9-12 Books

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  Girl Out of Water

  Laura Silverman

  When her aunt gets into a car accident, Anise is forced to leave her friends and surfing behind to spend the summer in Nebraska to help care for her cousins, and by doing so, forms familial bonds and new friendships that challenge her feelings of abandonment by her mother.

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  Girls for Breakfast

  David Yoo

  Nick Park, about to graduate from high school, looks back on his life in upscale Renfield, Connecticut, and wonders how much being the only Asian American in his school affected his thwarted quest for popularity and a girlfriend.

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  Girls Like Us

  Gail Giles

  Graduating from their school's special education program, Quincy and Biddy are placed together in their first independent apartment and discover unexpected things they have in common in the face of past challenges and a harrowing trauma.

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  Girls of Paper and Fire

  Natasha Ngan

  When Lei, seventeen, is stolen from her home to become one of nine Paper Girls, the Demon King's concubines, she proves to be more fire than paper.

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  Give Me Some Truth

  Eric Gansworth

  In 1980 life is hard on the Tuscarora Reservation in upstate New York, and most of the teenagers feel like they are going nowhere: Carson Mastick dreams of forming a rock band, and Maggi Bokoni longs to create her own conceptual artwork instead of the traditional beadwork that her family sells to tourists--but tensions are rising between the reservation and the surrounding communities, and somehow in the confusion of politics and growing up Carson and Maggi have to make a place for themselves.

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  God Loves Hair

  Vivek Shraya

  A collection of twenty-one short stories following a tender, intellectual, and curious child of Indian origin as he navigates the complex realms of sexuality, gender, racial politics, religion, and belonging. "I am often mistaken for a girl. Not just because I like to wear dresses or makeup. I don't mind. My parents are from India and here is not quite home. School isn't always safe and neither is my body. But I feel safe in my love for God. And God loves hair."

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  Going Bovine

  Libba Bray

  Cameron Smith, a disaffected sixteen-year-old who, after being diagnosed with Crutzfeldt-Jacob's (aka mad cow) disease, sets off on a road trip with a death-obsessed video gaming dwarf he meets in the hospital in an attempt to find a cure.

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  Golden Boy

  Tara Sullivan

  Light eyes, yellow hair and white skin-- Habo is an albino, strange and alone. His father, unable to accept Habo, abandons the family. When they are forced from their small Tanzanian village, Habo knows he is to blame. The family seeks refuge with an aunt in Mwanza....

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  Golden Boy

  Abigail Tarttelin

  The Walker family is good at keeping secrets from the world. They are even better at keeping them from each other. Max Walker is a golden boy. Attractive, intelligent, and athletic, he's the perfect son, the perfect friend, and the perfect crush for the girls in his school. He's even really nice to his little brother. Karen, Max's mother, is a highly successful criminal lawyer, determined to maintain the fac̦ade of effortless excellence she has constructed through the years. Now that the boys are getting older, now that she won't have as much control, she worries that the fac̦ade might soon begin to crumble. Adding to the tension, her husband, Steve, has chosen this moment to stand for election to Parliament. The spotlight of the media is about to encircle their lives. The Walkers are hiding something, you see. Max is special. Max is different. Max is intersex. When an enigmatic childhood friend named Hunter steps out of his past and abuses his trust in the worst possible way, Max is forced to consider the nature of his well-kept secret. Why won't his parents talk about it? What else are they hiding from Max about his condition and from each other? The deeper Max goes, the more questions emerge about where it all leaves him and what his future holds, especially now that he's starting to fall head over heels for someone for the first time in his life. Will his friends accept him if he is no longer the Golden Boy? Will anyone ever want him--desire him--once they know? And the biggest one of all, the question he has to look inside himself to answer: Who is Max Walker, really?"

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  Gone, Gone, Gone

  Hannah Moskowitz

  Struggling with the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and sniper shootings throughout the Washington, D.C. area, Craig and Lio consider a romantic relationship that is complicated by Craig's ex-boyfriend, Lio's broken family, and the death of Lio's brother.

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  Goodnight, Boy

  Nikki Sheehan

  A tale of two very different worlds, both shattered by the loss of loved ones. Tragic, comic and full of hope, thanks to a dog called Boy. The kennel has been JC's home ever since JC s new foster father locked them inside. As the hours and days pass, JC tells Boy about how he came to his country: his family, the orphanage and the Haitian earthquake that swept everything away. How, after, his adoptive mother his foster mother Melanie brought a new light into his life and brought him to her home country. He started to feel normal again. Until JC did something bad, so bad that he and Boy were banished to the kennel. Just before their punishment, just before the kennel. Now their Foster Father is getting sicker, Melody still isn't home, and JC and Boy realize that they have to try and escape.

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  Grandparents Raising Kids

  Rae Simons

  In 2005, 6 million children were being raised by their grandparents. Sometimes, their grandchildren's parents had died, sometimes they were in prison, and sometimes they just couldn't cope with raising children. When grandparents take in their grandchildren to raise, they have some difficulties most families don't have. They're older, for one thing, and they also have to deal with their own children and that relationship. But they have the wisdom and experience they've gained from raising one set of children already, and this can help. The families in this book have had both good and bad experiences, but they have learned a great deal through them.

