The Swimmer. The Rebel. The Nerd.
All Ryan, Harley and Miles had in common was Isaac. They lived different lives, had different interests and kept different secrets. But they shared the same best friend. They were sidekicks. And now that Isaac’s gone, what does that make them?
Will Kostakis, award-winning author of The First Third, perfectly depicts the pain and pleasure of this teenage world, piecing together three points of view with intricate splendour.
Taylor and Sierra have always been best friends. But Taylor’s fed up. Why does Sierra always get what – and who – she wants? And now Sierra is stealing the guy they both met online for herself and she wants her friends to cover for her while she goes to meet him for the first time.
But Sierra doesn’t come back when she said she would.
One day. Two days. Three . . .
What if Taylor’s worrying for nothing? What if Sierra’s just being Sierra, forgetting about everyone else to spend time with her new guy? When Taylor finally tells Sierra’s mum that her daughter is missing, Taylor and her friends are thrown into a dark world they never even knew existed.
Can they find Sierra’s abductor in time? Or should they be looking for a killer?
(From Goodreads)
When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it’s unclear who saves whom. And when they pair up on a project to discover the “natural wonders” of their state, both Finch and Violet make more important discoveries: It’s only with Violet that Finch can be himself—a weird, funny, live-out-loud guy who’s not such a freak after all. And it’s only with Finch that Violet can forget to count away the days and start living them. But as Violet’s world grows, Finch’s begins to shrink.
Jennifer Niven’s website.
All The Bright Places Tumblr.
Jennifer Niven’s and the All The Bright Places Pinterest pages.
All The Bright Places book trailer:
(From Goodreads)
Francis Wootton’s first memory is of Kurt Cobain’s death and there have since been other hardships much closer to home. At fifteen, he knows all about loss and rejection, and if he’s honest, Francis – would-be poet, possible intellectual – feels he is wasted in Tyne and Wear. Lower Fifth is supposed to be his time: but when he is diagnosed with leukaemia, a whole new world of worry presents itself. There’s the horror of being held back a year at school, the threat of imminent baldness. But he hadn’t reckoned on meeting Amber and finding a reason to tackle it all – the good the bad and everything in-between – head on.
(From Goodreads)
Cath is a Simon Snow fan.
Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan…
But for Cath, being a fan is her life—and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving.
Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere.
Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to.
Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words… And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.
For Cath, the question is: Can she do this?
Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? Writing her own stories?
And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?
Rainbow Rowell’s website.
Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl Pinterest.
Fangirl book trailer:
YouTuber Bookandquills reviews Fangirl:
(From Goodreads) Ryan Dean West is a fourteen-year-old junior at a boarding school for rich kids in the Pacific Northwest. He’s living in Opportunity Hall, the dorm for troublemakers, and rooming with the biggest bully on the rugby team. And he’s madly in love with his best friend Annie, who thinks of him as a little boy. With the help of his sense of humor, rugby buddies, and his penchant for doodling comics, Ryan Dean manages to survive life’s complications and even find some happiness along the way. But when the unthinkable happens, he has to figure out how to hold on to what’s important, even when it feels like everything has fallen apart. Filled with hand-drawn info-graphics and illustrations and told in a pitch-perfect voice, this realistic depiction of a teen’s experience strikes an exceptional balance of hilarious and heartbreaking. Andrew Smith’s website.
(From Goodreads)
Eleanor is the new girl in town, and with her chaotic family life, her mismatched clothes and unruly red hair, she couldn’t stick out more if she tried.
Park is the boy at the back of the bus. Black T-shirts, headphones, head in a book – he thinks he’s made himself invisible. But not to Eleanor… never to Eleanor.
Slowly, steadily, through late-night conversations and an ever-growing stack of mix tapes, Eleanor and Park fall for each other. They fall in love the way you do the first time, when you’re young, and you feel as if you have nothing and everything to lose.
Rainbow Rowell’s Blog
Listen to the Eleanor and Park playlist
Super awesome fan-art can be found here
Mia is a talented cellist facing a difficult choice. Should she follow her musical dreams, even if it means losing her boyfriend and leaving her family and friends behind?
