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  Also Known as Harper

  Ann Haywood Leal

  Writing poetry helps fifth-grader Harper Lee Morgan cope with her father's absence, being evicted, and having to skip school to care for her brother while their mother works, and things look even brighter after she befriends a mute girl and a kindly disabled woman.

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  Belle Prater's Boy

  Ruth White

  When Woodrow's mother suddenly disappears, he moves to his grandparents' home in a small Virginia town where he befriends his cousin and together they find the strength to face the terrible losses and fears in their lives. Everyone in Coal Station, Virginia, has a theory about what happened to Belle Prater, but twelve-year-old Gypsy wants the facts, and when her cousin Woodrow, Aunt Belle's son moves next door, she has her chance.

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  Between Mom and Jo

  Julie Anne Peters

  Nick has a three-legged dog named Lucky, some pet fish, and two moms who think he's the greatest kid ever. And he happens to think he has the greatest Moms ever, but everything changes when his birth mom and her wife, Jo, start to have marital problems. Suddenly, Nick is in the middle, and instead of having two Moms to turn to for advice, he has no one.

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  Between Us Baxters

  Bethany Hegedus

  The story of twelve-year-old Polly, a poor white Southern girl whose close friendship with Timbre Ann, a middle-class black teen, puts both families in danger. As white supremacists set fire to black businesses, Polly struggles to cope with the implications for her family and to understand the true meaning of friendship. Polly's sense of justice threatens to upset the status quo in her small town.

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  Beverly, Right Here

  Kate Dicamillo

  Beverly put her foot down on the gas. They went faster still. This was what Beverly wanted — what she always wanted. To get away. To get away as fast as she could. To stay away. Beverly Tapinski has run away from home plenty of times, but that was when she was just a kid. By now, she figures, it’s not running away. It’s leaving. Determined to make it on her own, Beverly finds a job and a place to live and tries to forget about her dog, Buddy, now buried underneath the orange trees back home; her friend Raymie, whom she left without a word; and her mom, Rhonda, who has never cared about anyone but herself. Beverly doesn’t want to depend on anyone, and she definitely doesn’t want anyone to depend on her. But despite her best efforts, she can’t help forming connections with the people around her — and gradually, she learns to see herself through their eyes. In a touching, funny, and fearless conclusion to her sequence of novels about the beloved Three Rancheros,

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  Bird

  Zetta Elliott

  Young Mekhai, better known as Bird, loves to draw. With drawings, he can erase the things that don't turn out right. In real life, problems aren’t so easily fixed. As Bird struggles to understand the death of his beloved grandfather and his older brother’s drug addiction, he escapes into his art. Drawing is an outlet for Bird’s emotions and imagination, and provides a path to making sense of his world. In time, with the help of his grandfather’s friend, Bird finds his own special somethin’ and wings to fly. Told with spare grace, Bird is a touching look at a young boy coping with real-life troubles. Readers will be heartened by Bird’s quiet resilience, and moved by the healing power of putting pencil to paper.

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  Chinese Handcuffs

  Christ Crutcher

  Dillon is living with the painful memory of his brother's suicide-and the role he played in it. To keep his mind and body occupied, he trains intensely for the Ironman triathlon. But outside of practice, his life seems to be falling apart. Then Dillon finds a confidante in Jennifer, a star high school basketball player who's hiding her own set of destructive secrets. Together, they must find the courage to confront their demons-before it's too late.

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  Dear Rachel Maddow

  Adrienne Kisner

  Brianna gets the lead in the Thanksgiving school play. She'll be Hero the Hen! She almost forgets about the coughing and breathing trouble she's been having.Brianna loves practicing her leaping and flapping. But at the dress rehearsal, she has a bad coughing attack and feels a tightness in her chest. The teacher calls 911 and the paramedics take Brianna to the hospital. There, Dr. Anderson diagnoses Brianna with asthma. Brianna begins to learn about her disease and how to manage it. Things are soon under control, and she's back on stage for her debut!

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  Dear Santa, Please Come to the 19th Floor

  Yin .

  Willy and Carlos, who is in a wheelchair, receive a visit from Santa on Christmas Eve, even though they live on the nineteenth floor of their building.

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  Debbie Harry Sings in French

  Meagan Brothers

  When Johnny completes an alcohol rehabilitation program and his mother sends him to live with his uncle in North Carolina, he meets Maria, who seems to understand his fascination with the new wave band Blondie, and he learns about his deceased father's youthful forays into "glam rock," which gives him perspective on himself, his past, and his current life.

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  Dirt

  Denise Orenstein

  Eleven-year-old Yonder stopped talking when her mother died, and she stopped going to school because of the bullies, knowing that her father would never even notice (although the social worker did); indeed the only creature that seems to care about her is the one-eyed Shetland pony called Dirt who lives on the neighboring farm--so when she discovers that Dirt is about to be sold for horsemeat she is determined to find a way to save him.