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  Grasshopper Jungle

  Andrew Smith

  Austin Szerba narrates the end of humanity as he and his best friend Robby accidentally unleash an army of giant, unstoppable bugs and uncover the secrets of a decades-old experiment gone terribly wrong.

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  Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood

  Melissa Hart

  Torn between the high socioeconomic status of her father and the bohemian lifestyle of her mother, Melissa Hart tells a compelling story of contradiction in this coming-of-age memoir. Set in 1970s Southern California, Gringa is the story of a young girl conflicted by two extremes. On the one hand theres life with her mother, who leaves her father to begin a lesbian relationship, taking Hart and her two siblings along. Hart tells of her moms new life in a Hispanic neighborhood of Oxnard, California, and how these new surroundings begin to positively shape Hart herself. At the opposite extreme is her fathers white-bread well-to-do security, which is predictable and stable and boring. Hart is made all the more fraught with frustration when a judge rules that being raised by two women is 'unnatural' and grants her father primary custody.

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  Half a Heart

  Rosellen Brown

  When her biracial daughter appears suddenly after eighteen years searching for the mother who left her, former civil rights activist Miriam Vener begins a painful confrontation with her past.

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  Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural

  Claudine C. O'Hearn

  Eighteen biracial and bicultural writers address the difficulties and benefits of growing up different in the United States. As we approach the twenty-first century, biracialism and biculturalism are becoming increasingly common. Skin color and place of birth are no longer reliable signifiers of one's identity or origin. Simple questions like 'What are you?' and 'Where are you from?' aren't answered -- they are discussed. These eighteen essays, joined by a shared sense of duality, address the difficulties of not fitting into and the benefits of being part of two worlds. Through the lens of personal experience, they offer a broader spectrum of meaning for race and culture. And in the process, they map a new ethnic terrain that transcends racial and cultural division.

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  Happy Accidents

  Jane Lynch

  Best-known as Glee's sharp-tongued Sue Sylvester, Jane Lynch's on-screen persona is someone that many love to hate. But when she's not prowling the corridors in Sue's shiny tracksuit, who is the real Jane Lynch and how did this Golden Globe and Emmy winner learn to channel such delicious nastiness?

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  Happyface

  Stephen Emond

  After going through traumatic times, a troubled, socially awkward teenager moves to a new school where he tries to reinvent himself.

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  Happy Families

  Tanita S. Davis

  In alternating chapters, sixteen-year-old twins Ysabel and Justin share their conflicted feelings as they struggle to come to terms with their father's decision to dress as a woman.

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  Hard Love

  Ellen Wittlinger

  After starting to publish a zine in which he writes his secret feelings about his lonely life and his parents' divorce, sixteen-year-old John meets an unusual girl and begins to develop a healthier personality.

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  Head Case

  Sarah Aronson

  Seventeen-year-old Frank Marder struggles to deal with the aftermath of an accident he had while driving drunk that killed two people, including his girlfriend, and left him paralyzed from the neck down.

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  Heart of Iron

  Ashley Poston

  Seventeen-year-old Ana is a scoundrel by nurture and an outlaw by nature. Found as a child drifting through space with a sentient android called D09, Ana was saved by a fearsome space captain and the grizzled crew she now calls family. But D09 -- one of the last remaining illegal Metals -- has been glitching, and Ana will stop at nothing to find a way to fix him. Ana's desperate effort to save D09 leads her on a quest to steal the coordinates to a lost ship that could offer all the answers. But at the last moment, a spoiled Ironblood boy beats Ana to her prize. He has his own reasons for taking the coordinates, and he doesn't care what he'll sacrifice to keep them. When everything goes wrong, she and the Ironblood end up as fugitives on the run. Now their entire kingdom is after them -- and the coordinates -- and not everyone wants them captured alive. What they find in a lost corner of the universe will change all their lives -- and unearth dangerous secrets. But when a darkness from Ana's past returns, she must face an impossible choice: does she protect a kingdom that wants her dead or save the Metal boy she loves?

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  Heavy Vinyl: Riot on the Radio (#1)

  Carly Usdin

  Starry-eyed Chris has just started the dream job every outcast kid in town wants: working at Vinyl Mayhem. It's as rad as she imagined; her boss is BOSS, her co-workers spend their time arguing over music, pushing against the patriarchy, and endlessly trying to form a band. When Rosie Riot, the staff's favorite singer, mysteriously vanishes the night before her band's show, Chris discovers her co-workers are doing more than just sorting vinyl...Her local indie record store is also a front for a teen girl vigilante fight club!

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  Hello, Groin

  Beth Goobie

  When Dylan Kowolski agrees to create a display for her high school library, she has no idea of the trouble it's going to cause—for the school principal, her family, her boyfriend Cam and his jock friends, and her best friend Jocelyn. And for Dylan herself. If only her English class had been studying a normal, run-of-the-mill, mundane book like Lord of the Flies instead of Foxfire things wouldn't have gotten so twisted. Then the world wouldn't have gone into such a massive funk. And then Dylan wouldn't have had to face her deepest fear and the way she was letting it run her life.

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  Hello, Sailor!: The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea

  Paul Baker and Jo Stanley

  Explores the meaning of gay life for sea-faring men. This book presents a strand of British history, and tells stories of lives lived against the odds.