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That Jennifer Lynn Barnes has advanced degrees in psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science is obvious in her new book, The Naturals, a book sure to appeal to readers like me who enjoy television programs like Criminal Minds and Cold Case. The book stars seventeen-year-old Cassie Hobbes, who describes herself as odd: “odd-looking, oddly quite, always the odd one out” (17).  While “other kids spent their preschool years singing their way through the ABC’s” (9), Cassie was learning a different alphabet: the BPE’s, tricks of her psychic mother’s trade: behavior, personality, environment.  When her mother is murdered, Cassie ends up in Colorado with her loud extendedRead More →

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With The Hit, Melvin Burgess takes on several key social and philosophical issues: political corruption, drug abuse/use, social class and power disparities, and measuring life’s value.  When the world begins to spin out of control and all hope seems lost, we look for an escape.  For seventeen-year-old Adam, who can only see hard work ahead and never earning enough to do what he wants, that escape is the drug called Death.  Death started out as a euthanasia drug, one that would give the terminally ill a week of bliss.  But when the young began to look at it as “the biggest high”—a way to improveRead More →

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When eighth graders Andrej Tschichatschow and Mike Klingenberg don’t receive invitations to the popular Tatiana Cosic’s birthday party, they set off to make their own fun on an epic adventure across Germany in a stolen Lada.  Bound for Wallachia without a map, the boys experience “the feeling of invincibility. No accident, no authority, no law of nature could stop us” (209).  As they travel, they discuss life, death, love, and sexuality.  They also encounter Isa Schmidt, who lives in the dump and shows them how to siphon gasoline; Horst Fricke, a former military sharpshooter who shoots at them and then offers them an orange soda andRead More →

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Having spent grades 7-11 in the cab of a semi-truck, home-schooled on the road by her father, Hayley Rose Kincain doesn’t know the rules for high school, where flaunts, taunts, and poses are all part of what she calls the zombie life.  Refusing to be colonized by the hive at Belmont High, Hayley spends a good part of her senior year in detention for correcting teachers’ mistakes and for committing other rule infractions.   Quiet, gawky, awkward, strangely smart, and “adorkable”—according to her friend Gracie Rappaport—Hayley wants to have a good time and make the world a better place. Those aspirations are nearly impossible, though, forRead More →

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Written as letters from a sixteen-year-old girl to an inmate, Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher tells the story of Zoe.  This British girl, who dreams someday of becoming an author of children’s books, has killed someone she was supposed to love.  With the guilt weighing heavily on her, Zoe locates a man on death row in Texas, guilty of his own crime of passion, and adopts him as her pen pal—a kindred spirit who might understand “the pain and the fear and the sadness and the guilt and the hundred other feelings that don’t even have a name in all of the English language” (7). Read More →

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What if hex lessons could empower a bully’s victim to enact revenge?  What if we could send out psychic energy as an agent of change?  These are questions Mariah Fredericks explores in her book Season of the Witch.  The novel features Antonia Thurman, a sixteen year old junior who wants to be elegant, fiercely smart, and strong but still funny and nice.  Instead, she is the target of bully Chloe Nachmias, a petite and perfect, every-part-ideal beauty who causes others to feel clumsy and insignificant.  Chloe and her minions, Zeena and Isabelle, make Slam the Slut everyone’s favorite game, with Toni the target since sheRead More →

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A reader who enjoyed Lauren Morrill’s debut novel, Meant to Be, or who appreciates books like Sarah Dessen’s Along for the Ride should find pleasure in Morrill’s latest book, Being Sloane Jacobs.  Despite the plot similarities, this book pushes beyond girl drama and romance, skating its way into the sports genre—with a couple of richly descriptive scenes where Sloane Emily and Sloane Devon compare gross injuries. The skating rink is Sloane Emily Jacobs’ childhood home, but when life in D.C. begins to spin out of control, the figure skating rink becomes another arena where Seej—as she is called by her brother James—feels judged and whereRead More →

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At the core of its plot, Erased by Jennifer Rush features psychological and genetic engineering that erases important memories and plants false ones in the void.  Four of the experimental group teens manage to escape the Branch lab.  Anna, unable to let go of the past, is on the run with loyal and noble Sam, the irritatingly adorable Cas, and Nick, “a shark masquerading as a panther” (19).  The Branch has been using biotechnology to turn teens into weaponry, and the four have received genetic alterations and programming to turn them into a team of assassins, with Anna as the leader. Hunted by the Branch,Read More →

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As its central conflict in The Darkest Path by Jeff Hirsch, the United States is again divided against itself, with some states controlled by the Federal Army and others controlled by the Army of the Glorious Path.  Leader of the Path is President Hill, who has co-opted progressive ideas about economic justice and mixed them with religious fundamentalism.  The Path believe that “there is a light inside all of us that comes from God.  The Choice is simply committing yourself to following the path that it illuminates” (254).  Propaganda occurs through mottoes and prayer, with followers believing “I am the Way and the Path” (240). Read More →