Difficult Family Relationships

Sixteen-year-old Sayers Wayte has everything. Popularity, good looks, perfect grades—there's nothing Sayers' family money can't buy. Until he's kidnapped by a man who tells him the privileged life he's been living is based on a lie. Trapped in a windowless room, without knowing why he's been taken or how long the man plans to keep him shut away, Sayers faces a terrifying new reality. To survive, he must forget the world he once knew, and play the part his abductor has created for him.

If Naomi had picked tails, she would have won the coin toss. She wouldn't have had to go back for the yearbook camera, and she wouldn't have hit her head on the steps. She wouldn't have woken up in an ambulance with amnesia. She certainly would have remembered her boyfriend, Ace. She might even have remembered why she fell in love with him in the first place. She would understand why her best friend, Will, keeps calling her "Chief".

This is the sequel to Freckles - the moving story of a young girl whose kindness and wholesome philosophy brightens the lives of everyone she meets.

Hopeless. Freak. Elephant. Pitiful. These are the words of Skinny, the vicious voice that lives inside 15-year-old Ever Davies's head. Skinny tells Ever all the dark thoughts her classmates have about her. Ever knows she weighs over 300 pounds, knows she'll probably never be loved, and Skinny makes sure she never forgets it. But there is another voice: Ever's singing voice, which is beautiful but has been silenced by Skinny. Ever decides to undergo a risky surgery that may help her lose weight and start over.

For 16-year-old Ben Bancroft - a kid with cerebral palsy, no parents, and an overprotective grandmother - the closest thing to happiness is hunkering alone in the back of the Rialto Theatre and watching Bride of Frankenstein for the umpteenth time. The last person he wants to run into is drugged-up Colleen Minou, resplendent in ripped tights, neon miniskirt, and an impressive array of tattoos.

In the wake of her best friend Ingrid's suicide, Caitlin is left alone, struggling to find hope and answers. When she finds the journal Ingrid left behind for her, she begins a journey of understanding and broadening her horizons that leads her to new friendships and first love. Nina LaCour brings the changing seasons of Caitlin's first year without Ingrid to life with emotion, honesty, and captivating writing.

This thoughtful, wry story is about two girls - a 'punk' and a 'priss' - who find themselves facing each other in a peer-counseling program and discover that they have some surprising things in common.

Five estranged cousins are lost in a maze of their family’s tangled secrets. Their grandparents, former potato farmers Gottfried and Marla Hemmings, managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions, and now they sit atop a million-dollar bank account - wealth they’ve refused to pass on to their adult children or their five teenage grandchildren. "Because we want them to thrive," Marla always says. But for the Hemmings cousins, "thriving" feels a lot like slowly dying of a poison they started taking the moment they were born.

When Sophie has to visit her mother at her sanctuary for bonobos, she's not thrilled to be there. Then Otto, an infant bonobo, comes into her life, and for the first time, she feels responsible for another creature. But peace does not last long for Sophie and Otto. When an armed revolution breaks out in the country, the sanctuary is attacked, and the two of them must escape unprepared into the jungle. Caught in the crosshairs of a lethal conflict, they must struggle to keep safe.

Meet Billy Bloom, new student at the ultra-white, ultra-rich, ultra-conservative Dwight D. Eisenhower Academy and drag queen extraordinaire. Actually, "drag queen" does not begin to describe Billy and his fabulousness. Any way you slice it, Billy is not a typical 17-year-old, and the Bible Belles, Aberzombies, and Football Heroes at the academy have never seen anyone quite like him before.

From the Stonewall Honor–winning author of Like a Love Story comes a revelatory novel about the enclosed world of privilege and silence at an elite boarding school and the unlikely group of friends who dare to challenge the status quo through their writing. Perfect for fans of E. Lockhart, Kathleen Glasgow, and Jandy Nelson, with crossover appeal for listeners of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep.

When Emma Sasha Silver loses her eyesight in a nightmare accident, she must relearn everything from walking across the street to recognizing her own sisters to imagining colors. One of seven children, Emma used to be the invisible kid, but now it seems everyone is watching her. And just as she's about to start high school and try to recover her friendships and former life, one of her classmates is found dead in an apparent suicide. Fifteen and blind, Emma has to untangle what happened and why - in order to see for herself what makes life worth living.

Francesca is at the beginning of her second term in Year 11 at an all boy's school that has just started accepting girls. She still misses her old friends, and, to make things worse, her mother has had a breakdown and can barely move from her bed.

One-day admission: $15. Summer job: Pros: Living on my own (plus roommates); Rides are free (but avoid the roller coasters-too scary!); Super-hot coworker...Cons: Periodic homesickness; Dressing like Gretel for job in fairyland gift shop; Super-hot coworker....and boyfriend back home.

Victor hates his life. He has no friends, gets beaten up at school, and his parents are always criticizing him. Tired of feeling miserable, Victor takes a bottle of his mother’s sleeping pills - only to wake up in the hospital. Bull is angry, and takes all of his rage out on Victor. That makes him feel better, at least a little. But it doesn’t stop Bull’s grandfather from getting drunk and hitting him. So Bull tries to defend himself with a loaded gun. When Victor and Bull end up as roommates in the same psych ward, there’s no way to escape each other or their problems. Which means things are going to get worse - much worse - before they get better.

There are two sides to every story. The surface reality that’s presented to the world. And then, there’s the other side. The real one. The one that matters. Seventeen-year-old self-proclaimed asshole Toby Page is alone. No friends. No family. He trades maintenance work in exchange for room and board. Every day, he fights demons no one else can see. Every day, he wants to give up. But he can’t. Not yet. When Alice Eliot moves in downstairs, she offers Toby some light in his dark world.

Sam Jones and Zoe Miller have one thing in common: they both want an escape from reality. Loner Sam flies under the radar at school and walks on eggshells at home to manage her mom’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, wondering how she can ever leave to pursue her dream of studying aerospace engineering. Popular, people-pleasing Zoe puts up walls so no one can see her true self: the girl who was abandoned as an infant, whose adoptive mother has cancer, and whose disabled brother is being sent away to live in a facility.

Obsessive-compulsive teen Clarissa wants to get better, if only so her mother will stop asking her if she's okay. Andrew wants to overcome his eating disorder so he can get back to his band and their dreams of becoming famous. Film aficionado Ben would rather live in the movies than in reality. Gorgeous and overly confident Mason thinks everyone is an idiot. And Stella just doesn't want to be back for her second summer of wilderness therapy.

It's 1953 and 11-year-old Penny dreams of a summer of butter pecan ice cream, swimming, and baseball. But nothing's that easy in Penny's family. For starters, she can't go swimming because her mother's afraid she'll catch polio at the pool. To make matters worse, her favorite uncle is living in a car. Her Nonny cries every time her father's name is mentioned. And the two sides of her family aren?t speaking to each other!

Sixteen-year-old Solomon is agoraphobic. He hasn't left the house in three years, which is fine by him. Ambitious Lisa desperately wants to get into the second-best psychology program for college (she's being realistic). But how can she prove she deserves a spot there? Solomon is the answer. Determined to "fix" Sol, Lisa thrusts herself into his life, introducing him to her charming boyfriend, Clark, and confiding her fears in him. Soon all three teens are far closer than they thought they'd be, and when their facades fall down, their friendships threaten to collapse as well.