Wake, by Lisa McMann

Janie Hannagan's problem is getting worse and harder to hide. Since childhood, Janie has been getting sucked into other people's dreams, leaving her in an almost seizure like trance. Lots of the dreams are familiar - the naked but nobody notices dreams, the everybody's laughing at the dreamer in their underwear dream, the falling dreams. But someone near her is having nightmares, and they are terrifying, leaving Janie shaken and disoriented when she wakes. She really needs someone she can trust to confide in and to watch over her. But Cabel, the only person she can trust, is the one having those nightmares.

This book, part romance and part horror, sucks the reader in to Janie's nightmare world and doesn't let go until the end.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

John Green has never written a weak book, and this collaboration with David Levithan works too. Like he did in Boy meets Boy, David Levithan can bring to life an imagined world without prejudice, and the final scene in this book is a dramatic tour-de-force worth reading the rest of the book to get to. The awesome musical theater production - an autobiographical account of gay 300 pound offensive lineman Tiny Cooper's life and loves - is such a feel good scene. John Lennon would have approved that imagined perfect world - Imagine.

The dark days of Hamburger Halpin, by Josh Berk

When Will Halpin decides to leave his school for the deaf and enter a regular public school, he knows it will be hard. His 1st day teaches him the truth tho. He will never be popular, never be anything but socially invisible. The teachers aren't accustomed to deaf students and don't quite know how to handle him. The other students ignore him. But Will is a keen observer of those around him, and when a student is murdered on a field trip, Will sets out to solve the mystery of who did it.

This is a clever send-up of high school life. All the characters are basic stereotypes - from the boring lecturer American History teacher, to the flirtatious young math teacher reliving her high school glory days, to the ex-marine PE teacher, the pot-smoking insane bus driver, and the tough-guy substitute. Nobody is safe from satire. From the football playing jocks to the homecoming queen princess and the wealthy ugly girl with high social status. And Will doesn't miss a thing, including who among the cast of characters may have murder in their heart.

Right behind you, by Gail Giles

Some books hit you right in your heart when you aren't expecting it, and Right behind you is one of those books. Kip McFarland is a main character who I wasn't sure I wanted to get inside the head of. He's a 14 year old who at the age of nine set another child on fire and killed. As the book opens, he has been in an Alaskan juvenile detention (the youngest inmate ever admitted) for 5 years. Five years of living with other juvenile psychopaths and learning how to survive being around them. Five years of constant psychotherapy. Five years of being locked away from any semblance of normal family life, normal adolescent rites of passage, anything remotely normal at all.

So Kip is released, given a new name of Wade, moves with his dad and stepmom to a new state, and begins a new life. But his old demons are not really gone but are just waiting to sabotage his attempts to build a new life. There are lots of issues here. How does a person rebuild a life with a past that horrific right behind him? How does he build relationships with new people while hiding that kind of past? Does a person with this kind of horror behind him deserve a future at all? And what about the dad, stepmom, psychiatrist also right behind him ready to back him up, and in doing so, opening themselves to being hurt by his self-destructive tendencies.

This is an intensly emotional read, and like all good literature it forces the reader to think about their own prejudices. Lots of people have something to hide (ok-maybe not THIS much to hide) in their pasts. So how do they live with the past, and at what point is it unfair to new people in their lives not to open up about that past? Hard questions.