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High School Reads April 2017
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Zenn Diagram
by Wendy Brant
Fiction. Eva Walker is a seventeen-year-old math genius. And if that doesn’t do wonders for her popularity, there’s another thing that makes it even worse: when she touches another person or anything that belongs to them — from clothes to textbooks to cell phones — she sees a vision of their emotions. She can read a person’s fears and anxieties, their secrets and loves … and what they have yet to learn about calculus. This is helpful for her work as a math tutor, but it means she can never get close to people. Eva avoids touching anyone and everyone. Then one day a new student walks into Eva’s life. His jacket gives off so much emotional trauma that she falls to the floor. Eva is instantly drawn to Zenn, a handsome and soulful artist who also has a troubled home life, and her feelings only grow when she realizes that she can touch Zenn’s skin without having visions. But when she discovers the history that links them, the truth threatens to tear the two apart.
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You're Welcome, Universe
by Whitney Gardner
Fiction. When Julia finds a slur about her best friend scrawled across the back of the Kingston School for the Deaf, she covers it up with a beautiful (albeit illegal) graffiti mural. Her supposed best friend snitches, the principal expels her, and her two mothers set Julia up with a one-way ticket to a “mainstream” school in the suburbs, where she’s treated like an outcast as the only deaf student.
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Overturned
by L. R. Giles
Suspense. Nikki Tate is infamous, even by Las Vegas standards. Her dad is sitting on death row, convicted of killing his best friend in a gambling dispute turned ugly. And for five years, he’s maintained his innocence. But Nikki wants no part of that. She’s been working on Operation Escape Vegas: playing in illegal card games so she can save up enough money to get out come graduation day. Then her dad’s murder conviction is overturned. The new evidence seems to come out of nowhere and Nikki’s life becomes a mess when he’s released from prison. Because the dad who comes home is not the dad she remembers. And he’s desperately obsessed with finding out who framed him—and why.
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| We Are Okay by Nina LaCourFiction. At the end of last summer, Marin left her home in San Francisco and boarded a plane with nothing but what she had in her pockets. Now, after her first semester of college in New York, she's facing a lonely winter break in an empty dorm. Holed up against the icy weather, Marin allows herself to remember the devastating events that led to her abrupt departure from California, and finally confronts their consequences during a visit with her estranged friend, Mabel. |
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Hellworld
by Tom Leveen
Horror. Five years ago, Abby Booth’s mom, co-host of a ghost hunting reality show, went missing while filming in a ‘haunted’ cave in Arizona. Since then, Abby’s life has all but fallen to pieces, most notably because of her dad’s deep depression and how they’ve drifted further and further apart. But now, at seventeen, Abby has decided that things will change. She plans to go to the same cave where her mom and the crew went missing and to find out, once and for all, what happened there.
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Just Fly Away
by Andrew McCarthy
Fiction. When fifteen-year-old Lucy Willows discovers that her father has a child from a brief affair, a eight-year-old boy named Thomas who lives in her own suburban New Jersey town, she begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her family and her life. Lucy’s father’s secret is now her own, one that isolates her from her friends, family, and even her boyfriend, Simon, the one person she expected would truly understand. When Lucy escapes to Maine, the home of her mysteriously estranged grandfather, she finally begins to get to the bottom of her family’s secrets and lies.
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Camp So-and-So
by Mary McCoy
Thriller. The letters went out in mid-February. Each letter invited its recipient to spend a week at Camp So-and-So, a lakeside retreat for girls nestled high in the Starveling Mountains. By the end of the month, twenty-five applications had been completed, signed, and mailed to a post office box in an obscure Appalachian town.Had any of these girls tried to follow the directions in the brochure and visit the camp for themselves on that day in February, they would have discovered that there was no such town and no such mountain and that no one within a fifty-mile radius had ever heard of Camp So-and-So.
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The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Fiction. It's the first day of senior year and everything is about to change. Until this moment, Sal has always been certain of his place with his adoptive gay father and their loving Mexican-American family. But now his own history unexpectedly haunts him, and life-altering events force him and his best friend, Samantha, to confront issues of faith, loss, and grief. Suddenly Sal is throwing punches, questioning everything, and discovering that he no longer knows who he really is—but if Sal’s not who he thought he was, who is he?
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Strange the Dreamer
by Laini Taylor
Fantasy. The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around— and Lazlo Strange, war orphan and junior librarian, has always feared that his dream chose poorly. Since he was five years old he's been obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, but it would take someone bolder than he to cross half the world in search of it. Then a stunning opportunity presents itself, in the person of a hero called the Godslayer and a band of legendary warriors, and he has to seize his chance to lose his dream forever.
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| The Hate U Give by Angie ThomasFiction. Sixteen-year-old Starr walks an uneasy line, with one foot in her poor, mostly-black neighborhood and the other in her rich, mostly-white school. After Starr sees her friend Khalil gunned down by a white cop, however, that line is obliterated. Amid the uproar, Starr knows she should speak out, but the pressure she's under from all sides makes it difficult -- and dangerous -- to raise her voice. |
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Who Killed Christopher Goodman?
by Allan Wolf
Mystery. Everybody likes Chris Goodman. Sure, he’s kind of weird. He wears those crazy bell-bottoms and he really likes the word ennui and he shakes your hand when he meets you, but he’s the kind of guy who’s always up for a good time, always happy to lend a hand. Everybody likes Chris Goodman, which is why it’s so shocking when he’s murdered. How could a thing like this happen?
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Goodbye Days
by Jeff Zentner
Fiction. One day Carver Briggs had it all—three best friends, a supportive family, and a reputation as a talented writer at his high school, Nashville Academy for the Arts. The next day he lost it all when he sent a simple text to his friend Mars, right before Mars, Eli, and Blake were killed in a car crash. Now Carver can’t stop blaming himself for the accident, and he’s not the only one. Eli’s twin sister is trying to freeze him out of school with her death-ray stare. And Mars’s father, a powerful judge, is pressuring the district attorney to open a criminal investigation into Carver’s actions.
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| American Street by Ibi ZoboiFiction. In a crowded house on the corner of Joy Road and American Street, Fabiola Toussaint begins her life in the U.S. Since her mom was detained by U.S. Immigration when they arrived from Haiti, Fabiola has to live with her aunt and cousins in Detroit, a cold, rough city that's nothing like Fabiola's dreams of America. Fined for speaking Creole and sent to Catholic school despite her Vodou beliefs, Fabiola has a hard time adjusting, and just when she begins to forge new relationships, she's tempted to risk them to earn her mother's freedom. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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