The Promise of Jesse Woods

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.” She’d know about her mom’s new family. She’d know about her dad’s fiancée. She never would have met James, the boy with the questionable past and the even fuzzier future, who tells her he once wanted to kiss her. She wouldn’t have wanted to kiss him back. But Naomi picked heads. After her remarkable debut, Gabrielle Zevin has crafted an imaginative second novel all about love and second chances. Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac is a 2008 Bank Street – Best Children’s Book of the Year.

“What’s your name?” “Serene.” “Serena?” Elliot asked. “Serene,” said Serene. “My full name is Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle.” Elliot’s mouth fell open. “That is badass.” The Borderlands aren’t like anywhere else. Don’t try to smuggle a phone or any other piece of technology over the wall that marks the Border—unless you enjoy a fireworks display in your backpack. (Ballpoint pens are okay.) There are elves, harpies, and—best of all as far as Elliot is concerned—mermaids. Elliot? Who’s Elliot? Elliot is thirteen years old. He’s smart and just a tiny bit obnoxious. Sometimes more than a tiny bit. When his class goes on a field trip and he can see a wall that no one else can see, he is given the chance to go to school in the Borderlands. It turns out that on the other side of the wall, classes involve a lot more weaponry and fitness training and fewer mermaids than he expected. On the other hand, there’s Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle, an elven warrior who is more beautiful than anyone Elliot has ever seen, and then there’s her human friend Luke: sunny, blond, and annoyingly likeable. There are lots of interesting books. There’s even the chance Elliot might be able to change the world.

A family saga set in the American West, about sibling rivalry, dark secrets, and a young girl’s struggle with freedom and artistic desire. This moving debut novel is a profoundly American story. Set in a circa-1960s rural South Dakota–a hardscrabble place of cattle buyers, homegrown ballet studios, casual drug abuse, and unmitigated pressure to conform, all amid the great natural beauty of the region–the book portrays a loving but struggling young family in turmoil, and two siblings, Rene and Leon, who opt for different but equally extreme means of escaping the burdens of home. By turns funny and tragic, lyrical and terse, Paula Saunders’ debut examines the classic American questions: What is to become of the vulnerable in a culture of striving and power? And what is the effect of this striving and power on both those who dominate and those who are overrun? It is an affecting novel, in which the author’s compassionate narration allows us to sympathize, in turn, with everyone involved.

Bullies, harsh teachers, vicious dogs–the pastoral British countryside is a much tougher place than ten-year-old city boy Peter thought it would be. Weirder, too–there are odd shopkeepers in the village, strange hermits living in the woods, and a man known as Scarecrow Man, who stands silently in the fields along Everlasting Lane looking up at the sky. Peter’s grieving mother has gone strange, too. In the new cottage where, after the death of his father, she’s moved them both from London, she seals off an upstairs room and forbids Peter from ever entering it. Somehow, he senses the locked room represents something that troubles his mother even worse than the death of his father–but what? It isn’t until he befriends the other school outcasts–the too-smart-for-her-own-good tomboy, Anna-Marie, and overweight Tommie–that Peter begins to think he has a fighting chance of getting by in school. And as the trio of outsiders band together, he begins to think he has a chance of helping his mother, too–by getting his new friends to help him discover the dark secret she is keeping from him…

On the surface, Ordinary Grace is the story of the murder of a beautiful young woman, a beloved daughter and sister. At heart, it’s the story of what that tragedy does to a boy, his family, and ultimately the fabric of the small town in which he lives. Told from Frank’s perspective forty years after that fateful summer, it is a moving account of a boy standing at the door of his young manhood, trying to understand a world that seems to be falling apart around him. It is an unforgettable novel about discovering the terrible price of wisdom and the enduring grace of God.

The warm, funny, and supremely original new novel from one of the most acclaimed writers in America The year is 1985. Benji Cooper is one of the only black students at an elite prep school in Manhattan. He spends his falls and winters going to roller-disco bar mitzvahs, playing too much Dungeons and Dragons, and trying to catch glimpses of nudity on late-night cable TV. After a tragic mishap on his first day of high school—when Benji reveals his deep enthusiasm for the horror movie magazine Fangoria—his social doom is sealed for the next four years. But every summer, Benji escapes to the Hamptons, to Sag Harbor, where a small community of African American professionals have built a world of their own. Because their parents come out only on weekends, he and his friends are left to their own devices for three glorious months. And although he’s just as confused about this all-black refuge as he is about the white world he negotiates the rest of the year, he thinks that maybe this summer things will be different. If all goes according to plan, that is. There will be trials and tribulations, of course. There will be complicated new handshakes to fumble through, and state-of-the-art profanity to master. He will be tested by contests big and small, by his misshapen haircut (which seems to have a will of its own), by the New Coke Tragedy of ’85, and by his secret Lite FM addiction. But maybe, with a little luck, things will turn out differently this summer. In this deeply affectionate and fiercely funny coming-of-age novel, Whitehead—using the perpetual mortification of teenage existence and the desperate quest for reinvention—lithely probes the elusive nature of identity, both personal and communal.