Then one snowy morning Mia goes for a drive with her family, and in an instant, everything changes. A devastating car accident leaves Mia critically ill. As she lies in a coma she reflects on her life, her passion for classical music and her relationships with family, friends and punk-rock boyfriend, Adam. We also witness the grief of her friends and extended family as they surround her hospital bed willing her to keep living. For now Mia has only one choice: fight to live or give in to despair over all she has lost.
An intensely moving novel about the choices we make, the power of love, the true meaning of family, and what makes life worth living.
If I Stay Official Trailer:
Five months ago, Valerie’s boyfriend, Nick, opened fire in their school cafeteria, leaving six students and a teacher dead and many others wounded. Shot trying to stop him, Valerie inadvertently saved the life of a classmate, but was implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create. A list of people and things she and Nick hated. The list he used to pick his targets.
Now, after a summer of seclusion, Val is forced to confront her guilt as she returns to school to complete her senior year. Haunted by the memory of the boyfriend she still loves and navigating rocky relationships with her family, former friends and the girl whose life she saved, Val must come to grips with the tragedy that took place and her role in it, in order to make amends and move on with her life.
Set in North Carolina, one of the southern states of the USA, we first meet Noah Calhoun who has recently returned from the Second World War. Noah is still in love with the girl he met fourteen years earlier and he dreams of her as he restores his nineteenth century plantation home. When Allie returns to town it seems as though a beautiful love story is coming to fruition. However, we soon realise that there are hidden layers of complexity to this story, and in fact their story is only just beginning. Deeply romantic and sentimental, this has been an incredibly popular film and novel.
A beautiful and affecting story of redemption and hope: Homeless Bird is a coming of age story with a difference. Thirteen-year-old Koly lives in a poor Indian village and her family doesn’t have enough food to go round. Married off to a sixteen-year-old boy, she faces her future with hope and courage. But things soon go tragically wrong. Her husband is not what she believed he would be and she is soon up against the traditions of her society.
The monster showed up after midnight. As they do. But it isn’t the monster Conor’s been expecting. He’s been expecting the one from his nightmare, the one he’s had nearly every night since his mother started her treatments for cancer. The monster outside his window is different. It’s ancient. And wild. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth.
Stark black and white illustrations reflect Connor’s anguish as he struggles with his fears and the progression of his mother’s illness.
From the final idea of award-winning author Siobhan Dowd — whose premature death from cancer prevented her from writing it herself — Patrick Ness has spun a haunting novel of life and loss, and monsters both real and imagined.
Minny, Abilene and Skeeter don’t seem to have much in common – especially in the Mississippi of 1962 where race relations are still strained. Skeeter has come home after graduating from University and her mother is just desperate for her to be married. Skeeter, however, is more concerned about where her beloved maid Constantine has disappeared to, and she starts to investigate what life is actually like as a black maid – using Minny and Abilene as her clandestine subjects. An extraordinary story about women’s lives and the rules to which they are forced to conform.
This coming-of-age novel charts Charlie’s attempts to navigate his way through high school. Aged fifteen, Charlie is intelligent but also shy and socially awkward: this doesn’t make his life easy. Charlie is likeable, sensitive and emotional, and he isn’t dealing well with a lot of the issues life has thrown at him. This novel will make you laugh and cry, as Charlie makes his way through this uncharted territory.
A portrait of Afghanistan through the eyes of one brave girl, Zulaikha. She hopes for peace, now that the Taliban have been driven from Afghanistan; a good relationship with her difficult stepmother; and one day even to go to school, or to have her cleft palate fixed. In the meantime, with the support of her father and sister, Zulaikha knows all will be provided for her — “Inshallah,” God willing. Then she meets Meena, who offers to teach her Afghan poetry, and the Americans come to their village, promising not just new opportunities and dangers, but surgery to fix her face. These changes could mean a whole new life for Zulaikha.
