Fairy Tales For Teens

Donald Davis was born into a southern Appalachian mountain world rich in stories. He grew up listening to his father and his Uncle Frank tell stories of their boyhood, all the while taking in the details of his own childhood experience.

One of America's favorite African-American storytellers remembers her childhood in tender, unforgettable new stories. Jackie Torrence, a frequent headliner at the National Storytelling Festival, is known to audiences nationwide as The Story Lady.

The best friend of our youth has no replacement, ever. Though we may start out as "two peas in a pod", we often lose touch with one another. In this affecting tale of two adults who reclaim their childhood bond after 30 years apart, the comforts of friendship are affirmed with humor and wit.

Here are a baker's dozen of Paul Laurence Dunbar's poems brought to life in the medium he always wrote for - the spoken word. As narrated by Bobby Norfolk, these poems evoke the range of moods, from elegy to wonder to celebration, that the poet is remembered for.

Micheline Helsing is a tetrachromat - a girl who sees the auras of the undead in a prismatic spectrum. As one of the last descendants of the Van Helsing lineage, she has trained since childhood to destroy monsters both corporeal and spiritual. The corporeal undead go down by the bullet, the spiritual undead by the lens. With an analog SLR camera as her best weapon, Micheline exorcises ghosts by capturing their spiritual energy on film.

Ash's dad has returned from war, close to a breakdown and lost in a world of imaginary threats. Meanwhile, Ash's best friend, Mark, is grieving and has drifted away into his own nightmares. Ash's only escape is his lonely mountain running, training to be the stag boy in the annual Stag Chase. But dark things are stirring. Could Mark and Dad be haunted by more than just their pasts?

In the classic style of the great epic storytellers, Newbery Honor-winning author Jamake Highwater breathes new life into the ancient literary traditions of India. With nonstop action, powerful superheroes, and evil monsters, Rama is an exciting introduction to the richness of The Ramayana.

Rex M. Ellis weaves the strands of African folklore, early American history, and contemporary interpretations into the rich quilt that is the African-American experience. His stories spin a thread from the Windward Coast of West Africa to the shores of Jamestown and beyond. He uses storytelling as both a historical teaching tool and a method for dealing with controversial subjects.

Greek mythology has portrayed Medea as an evil enchantress who first helps Jason and the Argonauts steal the Golden Fleece, and then uses her magic to seduce Jason into marriage. The Dawn Palace is Medea’s story, elegantly rethought and retold by award-winning author Helen M. Hoover.

"Years later," Donald Davis remember of his childhood," I came to realize that when you come from a long-dammed-up Scots-Irish gene pool it is an okay thing to wish for something, but it is not an OK thing to get it."

Being the new kid at school is hard, but Sophie has a secret weapon: her vivid imagination and her oversized, trusted Big Book of Monsters, an encyclopedia of myths and legends from all over the world. Sophie is convinced she is a monster because of the monster mark on her face. At least that's what she calls it. The doctors call it a blood tumor, and it covers almost half of her face. The Big Book of Monsters gives Sophie the idea that there might be a cure for her monster mark.

Amidst the 1971 Troubles between the Irish Republican Army and Northern Ireland, 12-year-old Finn lives in a world of her own of fairy tales. Raised by her grandmother, Nuala, who is the village storyteller, Finn spends her days playing make-believe in the forest, weaving tall tales to tell her friend Darcy, longing to go to the island of Inis Eala to meet the swans there, and waiting for her father to return from the war. She's long since stopped believing in happy endings and miracles, preferring to believe instead in serendipity, or "happy mistakes".

At seventeen, Avaline Hall has already buried her mother, survived a horrific factory fire, and escaped from an insane asylum. Now she's on her way to Blythewood Academy, the elite boarding school in New York's mist-shrouded Hudson Valley that her mother attended - and was expelled from. Though she's afraid her high society classmates won't accept a factory girl in their midst, Ava is desperate to unravel her family's murky past, discover the identity of the father she's never known, and perhaps finally understand her mother's abrupt suicide.

Becoming immortal wasn't supposed to be the easy part. Though Kate is about to be crowned Queen of the Underworld, she's as isolated as ever. And despite her growing love for Henry, ruler of the Underworld, he's becoming ever more distant and secretive. Then, in the midst of Kate's coronation, Henry is abducted by the only being powerful enough to kill him: the King of the Titans.

Nothing has been normal since Vanessa Sands learned that her sister was murdered by siren femme fatales of the watery depths and that everything she believed about her family was a lie. Her boyfriend, Simon, has been the only person Vanessa feels she can really trust. But now there are some secrets she can't tell even him. And when Vanessa finds herself in the sights of Parker, Hawthorne Prep's resident charmer, she needs someone to confide in more than ever.

Life has gone according to plan for Anna—she stays in the background, letting her sister, Emily, shine in the spotlight. But on Emily’s wedding night, Anna learns that her sister is moving away, abandoning her—and all their shared dreams. Devastated, Anna leaves the reception in the middle of a raging storm, taking shelter in a hotel she’s never seen before: the Houdini. The Houdini is a hotel unlike any other, with sumptuous velvet couches, marble tiled floors, secret restaurants, winding passageways, and an undercurrent of magic in the air.

Lan spends her nights as a songgirl in Haak’gong, a city transformed by the Elantian colonizers. Her days are consumed by the search for knowledge about the strange mark—an untranslatable Hin character—burned into her arm by her mother in her last act before she died. Zen is a practitioner—one of the fabled magicians of the Last Kingdom. He’s never seen anything like Lan’s mark, but he knows that if there are answers, they lie deep in the pine forests and misty mountains of the Last Kingdom, with an order of practitioning masters planning to overthrow the Elantian regime.

The story of an evil Persian king, who marries a new wife each day and then kills her the next morning. To stop this murderous ruler, a brave woman named Scheherazade risks her own life and marries the king herself...but not without a plan. On their wedding night, she will entertain him with the tale of the Fisherman and the Genie, a legend so great, he'll never want it to end.

When bad-boy drummer Kaidan Rowe encounters good girl Anna Whitt, the girl chosen to vanquish the demons from Earth, he can't stop thinking about her. The Nephilim son of the Duke of Lust, Kaidan tries to help Anna embrace a life of sin, but she gradually helps him see that he's meant to do more with his life. Their relationship is as tortured as it is passionate, for Nephilim are forbidden to fall in love. But as hard as they may try to obey, Kai can't seem to stay away from Anna, nor Anna from Kai.

When a young troll named Hawthorn is stolen from Fairyland by the Golden Wind, he becomes a changeling - a human boy - in the strange city of Chicago, a place no less bizarre and magical than Fairyland when seen through trollish eyes. Left with a human family, Hawthorn struggles with his troll nature and his changeling fate. But when he turns 12, he stumbles upon a way back home, to a Fairyland much changed from the one he remembers.