Boot Camp, by Todd Strasser

Garrett is kidnapped in the middle of the night, handcuffed, and driven for 8 hours to a remote camp for troubled teens, Lake Harmony. His parents are paying $4000.00 per month for the chance that boot camp will turn Garrett into the son they want him to be. His crime? Garrett fell in love with the wrong girl. No anger issues, no school issues, no maturity issues. But in boot camp he is subjected to brutal physical and psychological abuse, and with his parents behind it, there is no way out until he is 18. Then he's asked to join an escape with two others. The risk is enormous, but staying is dangerous too.

I'd like to think camps like Lake Harmony are fictional and the product of the author's imagination, but Todd Strasser has added a bibliography of the sources he used to research the subject, and that may be the most unsettling part of the book.

Deadline, by Chris Crutcher

This book was one of the 2011 Abe books, but I delayed reading it because it concerns a dying teen - emotional stuff. But in the hands of a writer like Chris Crutcher, there are themes worth the inevitable tears here. The main character, Ben Wolf, learns he has terminal cancer during a routine sports physical at the opening of his senior year. Being 18, he refuses to let his doctor tell anyone else and refuses treatment. Instead, he sets about making his last year count for a whole lifetime. In the hands of a lesser writer this could be unbearable. But there is no sentimentality, no unnecessary pulling of heartstrings as smart-ass Ben meets his mortality on his own terms and touches the lives of everyone around him.

Paper towns, by John Green

I didn't read this book for a long time after it arrived at CHS, mainly because I couldn't get any kind of take on what it is about. Now I've read it, and loved it, and am at a loss for words to explain what it is about without giving up the entire thing. Hmmm. Love - loss - the things that keep us going and the things that break our hearts. I can't explain it either. But I think John Green is one of the best authors out there writing.

Twisted, by Laurie Halse Anderson

Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak, has written another hard hitting story, this time about just how quickly a person's life can be ruined by today's technology - facebook, texting, cell phones with cameras.

As the story opens Tyler is on probation for a high school prank gone wrong and serving community service hours instead of jail time. His senior year starts with him still getting used to his new bad boy reputation and he finds that reputation comes with a plus side when popular, attractive Brittany starts wanting to spend time with him. But at a drunken party Brittany loses control, and tho Tyler does the right thing and gets her home, someone has taken compromising pictures of her. Tyler's reputation works against him as the gossip mounts that he has taken advantage of Brittany, and the cops, Brittany, his parents, school administrators, basically everybody, are all skeptical of his innocence. With frightening swiftness Tyler's life is going down the tubes, and people's perceptions of reality are far more important than the honest truth.

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.

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.

Perfect chemistry, by Simone Elkeles

Gang member Alex and head cheerleader Brittany are assigned as partners in Chemistry lab, and their personal chemistry sets off a chain reaction that has life changing effects. In less skilled hands, the plot could be ordinary, but Elkeles writes well, and the romantic story becomes one that's impossible to put down as together the two struggle to become the adults they want to be instead of following the paths others expect of them. The secondary characters are interesting as well, from Alex's tough widowed mother, Brittany's handicapped older sister, and their Chemistry teacher, who cares passionately about her students while knowing the difference between being supportive and trying to be a friend to her students.

Leaving Paradise, by Simone Elkeles

Caleb Becker has just served a year in juvenile detention for a hit and run accident in which the girl next door was critically injured.

Maggie Armstrong has just spent a year in hospitals and rehabilitation trying to recover use of her leg after being struck by Caleb's car.

Both are returning to school and trying to put their lives back together and are dreading having to see one another. But both are fighting for their lives, and no one understands that as well as each other.

Told in alternating chapters, the stories of these two damaged people struggling with the after effects of a devastating accident is moving and complicated as it becomes a love story with no happy ending in sight.

Nineteen minutes, by Jodi Picoult

The story opens with a school shooting incident - the nineteen minutes of the title. But after those nineteen minutes in Sterling, New Hampshire, nothing is ever the same for anyone. Lives of victims are over. Lives of surviving victims are irrevocably altered. And then there are other, indirect victims. And one more, the shooter, who has lived his entire life a victim.

Aftershock, by Kelly Easton

In a state of shock, 17-year-old Adam walks away from the scene of the car accident that has killed his parents. Stranded on a lonely road in rural Idaho, he heads east, on foot, as random snippets of memory wander in and out of his mind. Too traumatized to speak, his silence is misinterpreted by the succession of characters he meets on the odyssey home to Rhode Island. Stumbling upon a Wiccan meeting in a forest, he is taken in by one of the chatty young women and takes a job as a dishwasher in a local diner, where he is treated as deaf. Weeks later, he hitchhikes with a trucker and finds backbreaking work in Colorado fields with Mexican migrant farmers. He struggles to survive as he devours a frozen pizza found in a taxidermist's cabin, sleeps in a Dumpster, crashes a picnic, and steals a car. The adventures intertwine with thoughts about his girlfriend, locker-room antics, his parents, their bookstore, and his autistic cousin–spontaneously, as if his mind has short-circuited from the crash.
Adam, before the crash, is a normal and likable young man. His cross-country journey home from the scene of the crash parallels his emotional journey back to sanity, and the reader hopes that at the end of that journey he will find a life that feels like home.