Inspired by a girl whom the author met in Afghanistan, this is not only a fascinating portrait of life in a country we hear about, yet rarely see from inside.
It’s not easy to be the new kid at school, and for Auggie Pullman starting fifth grade at Beecher Prep it’s a bit harder. Inside, Auggie feels like just a normal kid but all other people seem to see is his face. Born with a serious facial deformity, his move into a mainstream school seems fraught with challenges – he just wants his new classmates to see him for who he is, but will they? This is a novel that will make you both laugh and cry.
Clay Jensen is surprised to receive a mysterious package in the post. He is even more confused when he plays the tape enclosed in it and hears the voice of his class mate who commited suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah, his class mate, has sent her story to the thirteen people who led her to this action, asserting “everything affects everything”; somehow, Clay is implicated in her death. Most of the story focuses on Clay listening to the tape, and Hannah’s story is both heart-wrenching and compelling – with an important message about how people are affected by even the smallest of our actions.
Harper’s older sister was always the perfect one, so when June takes her own life a week before her high school graduation, sixteen-year-old Harper is devastated. Everyone’s sorry, but no one can explain why. When her divorcing parents decide to split up June’s ashes, Harper steals the urn and takes off cross-country with her best friend, Laney, to the one place June always dreamed of going—California. Enter Jake Tolan, a boy with a bad attitude, a classic-rock obsession and an unknown connection to June. When he insists on joining them, Harper’s desperate enough to say yes. Except June wasn’t the only one hiding something. Jake’s keeping a secret that has the power to turn Harper’s life upside down again.
Despite the tumour-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel’s story is about to be completely rewritten.
A heartbreaking novel of life, death and being in love, that will make you both laugh and cry.
Khalid is a fifteen-year-old British boy who loves video games and hanging out with his mates, and is starting to take an interest in girls. From a Muslim family, he is abducted while on a holiday to Pakistan. Held at the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay without charge, this is a coming of age story (bildungsroman) with a difference. The reader cannot help be moved by the humiliation, desolation and confusion experienced by Khalid, as he tries to prove his innocence when justice seems frighteningly absent. An engaging and compelling look at the ‘war on terror’ and its impacts on the individual.
Eddie is a war veteran who feels like he has led a pretty dull and uninspiring life. The novel opens on his 83rd birthday where he is only minutes away from dying – trying to save the life of a young girl at the amusement park where he works. The novel is told in three parts from his perspective, and in one he discovers that Heaven is not a destination but is where five people explain your life to you. Albom also explores what happens to the people in Eddie’s world after he dies, as they cope with his loss, and we discover that perhaps our lives can affect others more than we imagine. This fable-like novel makes us think about what is really important in our lives.
Lennie plays second clarinet in the school orchestra and has always happily been second fiddle to her charismatic older sister, Bailey. Then Bailey dies suddenly, and Lennie is left at sea without her anchor. Overcome by emotion, Lennie soon finds herself torn between two boys: Bailey’s boyfriend, Toby, and Joe, the gorgeous and musically gifted new boy in town. While Toby can’t see her without seeing Bailey and Joe sees her only for herself, each offers Lennie something she desperately needs. But ultimately, it’s up to Lennie to find her own way toward what she really needs-without Bailey.
This is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played tortuous, unpredictable games–games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother’s games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; and no longer a boy, but an “it.”
Dave’s bed was an old army cot in the basement, and his clothes were torn and raunchy. When his mother allowed him the luxury of food, it was nothing more than spoiled scraps that even the dogs refused to eat. The outside world knew nothing of his living nightmare. He had nothing or no one to turn to, but his dreams kept him alive–dreams of someone taking care of him, loving him and calling him their son.
TS 362.76092 PEL
For years, Grace has watched the wolves in the woods behind her house. One yellow-eyed wolf – her wolf – is a chilling presence she can’t seem to live without. Meanwhile, Sam has lived two lives: In winter, the frozen woods, the protection of the pack, and the silent company of a fearless girl. In summer, a few precious months of being human . . . until the cold makes him shift back again.
