• Recommended Titles
• After the Death of Anna Gonzales - Terri Fields
  Forty-seven people, including students, teachers, and other school staff, record the aftermath of a high school student's suicide and the preoccupations of teen life. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Aleutian Sparrow - Karen Hesse
  An Aleutian Islander recounts her suffering during World War II in American internment camps designed to "protect" the Aleuts from the invading Japanese. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Ann and Seamus - Kevin Major*
  Based on true events that took place off the treacherous coast of Newfoundland in 1828, when seventeen-year-old Ann Harvey helped her father rescue 163 passengers who were stranded after a ship carrying Irish immigrants ran aground. (Grade 5 - 12)
  
• Annabel Lee - Edgar Allan Poe
  Poe's haunting tale of the loss of a childhood sweetheart, illustrated by Gilles Tibo. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Apprentice's Masterpiece: A Story of Medieval Spain - Melanie Little*
• Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson
  A retelling of the Greek myth of Geryon and Heracles. (Grade 10 - Adult)
  
• Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl - Tanya Lee Stone
  Josie, Nicolette, and Aviva all get mixed up with a senior boy who can talk them into doing almost anything he wants. In a blur of high school hormones and personal doubt, each girl struggles with how much to give up and what ultimately to keep for herself. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
• Black Cat Bone - J. Patrick Lewis
  The life of blues legend Robert Johnson, told in 19 poems. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Braid - Helen Frost
  Two Scottish sisters, living on the island of Barra in the 1850s, relate in alternate voices their experiences after their family is forcibly evicted and separated, with one sister accompanying their parents and younger siblings to Cape Breton and the other staying behind with other family. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Brimstone Journals - Ronald Koertge
  Students at a high school nicknamed Brimstone reveal the violence existing and growing in their lives. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
• Bronx Masquerade - Nikki Grimes
  While studying the Harlem Renaissance, students at a Bronx high school read aloud poems they've written, revealing their innermost thoughts and fears to their classmates. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Burned - Ellen Hopkins
  17-year-old Pattyn, eldest daughter in a large Mormon family, is sent to her aunt's ranch for the summer, where she temporarily escapes her abusive father and finds love and acceptance, only to lose everything when she returns home. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
• By the River - Steven Herrick
  Harry dreams of escaping the sleepy Australian town where he lives with his widowed father and younger brother. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Casey at the Bat - Ernest Lawrence Thayer
  This poem, written in 1888, captures an emotional moment in an everyday game of baseball. (Grade 5 - Adult)
  
• Crank - Ellen Hopkins
  Kristina is seventeen when she “shakes hands with the monster” and starts calling herself “Bree.” Kristina/Bree soon finds that the monster – crystal meth – is more powerful than she ever imagined. Can she regain control of her life? (Grade 8 - 12)
  
• Crazy Man - Pamela Paige Porter*
  Friendship with a mentally ill man helps 11-year-old Emaline cope with being fatherless and injured in a farm accident as well as the death of her dog. (Grade 5 - 8)
  
• Cremation of Sam McGee - Robert Service*
  A legend from the days of the Yukon Gold Rush about what the Arctic cold can do to a man. (Grade 4 - 12)
  
• Dark Sons - Nikki Grimes
  Alternating poems compare and contrast the conflicted feelings of Ishmael, son of the Biblical patriarch Abraham, and Sam, a teenager in New York City, as they try to come to terms with being abandoned by their fathers and with the love they feel for their younger stepbrothers. (Grade 5 - 12)
  
• Dead on Town Line - Leslie Connor
  A teenaged murder victim speaks from her afterlife. (Grade 8 - 12)
  
• Downtown Boy - Juan Felipe Herrera
  From June of 1958 to June of 1959, Juanito tries to stay out of mischief and be good as his family moves around the state of California, never quite feeling at home. (Grade 5 - 10)
  
• Fattening Hut - Pat Lowery Collins
  A teenage girl living on a tropical island runs away to escape her tribe's customs of arranged marriages and female genital mutilation. (Grade 8 - 12)
  
