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 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!

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.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick

Forgive me, Leonard Peacock is a gripping tale of a troubled teen's last day of life before he shoots his former best friend and then himself with his grandfather's P-38 pistol, a relic from WW II.  Leonard's recitation of the things he has to do before his final acts is fleshed out with footnotes that reveal the suffering that drives him to plan this murder/suicide.  ""34. You should read about all of those [other]  killers.  They all have a lot in common.  I bet they felt lonely in many ways, helpless, FORGOTTEN, ignored, alienated, irrelevant, cynical, and sad . . ."  This is Leonard in a nutshell.  No one remembers his eighteenth birthday; no one except maybe his Holocaust Studies teacher,  Herr Silverman, and his elderly neighbor Walt seems to care one way or another what happens to him.  Betrayed by his best friend, Asher, snubbed by the beautiful and uber-Christian Lauren, and basically abandoned by his mother, Linda,  Leonard moves through his day hoping against hope that someone will connect with him enough to deter him from his violent intentions.

At first the story just seems like  a creepy way to introduce us to the mind of deranged potential killer who takes a weapon to school to revenge himself against everyone who has bullied him.  But as  Leonard keeps writing,  his dark humor and anguish combine to make him much more sympathetic. He is a teen with serious issues struggling to find good in the world.  As much as Leonard wants to kill Asher, he has also prepared special gifts for the few people who have made his life bearable.  

There are some rather strange passages in the beginning that appear to be letters Leonard and his daughter have written to him from the future, but eventually these make sense as a strategy suggested by Herr Silverman to show Leonard that if he can imagine a world where things get better, this will help him to deal with his depression.

Leonard seems to me to be a character well worth knowing and trying to understand.  His internal dialogs ring true as do the efforts of other characters to reach him.  Recommended.

17 & Gone by Nova Ren Suma

Seventeen-year-old Lauren Woodman stops at a red light one day and sees an old flyer on a telephone pole asking for information about a missing 17-year old girl.  The assumption that Abigail Sinclair, the girl in question, is a runaway starts Lauren thinking about all the missing girls who are forgotten by their communities. Lauren begins to see visions of a former neighbor and babysitter who left home when she was 17 as well as glimpses of Abigail and her activities on the night she disappeared.   Ghostly images of the girls appear in her car, in her home and in her dreams.  Lauren starts to understand that there is something ominous about their individual stories;  clearly they did not all choose to leave home forever.  She knows she needs to do something to make the police and the girls' families more aware--to keep looking!

The suspense builds as Lauren puts herself in some pretty sketchy situations--visiting people related in one way or another to the missing girls and trespassing in a gloomy, isolated summer camp where Abby worked until, abruptly, she didn't.  Increasingly it becomes apparent that Lauren is obsessed and very troubled.  She breaks up with her boyfriend, shuts out her mother, avoids her former best friend, and starts skipping school. Lauren's voice as she tells her story is one of desperation--she knows she is losing the ability to distinguish between her visions and reality, but doesn't believe she can trust anyone to help her find out the truth about the girls who, through her, are crying for help.  As her relationships with her friends and family wither, her communications with the ghosts increase in frequency and power, telling Lauren what to do.  Lauren's struggles,  punctuated by the tragic stories of the missing teens, make this a definite page-turner.

Compulsion by Heidi Ayare

This is one of those books that is almost impossible to put down, while at the same time almost impossible to keep reading. The story, told in the first person by teen soccer star Jake Martin, basically recounts the moment-by-moment struggle he undergoes to hold on to his self-control and appear "normal" to his friends. Jake suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder; in his case, he must constantly check clocks, his watch, and at times the number of words in a conversation, to make sure everything works out to prime numbers. If not, he freezes and fights nausea, pain and the sense of spiders attacking his brain. Whew.

Jake is also tied to daily routines which, if they're disrupted, threaten to make him totally nonfunctional. The tension that permeates this narrative comes from knowing that sooner or later (probably sooner) something is going to upset his routines. A series of events outside of his control threatens to turn the upcoming championship soccer match into a disaster. If only he can win that game and meet the expectations of his teammates and the whole school, Jake believes he will finally be free from his living nightmare.

Jake's family is dysfunctional--his mother rarely comes out of her room and is fragile both physically and mentally. His father is burdened with debt. Jake's younger sister, Kasey, is his closest friend, but even she is not aware of his illness. Although some of Jake's friends come across chiefly as stereotypes, author Ayarbe makes Jake a convincing and compelling character. Recommended.