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  (Don't) Call Me Crazy

  Kelly Jensen

  A Washington Post Best Children’s Book of 2018Who’s Crazy? What does it mean to be crazy? Is using the word crazy offensive? What happens when a label like that gets attached to your everyday experiences? To understand mental health, we need to talk openly about it. Because there’s no single definition of crazy, there’s no single experience that embodies it, and the word itself means different things—wild? extreme? disturbed? passionate?—to different people. In (Don’t) Call Me Crazy, thirty-three actors, athletes, writers, and artists offer essays, lists, comics, and illustrations that explore a wide range of topics:their personal experiences with mental illness,how we do and don’t talk about mental health,help for better understanding how every person’s brain is wired differently,and what, exactly, might make someone crazy. If you’ve ever struggled with your mental health, or know someone who has, come on in, turn the pages . . . and let’s get talking.

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  Echo After Echo

  Amy Rose Capetta

  Zara Evans has come to the Aurelia Theater, home to director Leopold Henneman, to play a dream role in Echo and Ariston, the Greek tragedy that taught her everything she knows about love. When the director asks Zara to promise that she will have no outside commitments, no distractions, it's easy to say yes. But are the deaths at the theater accidents, or murder, or a curse that always comes in threes? When assistant lighting director Eli Vasquez, a girl made of tattoos and abrupt laughs and every form of light, looks at Zara it's hard not to fall in love.

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  Fangirl

  Rainbow Rowell

  Being consummate fans of the Simon Snow series helped Cath and her twin sister, Wren, cope as little girls whose mother left them, but now, as they start college but not as roommates, Cath fears she is unready to live without Wren holding her hand--and without her passion for Snow.

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  Fighting for Dontae

  Mike Castan

  When Mexican American seventh-grader Javier is assigned to work with a special education class and connects with Dontae, who has both physical and mental disabilities, his reputation among gang members and drug abusers no longer seems very important.

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  Hey, Kiddo

  Jarrett J. Krosoczka

  A National Book Award Finalist! Hey, Kiddo is a profoundly important memoir about growing up in a family grappling with addiction, and finding the art that helps you survive.

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  Home After Dark

  David Small

  A savage portrayal of male adolescence gone awry, like no other work of recent fiction or film. Wildly kaleidoscopic and furiously cinematic, Home After Dark is a literary tour-de-force that renders the brutality of adolescence in the so-called nostalgic 1950s, evoking classics such as The Lord of the Flies. Thirteen-year-old Russell Pruitt, abandoned by his mother, follows his father to California in search of a dream. Forced to fend for himself, Russell struggles to survive in Marshfield, a dilapidated town haunted by a sadistic animal killer and a ring of malicious boys who bully Russell for being "queer." Rescued from his booze-swilling father by Wen and Jian Mah, a Chinese immigrant couple who long for a child, Russell betrays them by running away with their restaurant's proceeds.

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  Hooper

  Geoff Herbach

  For Adam Reed, basketball is a passport. Adam’s basketball skills have taken him from an orphanage in Poland to a loving adoptive mother in Minnesota. When he’s tapped to play on a select AAU team along with some of the best players in the state, it just confirms that basketball is his ticket to the good life: to new friendships, to the girl of his dreams, to a better future. But life is more complicated off the court. When an incident with the police threatens to break apart the bonds Adam’s finally formed after a lifetime of struggle, he must make an impossible choice between his new family and the sport that’s given him everything.

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  I Am Nuchu

  Brenda Stanley

  Upon his parents' 1981 divorce, Cal Burton goes from being a popular, comfortable Spokane basketball all-star to a resident of a Ute Indian reservation in Utah, where apathy, poor living conditions, racism, and bitterness over a decades-old family tragedy change his life.

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  I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain

  Will Walton

  For most of his young life Avery has dealt with his alcoholic mother with the help of his grandfather Pal--he immerses himself in poetry and popular music, and now that high school is over for the summer, he makes out with his best friend Luca (who understands about alcoholic mothers), but the death of his grandfather creates a hole in his life that he can not seem to crawl out of.

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  If I Tell

  Janet Gurtler

  Raised by her grandparents, seventeen-year-old Jasmine, the result of a biracial one night stand, has never met her father but has a good relationship with her mother until she sees her mother's boyfriend kissing Jaz's best friend.

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  I’ll Give You the Sun

  Jandy Nelson

  A story of first love, family, loss, and betrayal told from different points in time, and in separate voices, by artists Jude and her twin brother Noah.

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  I'll Meet You There

  Heather Demetrios

  Skylar Evans, seventeen, yearns to escape Creek View by attending art school, but after her mother's job loss puts her dream at risk, a rekindled friendship with Josh, who joined the Marines to get away then lost a leg in Afghanistan, and her job at the Paradise motel lead her to appreciate her home town.

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  I See Reality: Twelve Short Stories About Real Life

  Grace Kendall

  Popular young-adult authors weave together questions of identity, loss, and redemption into poignant tales for today's teens.

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  Love and Other Carnivorous Plants

  Florence Gonsalves

  Freshman year at Harvard was the most anticlimactic year of Danny's life. She's failing pre-med and drifting apart from her best friend. One by one, Danny is losing all the underpinnings of her identity. When she finds herself attracted to an older, edgy girl who she met in rehab for an eating disorder, she finally feels like she might be finding a new sense of self. But when tragedy strikes, her self-destructive tendencies come back to haunt her as she struggles to discover who that self really is.