• Frenchtown Summer - Robert Cormier
  A series of vignettes in which the writer reminisces about life as a twelve-year-old boy living in a small town during the hot summer of 1938. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Fruit Bowl Project - Sarah Durkee
  A teacher arranges for a rock superstar to teach her Grade 8 students, who each tell a story about the same topic, in the style of a rap, poem, monologue, screenplay, haiku, fairytale, and more.(Grade 5 - 8)
  
• Geography of Girlhood - Kirsten Smith
  Follow the life of Penny, from ages 14 to 18, exploring first crushes, first dances, first kisses, and the many dangers of growing up. (Grade 8 - 12)
  
• Girl Coming in for a Landing - April Halprin Wayland
  The ups and downs of one adolescent girl's school year. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Hard Hit - Ann Warren Turner
  Tenth-grader Mark's life is perfect... until his father is diagnosed with cancer. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Heaven Looks a Lot Like a Mall - Wendy Mass
  After a severe head injury in gym class, a teen finds herself floating up to what she thinks is heaven, where she begins to reconcile with her past and gain a better perspective of her life. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Hiawatha - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  Verses from Longfellow's epic poem depict the boyhood of Hiawatha. (Grade 3 - Adult)
  
• Highwayman - Alfred Noyes
  Returning by moonlight to the inn where his true love, the landlord's daughter, awaits him, the highwayman is unaware that the king's soldiers also lie in wait for him, concealed in the girl's bedroom. (Grade 5 - Adult)
  
• Hold Me Tight - Lorie Ann Grover
  Ten-year-old Essie has trouble overcoming her fear, guilt and shame when her father abandons their family, a classmate is kidnaped, and then a family friend molests her. Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Home of the Brave - Katherine Applegate
  Kek, a refugee from Sudan, encounters many strange things at the Minneapolis home of his aunt and cousin, and longs for his missing mother, but finds comfort in the company of a cow and her owner.(Grade 4 - 9)
  
• Hugging the Rock - Susan Taylor Brown
  Rachel expresses her feelings about her parents' divorce, living without her mentally ill mother, and her changing attitude towards her father as they both learn to cope with their new family unit. (Grade 5 - 8)
  
• Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll
  Illustrator Stephane Jorisch recasts Carroll's nonsense comedy as a dystopia, setting it in a claustrophobic city among grim-faced people. (Grade 5 - Adult)
  
• Jimi & Me - Jaime Adoff
  After his father's death, twelve-year-old Keith James moves from Brooklyn to a small town where his bi-racial heritage is not accepted, but he finds comfort in the music of Jimi Hendrix and the friendship of a white classmate. (Grade 6 - 11)
  
• Jinx - Margaret Wild
  With the help of her understanding mother and a close friend, Jen eventually outgrows her nickname, Jinx, and deals with the deaths of two boys with whom she had been involved. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
• Keesha's House - Helen Frost
  The stories of seven teenagers who courageously struggle to hold their lives together and overcome their difficulties. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Lady of Shalott - Alfred Tennyson
  The doomed Lady chooses a path of action over the safety of seclusion from Camelot. (Grade 5 to Adult)
  
• Learning to Swim: A Memoir - Ann Turner
  A series of poems convey the feelings of a young girl whose sense of joy and security at the family's summer house is shattered when an older boy who lives nearby sexually abuses her. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Little Green: Growing Up During the Chinese Cultural Revolution - Chun Yu
  Little Green was born at the start of the Cultural Revolution in China and spent her early years with her grandmother in the countryside. (Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Locomotion - Jacqueline Woodson
  Eleven-year-old Lonnie writes about his life after the death of his parents, separated from his younger sister, living in a foster home, and finding his poetic voice at school. (Grade 3 - 7)
  
• Loose Threads - Lorie Ann Grover
  Seventh-grader Kay Garber faces her grandmother's battle with breast cancer while living with her mother and great-grandmother and dealing with everyday junior high school concerns. (Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Love That Dog - Sharon Creech
  A young student comes to love poetry through a personal understanding of what different famous poems mean to him and surprises himself by writing his own inspired poem. (Grade 4 - 8)
  
