Booklist for Teens Grades 11-12


Fiction
Title: Beautiful Creatures
Author: Kami Garcia and Marcia Stohl
Summary: Ethan has nightmares about a mysterious girl who then appears at his small-town South Carolina high school with secrets and an impending curse slated to take place on her sixteenth birthday.


Title: Book Thief
Author: Marcus Zusak
Summary: In Nazi Germany, Death collects souls and watches over orphaned Liesel as she and her foster parents struggle to survive the hardships of war.


Title: Chime
Author: Franny Billingsley
Summary: Briony, the reverend's daughter, believes that she is a witch. Will her newfound love for Eldric prevent her from using her power to save their community? Or will she be hanged for practicing witchcraft?


Title: Crank
Author: Ellen Hopkins
Summary: While visiting her drug-dealing dad in Albuquerque, Kristina Snow falls for a boy who introduces her to crank (crystal meth). Her wild alter-ego Bree can't resist the high meth gives her which soon leads her along a perilous path of self-destruction.


Title: Glimpse
Author: Carol Lynch Williams
Summary: When Hope walks in on her older sister Lizzie holding a gun, she realizes how desperate her sister is. While her sister is hospitalized for her suicidal thoughts, Hope struggles to understand the reason for her sister's pain and silence.


Title: If I Stay
Author: Gayle Forman
Summary: After a terrible car accident, Mia finds herself outside her comatose body trying to decide whether she should fight to live or die and join her family.


Title: Imani All Mine
Author: Connie Porter
Summary: Single mother Tasha, fifteen, raises her daughter, Imani (meaning "faith"), in the violent ghetto of Buffalo, New York.


Title: Joy Luck Club
Author: Amy Tan
Summary: Four immigrant women from China form a "Joy Luck Club" to play mah jong and share stories. As the next generation hear these stories, they gain insight into understanding their old-fashioned mothers.


Title: Kite Runner
Author: Khaled Hosseini
Summary: As an adult, who is a successful novelist in California, Amir is haunted by the memories of his childhood friend, Hassan, who he lost of track of when Amir's family fled Afghanistan during the time of the Soviet invasion.


Title: Little Brother
Author: Cory Doctorow
Summary: After a terrorist attack in San Francisco, Marcus is picked up and interrogated by Homeland Security, then released into a newly formed police state, prompting him to use his cyber-hacking skills to fight the socially oppressive government.


Title: Marcelo in the Real World
Author: Francisco X. Stork
Summary: Seventeen-year-old autistic Marcelo prefers his special-ed classes and his job at a therapeutic riding stable, but his father wants him to work in his law office's mailroom and attend mainstream high school.


Title: Northern Light
Author: Jennifer Donnelly
Summary: In 1906, sixteen-year-old Mattie is torn between duty to her family and her longing to become a writer when she is given a packet of letters that hold the key to a woman's drowning and a man's disappearance.


Title: Secret Life of Bees
Author: Sue Monk Kidd
Summary: Fourteen-year-old Lily and her black nanny Rosaleen flee from Lily's abusive father and their racist town to Tiburon, South Carolina where three black women beekeepers take them in and treat them like family.


Title: Shift
Author: Jennifer Bradbury
Summary: Two best friends celebrate their graduation from high school with a cross country bicycle trip, until one of them mysteriously disappears.


Title: Tamar
Author: Mal Peet
Summary: Fifteen-year-old Tamar inherits a box of clues from her grandfather, who worked for the Dutch Resistance during WWII, and discovers a story of passion and betrayal.


Title: Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale
Author: Holly Black
Summary: Ever since she was a little girl, tough girl Kaye has believed in faeries. But when Kaye and her mom move back home to the beach, she soon learns the dark and gritty truths about this fantasy world, and her destiny as their sacrifice.


Title: War Dances
Author: Sherman Alexie
Summary: This collection of short stories and poems create a realistic portrayal of challenges men face, some focused in the Native American community. In the title story, a son comes to terms with his father's fatal alcoholism, while dealing with his own mortality.


Title: White Cat
Author: Holly Black
Summary: Cassel Sharpe, the odd man out in a family of magic working con men, dreams of a white cat that reminds him of his murdered friend. But Cassel's memories have been manipulated, and he must use his quick wit and con artist abilities to figure out what's real. Can he out-con his family?


Title: Wild Ginger
Author: Anchee Min
Summary: Two girls, Maple and Wild Ginger, struggle through their teen years in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution.


Title: Will Grayson, Will Grayson
Author: John Green and David Levithan
Summary: Two teen boys with completely different personalities, but both named Will Grayson, meet and find their lives increasingly entangled.


Title: Wintergirls
Author: Laurie Halse Anderson
Summary: Cassie won the competition with her best friend Lia to see who could be the skinniest, but died from the complications of anorexia. Her ghost still haunts Lia, whose self-destructive behavior is spiraling out of control.


Title: World War Z: an Oral History of the Zombie War
Author: Max Brooks
Summary: Max Brooks interviews military, political, and civilian survivors of the fictitious Zombie War, an epic ten-year battle that almost wiped out humanity.


Non-Fiction
Title: Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
Author: Eric Schlosser
Summary: A pivotal book that exposes what fast food has done to our health, economy, and culture.


Title: In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer
Author: Irene Gut Opdyke
Summary: This is the story of Irene Gut Opdyke, a young Polish girl who was forced to work in a Nazi work camp after her country was invaded. Irene used her position in the kitchen to hide Jews and supply them with necessary food and supplies, bringing hope to a dismal situation.


Title: Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Author: Art Spiegelman
Summary: Cartoonist Spiegelman presents his parents' harrowing story of surviving the Holocaust through illustrations, with the Nazis as cats and the Jewish people as mice.


Title: Persepolis and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
Author: Marjane Satrapi
Summary: These are two autobiographical graphic novels. The first takes place in Iran when the author is between the ages of age six and fourteen, living through the Islamic revolution of 1979. The second installment covers the period from age fourteen to after college graduation when the Iran-Iraq war forced her to flee to Europe for safety.


Title: Radioactive Boy Scout: The True Story of a Boy and His Backyard Nuclear
Author: Ken Silverstein
Summary: David Hahn, a teenage boy scout obsessed with science, began work on the Atomic Energy badge by making a model of a nuclear reactor. Not satisfied with that, he set out to build a real one unaware of the environmental hazards.


Title: Seabiscuit: An American Legend
Author: Laura Hillenbrand
Summary: Seabiscuit, who ran fifty races before he began winning, rises to the heights of fame and fortune as the fastest race horse in America.


Title: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
Author: Mary Roach
Summary: What happens if you donate your body to science? From dissection in medical anatomy classes to serving as a crash test dummy, to historical uses such as testing the guillotine, this is an interesting and entertaining expose of cadavers.


Title: True Notebooks
Author: Mark Salzman
Summary: A writer's memoir of teaching writing to boys who are inmates at a Los Angeles correctional facility, complete with writing excerpts from the incarcerated teens.