Now, Grace meets a yellow-eyed boy whose familiarity takes her breath away. It’s her wolf. It has to be. But as winter nears, Sam must fight to stay human–or risk losing himself, and Grace, forever.
This suspenseful, romantic fantasy is full of longing, tenderness and passion, and the mythology of the wolf pack.
At 11.35am, Thursday May 4th, Sara′s sister Reenie disappears.
Was she kidnapped? Did she kill herself? Did she simply decide to vanish? Or is her body lying somewhere waiting to be found? How can someone like Reenie just disappear? And are the police really doing everything they can to find her? This is Sara′s story as she searches for answers.
Fascinated by the last words of famous people, 16-year-old Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter leaves his safe, boring life in search of the “Great Perhaps” at the Culver Creek boarding school. Here he makes friends whose lives are anything but safe and boring. And he meets Alaska – wild, unpredictable and beautiful – and falls instantly in love. But then tragedy strikes the close-knit group and everything changes. A moving story about friendship, love and life.
Recommended age: 15+
Bruno is an innocent 9 year old boy, who happens to be the son of the commandant of the Aushwitz concentration camp. Through Bruno’s eyes we experience his confusion about the place where they have come to live and the fence that separates them from the strange people in striped pyjamas on the other side. Desperate for companionship Bruno becomes friends with a young boy on the other side of the fence, a friendship which leads ultimately to horror.
Recommended age: 12+
Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. Since birth Anna has donated blood and bone marrow for her older sister Kate, who has a rare form of leukemia. Anna was genetically engineered to be a perfect match for her sister in an attempt to save Kate’s life. But when a kidney transplant is planned, thirteen-year-old Anna hires a lawyer to sue her parents for the rights to her own body. A gripping court case follows, told from multiple viewpoints, it raises more questions than it answers. This is a controversial, compelling and heartbreaking story of a family in turmoil with an unexpected twist at the end.
Recommended age: 15+
After being savaged by their new English teacher, nicknamed the Pitbull for obvious reasons, Kiffo with his friend Calma, decides to get back at her. While on the trail of the Pitbull the two friends land in some tricky and dangerous situations. This is a great story – both funny and sad.
Recommended age: 13+
Susie Salmon is murdered and from heaven she watches her family cope with their terrible loss. A compelling read!
Recommended age: 15+
An intensely moving and honest story told by a 16-year-old girl dying of leukaemia.
Recommended age: 15+
Callum is a Nought – a second-class citizen in a world run by the ruling Crosses. He is also white. Sephy is a Cross, daughter of one of the most powerful men in the country and she is black. In their world Noughts and Crosses simply don’t mix. So how can their love possibly survive?
Recommended age: 14+
On the outside, Macy Queen is cool and calm. On the inside, she’s breaking. Silently struggling with her dad’s death, and spending the summer apart from her perfect boyfriend, Macy is smiling her way through – she’s ‘fine.’ It’s only when she meets a new group of friends – and artistic, sexy and understanding Wes catches her eye – that she finally lets her guard down and talks about how much she misses her father.
Recommended age: 15+
A novel, written in verse, that describes how it feels to be growing up, grieving and falling in love. The sequel is ‘A place like this.’
Recommended age: 15+
A beautiful and sad story about a boy dying of leukemia.
Recommended age: 12+
Knowing that he is dying, Jess’s grandfather insists on returning to the river he had known as a boy, to finish a special painting and fulfill a lifelong dream. A beautifully written story with a supernatural element and an emotional ending.
Recommended age: 11+
Sal is left devastated when her mother suddenly, and without warning, disappears. Desperate to understand, Sal makes a journey across the country with her grandparents, following the footsteps of her mother. What follows is a heartwarming and heartbreaking story that unravels more than one mystery.
Recommended age: 11+
Ali is missing Aunty Mim, her best friend in the world. She’s also waiting for her first real kiss, for Dad to unlock Aunty Mim’s door and she’s waiting for Jason Delaney. A moving story of loss and love.
Recommended age: 11-13
Balwyn Best Books 