• Love, Ghosts and Facial Hair - Steven Herrick
  Jack's got a lot on his mind: He's trying to figure out the mystery of the opposite sex, he can't stop wondering about facial hair, and he won't let go of his mother's ghost, even though she died seven years ago. (Grade 8 - 12)
  
• Ludie's Life - Cynthia Rylant
  The life, from childhood to old age, of a poor woman in West Virginia. (Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Make Lemonade - Virginia Euwer Wolff
  In order to earn money for college, fourteen-year-old LaVaughn babysits for a teenage mother. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• One Night - Margaret Wild
  Narrated by alternating characters, this is the story of a teenaged girl who decides to have her baby and care for it on her own after a one night stand results in pregnancy. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
• One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies - Sonya Sones
  Fifteen-year-old Ruby Milliken leaves her best friend, her boyfriend, and her mother's grave in Boston and reluctantly flies to Los Angeles to live with her father, a famous movie star who divorced her mother before Ruby was born. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Out of the Dust - Karen Hesse
  Fourteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression. (Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Pieces of Georgia - Jennifer Bryant
  In journal entries to her mother who died suddenly, thirteen-year-old Georgia reveals how her life changes after she receives a gift membership to a nearby art museum. (Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Place Like This - Steven Herrick
  Jack and Annabel take a post-graduation road trip and end up working for an apple farmer with a pregnant, 16-year-old daughter. (Grade 8 - 12)
  
• Poet Slave of Cuba: A Biography of Juan Francisco Manzano - Margarita Engle
  A fictionalized account based on the autobiography of an extraordinary man, born into slavery in 1797. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Psyche in a Dress - Francesca Lia Block
  Psyche is a young woman searching for her lost love and questioning her true self in a modern retelling of Greek myths. (Grade 9 - Adult)
  
• Reaching for Sun - Tracie Vaughn Zimmer
  Josie, who has cerebral palsy and lives with her mother and grandmother, befriends a boy who moves into one of the rich houses behind her old farmhouse. (Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Realm of Possibility - David Levithan
  A variety of students at the same high school describe their ideas, experiences, and relationships in a series of interconnected stories. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
• Rubber Houses - Ellen Yeomans
  Kit is in high school when her younger brother is diagnosed with cancer. Kit and her family must learn to cope with grief while celebrating the gift of his existence. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Running Back to Ludie - Angela Johnson
  A teenage girl longs for the presence of her mother in her life. (Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Scout - Christine Ford
  After her mother dies, eleven-year-old Cecelia befriends a new boy at school, but soon realizes that the scruffy youth's home life is the reason for his introspective personality, which is so much like her own. (Grade 5 - 8)
  
• Secret of Me - Meg Kearney
  Fourteen-year-old Lizzie wants to know about her birth parents and the story behind her adoption. (Grade 7 - 10)
  
• Seeing Emily - Joyce Lee Wong
  Emily comes to terms with her Chinese heritage when a student from Taiwan spends a year at her American high school. (Grade 6-12)
  
• Seventeen - Liz Rosenberg
  Seventeen-year-old Stephanie journeys from fall to spring and from childhood to womanhood as she experiences first love and deals with her fear of inheriting her mother's mental illness. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
• Shakespeare Bats Cleanup - Ronald Koertge
  When a fourteen-year-old baseball player catches mononucleosis, he discovers that keeping a journal and experimenting with poetry not only helps fill the time, it also helps him deal with life, love, and loss. (Grade 6 - 10)
  
• Shark Girl - Kelly Bingham
  After a shark attack causes the amputation of her right arm, 15-year-old Jane must come to terms with her loss and the changes it imposes on her life. (Grade 6 - 11)
  
• Sister Slam and the Poetic Motormouth Roadtrip - Linda Oatman High
  Best friends and aspiring poets Laura and Twig embark on a road trip from Pennsylvania to New York City after graduating from high school. Enroute, they compete at slam poetry events. (Grade 8 - 12)
  
• Sold - Patricia McCormick
  Sold into prostitution, Lakshmi lives a nightmare and gradually forms friendships with the other girls that enable her to survive in this terrifying new world. (Grade 9 - Adult)
  
