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,

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 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.

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.

Good Kings Bad Kings by Susan Nussbaum

This award winning book serves as an eye-opener on the care--or lack of care in most cases, of a group of teens with disabilities who are confined to a privately-run  but government-sponsored nursing home in Chicago.  The story is told through the voices of  three of the teens, two of the staff, a recruiter for the company that runs the home and wants beds to be filled, and a smart young woman, also disabled, who is hired as a data-entry clerk, a job which provides access to patient records and prompts her to ask questions.

A variety of relationships emerge from the teens' narrations.  Sad, vulnerable Mia is often stranded in her oversized and broken wheelchair.  Sometimes Teddy attaches her chair to his automated one so he can move her around.  Teddy adores Mia and watches over her until she mysteriously starts to shun him.  Yessie is also wheelchair-bound, but that doesn't stop her from taking on girls that steal from her or call her names. Orphaned and grieving but tough, fifteen-year-old Yessie finds a friend in Jimmie, one of the aides, who feels fortunate to escape from a life on the streets herself.   The other aide, Ricky, is a pretty cool Puerto Rican who cares about the kids and has a major crush on Joanne, the data-entry clerk.  Their romance and Joanne's increasing involvement in patient advocacy are high points of the book.

Ricky, Joanne and Jimmie are the "good kings."  There are, unfortunately, a number of "bad kings" who are abusive or criminally negligent as part of a system that values making money over delivering quality care.  The home, also know as the ILLC--Illinois Learning and Life-Skills Center, has a higher than expected number of hospitalizations for its clients.  There are disturbing undercurrents of  danger for the residents, who have few resources other than their own spirit and resilience and the dedication of the "good kings" to deflect the physical and psychological threats that confront them on a daily basis. The language is honest and raw and the situations are very believable. The tension comes from wondering if there will be any justice for the characters. The novel is gripping and at times tough to read, but its well worth the effort.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe

This award-winning novel by Benjamin Alire Saenz is told through the eyes of a 15-year-old Mexican American living in El Paso, Texas.  Ari, short for Angel Aristotle Mendoza, relates two years of his life, beginning with his meeting Dante Quintana at the local swimming pool.  The boys are opposites--Dante is upbeat, extroverted, and intellectual. He wears his heart on his sleeve, kisses his parents, and can cry about an injured bird.  Ari is aloof and prone to anger as he struggles with communicating with his father, a Vietnam vet, and learning more about his brother, Bernardo, who is in prison. He keeps all of his emotions bottled up inside.  Both boys are lonely and feel isolated from their culture and are struggling to define who they are.  The novel is one of exploration of the teens' deepening relationship.  Two widely separated but significant events force them to evaluate their feelings about and trust in each other.  Saenz's novel is about trust, pain, commitment, communication, and honesty.  This is a slow-paced but ultimately satisfying exploration of friendship, love, and acceptance.