City of bones, by Cassandra Clare

15 year old Clary and her friend Simon are in a New York club when Clary witnesses a murder committed by three teens covered with strange tatoos and using bizarre weapons. But she is the only one who can see the 3 murderers, and the body disappears. Clary soom finds herself deeply involved in a clan of Shadowhunters - warriors dedicated to hunting and killing demons who stalk the earth. And the Shadowhunters are interested in finding out why Clary has the sight that allows her to see them and the demons. Clary soon finds that her life up to now has been a falsehood, and almost everyone she knows is not who she thought they were. Her friend Simon is her only constant friend, tho she is soon drawn to a handsome Shadowhunter named Jacy, who is equally drawn to her. There are plots and counterplots, twists and turns on every page. Fantasy readers won't want to miss this one and it's sequels.

The Good guy, by Dean Koontz

Timothy Carrier, a quiet stone mason having a beer in a California bar, meets a stranger who mistakes him for a hit man. The stranger slips Tim a manila envelope containing $10,000 in cash and a photo of the intended victim, Linda Paquette, a writer in Laguna Beach, then leaves. A moment later, Krait, the real killer, shows up and assumes Tim is his client. Tim manages to distract Krait from immediately carrying out the hit by saying he's had a change of heart and offering Krait the $10,000 he just received. This ploy gives the stone mason enough time to warn Linda before they begin a frantic flight for their lives. (Amazon)

This thriller grabs the reader from the first page and doesn't let go. I could barely put it down until I had it finished, when I could finally resume my life.

Gym candy, by Carl Deuker

Carl Deuker is one of the best sports fiction writers working today. I have read so called "sports" books where all the action takes place off field. Not Deuker. The reader gets a lot of football in this book, and it's written so that even a non-athlete can find it interesting and understandable. The title of the book refers to steroids. Gym candy is an inside look at the motivation for a high school athlete to get involved in steroid use, and the problems that go along with it.
High Heat (baseball) has been my favorite Deuker book for a long time, but this one is just as good and well written.

Life as we knew it, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Miranda is a typical sophmore in high school - anxious for her driver's liscence, hanging out with her friends, arguing with Mom, and looking forward to Prom. An interesting astrological event has her neighbors in lawn chairs viewing the moon on the evening an meteor is predicted to hit the moon. The meteor hits, and life on earth is changed forever as the collision shifts the moon closer to the earth causing violent earthquakes, erupting volcanoes, huge tsunamis, and millions of deaths. All that Miranda has taken for granted suddenly begins to disappear. Food and gasoline are in short supply, and winter is coming on without heat or electricity. This is hard to put down, and hard to forget.

The haunting of Alizabel Cray, by Chris Wooding

This horror story takes place in a Victorian England haunted with evil supernatural creatures bent on taking over the world. Thaniel, seventeen, is a wych-hunter. Together, he and Cathaline--his friend and mentor--track down the fearful creatures that lurk in the Old Quarter of London. It is on one of these hunts that he first encounters Alaizabel Cray. Alaizabel is half-crazed, lovely, and possessed.Whatever dreadful entity has entered her soul has turned her into a strange and unearthly magnet--attracting evil and drawing horrors from every dark corner. Cathaline and Thaniel must discover its cause--and defend humanity at all costs.

This story gets off to a slow start, but once I got into it a couple of chapters I was hooked by the dark mystery and suspense. Fantasy lovers shouldn't miss this one.

A Northern light, by Jennifer Donnelly

This historical fiction story takes place in rural Maine at the turn of the last century. Life was slower, more agricultural, and a young woman had to make a choice between love or a career. Love in a time before birth control meant marriage, babies, and backbreaking labor to keep a house and farm going. So seventeen year old Mattie is resisting the growing pressure she feels to marry the young man who loves her. Her father needs her to help raise her younger brother and sisters and to stay at home. Her teacher at school is trying to show her the possibility of a college education in New York. Girls in 1906 decided their lives early, and Mattie has already stayed in school long past the time most girls quit school and married.

This is an introspective, quiet story. Well written, and one that will stay with me for a long time I think.

Dairy Queen, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

It's too bad the cover of this book has that cow with the tiara....This book IS funny, but not cow in a tiara kind of funny. It's the kind of funny where you recognize the characters and what they are going through and it makes you smile - you KNOW people like this. D.J. Schwenk, the main character, is from a family that does not talk about the stuff that's going on in their heads. At the opening of the book she is working like crazy to keep the farm going while her dad is laid up with knee surgery, and trying to keep up at school, and maybe finding a little time to have a life of her own. This was fun to read, and I laughed out loud.

Peeps, by Scott Westerfeld

This book and it's sequel, The Last Days, are my favorite Westerfeld books and my favorite vampire books too. (Well, there is that whole Twilight series too - but that's another review). There's no magic, no superpowers involved here. And no V word, either. Vampirism is spread by a parasite. Cal has been infected by the parasite, but is a carrier. He is still sane and able to control the V urges, but he will transfer the parasite to anyone he so much as kisses. Cal resolves to do the right thing, and begins working with a secret organization that works to control the spread of the plague. This is a modern take on the old vampire legends and is a great read, as so many of you at CHS know for yourselves.

I Am the Messenger, by Markus Zusak

Ok, to be honest I think this book is weird. Entertaining in places, thought provoking in places, and overall weird. The story concerns a nineteen year old who is driving a taxi for a living and feels he's wasting his life away. One day, playing cards begin arriving in the mail with addresses written on them - addresses of people who need his help. He begins living a sort of secret life of helping strangers. And it keeps getting weirder from there........

Looking for Alaska, by John Green

Miles Halter is tired of his dull, ordinary life and is ready for a change when he begins school at Culver Creek prep school. His life does change as he becomes part of a tight group of friends led by beautiful, sexy, smart and screwed up Alaska Young. With her guidance, Miles experiences his first drink, his first smoke, first prank, and some other great firsts. Then one more first - first death of a loved friend. This is a hard hitting story with equal parts humor and tragedy.