• Something about America - Maria Testa
  After her father organizes a protest against a hate group in a neighbouring town, a Serbian immigrant teen and her family are heartened by the public's response and support. (Grade 6 - 9)
  
• Song of the Sparrow - Lisa Ann Sandell
  The tale of Elaine of Ascolat, who will one day be known as The Lady of Shalott, starts out with her life as a motherless tomboy in Arthur's encampment. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Soul Moon Soup - Lindsay Lee Johnson
  After her father leaves and Phoebe and her mother struggle to survive in the city, Phoebe finally goes to the country to live with her grandmother, where she learns family secrets and hopes her mother will return for her. (Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Splintering - Eireann Corrigan
  Relates, in alternating brother-sister perspectives, the events and after-effects of an intruder's violent attack on a family. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
• Street Love - Walter Dean Myers
  This story is set against a background of street gangs and poverty in Harlem in which seventeen-year-old African American Damien takes a bold step to ensure that he and his new love will not be separated. (Grade 8 - 12)
  
• Sweetgrass Basket - Marlene Carvell
  Two Mohawk sisters describe their lives at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, established in 1879 to educate Native Americans, as they try to assimilate into white culture and one of them is falsely accused of stealing. (Grade 5 - 10)
  
• Taking of Room 114 - Mel Glenn
  A class of seniors have been taken hostage by their high school history teacher. (Grade 8 - 10)
  
• Things Left Unsaid - Stephanie Hemphill
  After a lifetime of conforming to the image of what her parents and high school friends want her to be, Sarah must come to terms with her own identity when her destructive best friend tries to commit suicide. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Today and Today - Issa
  A selection of haiku written by Issa, a Japanese poet born in 1763, and arranged and illustrated by G. Brian Karas to tell of a year in the life of one family. (Grade 3 - adult)
  
• Walking on Glass - Alma Fullerton*
  While his mother is in a coma after a failed suicide attempt, her son grapples with the question of euthanasia. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
• Way a Door Closes - Hope Anita Smith
  Thirteen-year-old CJ struggles to cope with his father's desertion of his family. (Grade 4 - 8)
  
• What I Believe - Norma Fox Mazer
  Vicki faces her problems by writing poems and journal entries about the family's personal and financial crises, including the loss of her father's job and the selling of their home. (Grade 4 - 9)
  
• What My Mother Doesn’t Know - Sonya Sones
  These sharp, funny, and tragic poems tell of Sophie's sometimes painful but always passionate journey of self-discovery. (Grade 6 - 9)
  
• Who Will Tell My Brother? - Marlene Carvell
  During his lonely crusade to remove offensive mascots from his high school, an Aboriginal teenager learns about his heritage, his ancestors and his place in the world. (Grade 7 - 10)
  
• Witness - Karen Hesse
  Various people express their viewpoints when the Ku Klux Klan infiltrates their small Vermont town in the 1920s. (Grade 6 - 12)
  
• Wolf - Steven Herrick
  Sixteen-year-old Lucy, living in the shadow of her violent father, experiences a night of tenderness, danger, and revelation as she and Jake, her fifteen-year-old neighbor, search for a legendary wolf in the Australian outback. (Grade 7 - 12)
  
• Worlds Afire - Paul Janeczko
  The story of a horrific circus fire in Connecticut that killed 167 people and injured more than 500 in 1944. (Grade 4 - 8)
  
• Yellow Star - Jennifer Roy
  From 1939, when Syvia is four, to 1945 when she is ten, a Jewish girl and her family struggle to survive in Poland's Lodz ghetto during the Nazi occupation. (Grade 5 - 9)
  
• Your Own Sylvia - Stephanie Hemphill
  A verse portrait of Sylvia Plath, a young American poet who died by her own hand in 1963 and passed into myth. (Grade 8 - 12)
  
• Zane's Trace - Allan Wolf
  Believing he has killed his grandfather, Zane Guesswind embarks on a road trip to his mother's grave, where he intends to kill himself. He meets assorted dead ancestors along the way who help him discover who he really is. (Grade 9 - 12)
  
  
  
• Web Sites
• Verse Novel List from Gold Creek School, Australia
  Includes reviews by teens.
  

*denotes Canadian author; updated October 2008