and sobering, Spare Parts is a compelling story.

All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven

Theodore Finch meets Violet Markey when both climb to the school's bell tower to contemplate what it would mean to jump.  Forever searching for a way to justify living, Finch combines two projects--a geography class assignment to visit special places in the state (Indiana) and helping Violet to deal with her despair at the recent loss of her older sister.  The pair's developing relationship is told in alternating viewpoints that contrast Finch's irrepressible nature and attraction to Violet with her reluctance to be associated with someone commonly known as Freak.  The dialog is witty and the teens are sympathetic and engaging. The book deals with  love, responsibility,  family dysfunctions, school bullying and peer pressure, and mental illness.  This is both a satisfying and heart-wrenching story.

Alice & Freda Forever: A Murder in Memphis by Alexis Coe

Coe explores Southern society in the 1890's from the perspective of sensationalist coverage of the trial that followed Alice Mitchell's murder of her former fiancee Freda Ward.  The public and doctors of the day were incapable of understanding the same-sex attraction that compelled nineteen-year-old Alice to propose marriage to seventeen-year-old Freda and then drove Alice to desperation when Freda's family discovered the affair and forbade any future contact between the two.  Terms such as deviancy, perversion, and insanity appeared often during the trial. Coe delves into the limited roles and possibilities of girls and women during the Victorian era.  The author also compares the type of justice applied to genteel white women to the lynching of three black men. The narrative is enhanced with primary source materials, particularly the impassioned love letters between Alice and Freda.  This is a fascinating glimpse of social mores in a distant place and time.  Recommended.

The Thicket by Joe. R. Lansdale

About 10 years ago HBO carried a series called Deadwood about the wild west as lived in Deadwood, South Dakota in the 1870's.   The series was memorable for its depiction of the squalor, ugliness, violence, and random acts of kindness in a free-wheeling frontier town .  The Thicket gives much the same feel, only this time in East Texas.  The story revolves around 16-year-old Jack Parker who loses his parents to smallpox, his grandfather to murder, and his sister to kidnapping by a band of low-lifes, all in a matter of days.  Determined to rescue his sister, Jack joins forces with a dwarf bounty hunter, his sidekick--a huge black man with an oversized shotgun, and, eventually, a prostitute, newly retired.  Their adventure has more than its share of evil doings by evil doers, all described in excruciating detail.  Nonetheless--or maybe because of--the slaughter and ever-present dangers, the book is hard to put down.  Jack tells his story with much dark humor and understatement, and he makes his partners at once engaging and ruthless.  Trigger warning:  some sex and frequent violence.

Audacity by Melanie Crowder

Membership in labor unions in the U.S. has significantly declined in the past 10 years, both as a result of legislative action to eliminate compulsory union dues and as a general disillusionment with union effectiveness in meeting member demands.  What we tend to forget, and what this novel by Melanie Crowder reminds us of, is the reason for the birth of unions.  Crowder presents a fictionalized account of the life of union activist Clara Lemlich.  As a young woman, Clara emigrated from a small village in Russia to escape the pogroms targeting Jews.  Clara and her family eventually arrived in New York City and Clara, needing to help support her family, took a job in a sweatshop, sewing for a garment manufacturer. Young women employed in these factories were forced to work 7 days a week and 10 hour days with only the briefest of breaks for lunch and bathrooms.  Each day, upon leaving work, they were searched and fondled by supervisors ostensibly looking for anything the girls were trying to smuggle.  Protests were met with immediate dismissal.  The author chronicles the women's struggles in the face of inhumane conditions and physical violence.  Clara's story makes for a fascinating and thoughtful read.

100 Sideways Miles by Andrew Smith

The term sideways miles refers to Finn Easton's preferred way of measuring time, by distance covered by the earth every second.  Finn is a teenager with epilepsy and heterochromatic eyes. His life was upended when, at the age of 7, he and his mother were struck by a dead horse falling out of a truck.  Finn's mother died and although Finn survived, he was left with his condition--unexpected and definitely inconvenient grand mal seizures.  Now a teenager, Finn struggles to escape from his sheltered life and figure out who-- or what--he is.  In his journey of self-discovery, Finn is accompanied by the love of his life,  neighbor Julie Bishop, and by his  borderline crazy, uninhibited (one reviewer says "raunchy") but devoted sidekick, Cade Fernandez.  Finn's narrative swings between the awkward, embarrassing, sad, and downright funny things that can happen to teenage boys.  Very entertaining.

How It Went Down by Kekla Magoon

Magoon's novel is relevant and current, given the spate of black teenage deaths due to gun violence.  Told from the various perspectives of neighborhood residents and gang members who witnessed the shooting  and friends and family of the victim, the novel addresses issues of justice for black youths and the challenge of staying clear of gang life.  Tariq Johnson, the main character, dies in the first pages but the nature of his involvement with the local gang and details of the incident that led to his death are full of contradictions.  Did he have a gun?  Was he wearing gang colors? Tension mounts as the main characters--the young woman who administered CPR and his best friend, Tyrell, try to come to terms with the the  hopelessness of life in a world of poverty and violence.  Very thought-provoking and moving.