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According to seventeen-year- old Louna Barrett, “You can’t measure love by time put in, but by the weight of those moments” (115).  She had only loved Ethan Caruso for a short time, but he was her “once and for all,” until he wasn’t. Since losing Ethan, Louna is prickly, antisocial, and somewhat cynical about love.  Ethan, whose mother had been married multiple times, had been cynical about marriage, but Louna knows a lot about weddings, after having worked summers at her mother’s wedding planning business.   She sees a wedding as a series of special moments, strung together like beads on a chain.  A Natalie BarrettRead More →

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Some books engender an anger and a disgust so intense that readers want to reach inside the pages to yank an abuser right out of a child’s life.  A List of Cages by Robin Roe is one of those books.  Julian Harlow’s Uncle Russell joins Dave Pelzer’s mother from the A Child Called It trilogy and Liam’s father from King of the Screwups by K. L. Going as characters with diseased brains. Having lost his parents in a tragic accident, Julian is orphaned and spends some time in a foster home before his Uncle Russell takes him in.  However, Russell is unfit for parenting, abusingRead More →

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Her brother Nolan is dead, her parents are divorced, her aunt Joan is a “hurricane,” and Mel Hannigan has one of many versions of bipolar disorder, but some things you just don’t tell the world.  In the same spirit with which Terry Spencer Hesser skillfully and credibly illustrates obsessive compulsive disorder in Kissing Doorknobs  and Mark Haddon writes about life for someone coping with autism in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Eric Lindstrom shares his honest and informative novel,  A Tragic Kind of Wonderful.  Books like these, with realistic representations of people who experience mental health issues, can help readers notRead More →

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Set in Manhattan, New York, with scenes from Santa Monica, California, History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera is a deeply unsettling but important book about the total nightmare of life after losing a loved one.  Although th e book features more references to sex than some readers might find necessary, the book captures how love and heartbreak can turn someone crazy and suspicious and how the death of a loved one can make us “the worst kind of alive” (139), a life after death zombie without a brain, heart, light, or direction. Griffin Jennings, a seventeen-year-old with a fixation for even numbersRead More →

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Despite his warm, friendly, and generous nature, junior Lawrence Barry is on the verge of expulsion for his actions at a diversity assembly at Meridian High School while stoned.  Because his father is a powerful attorney of the law firm Barry, Yu and Singh and because his counsellor Mr. Lunley believes Lawrence has potential and simply needs to channel his energies in more positive directions, the expulsion hearing is thwarted.   However, with his dad’s threat of Langdon Military Academy hanging over his head, with Mr. Lunley’s having recruited him for the Buddy Club, and with Principal Stone scrutinizing his every action, Lawrence has to reformRead More →

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The year is 2118 and New York City is home to the Tower, a skyscraper that spans dozens of blocks and has a total of one thousand floors, “the biggest structure on earth, a whole world unto itself” (7). Telling the sprawling story of five teenage tower dwellers of varying ages, genders, races, and tower levels, Katharine McGee intersects their lives into The Thousandth Floor, a drama worthy of comparison to television’s Gossip Girl or Pretty Little Liars. Avery Fuller is the wealthiest of the main cast, living on top of the world on the thousandth floor. It’s no secret to her friends that herRead More →

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Had Molly Rosenberg known that middle school was going to be the high point in her life, she would have tried harder to enjoy it.  Now, she’s a freshman at Santa Monica High School in Southern California, and she’s friendless and living a life haunted by past mistakes and regrets.  Because she suffers from severe anxiety and panic attacks, her service dog Pixel coaxes her to breathe. But life wasn’t always like this.  Before everything changed, the Rosenbergs were a regular family who played Monopoly or snuggled under blankets to watch old movies together.  “After the awful thing that happened last winter” (47), Mom became addictedRead More →

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Joanna Gordon is a high school senior, who is looking forward to her last year with her best friend Dana. Joanna and Dana have experienced a lot together; both girls came out of the closet and have stuck by one another when faced with issues regarding their sexuality. Even Joanna’s father accepts who she is, which means a lot because he is an evangelist with his own radio show. However, Joanna is not the only woman in her dad’s life anymore. Elizabeth Gordon, or as Joanna likes to call her, “Three”, is her dad’s new wife. (She’s his third wife, hence her nickname.) Joanna does not mindRead More →

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Love isn’t all emotion; it is also biology and chemistry, and according to Krystal Sutherland in her debut novel, Our Chemical Hearts, “all love is equal in the brain” (287).  Like hunger and thirst, love drives us to act, and satisfying that craving becomes a goal.  Although we tend to identify love most often with euphoria, that is hardly the only emotion we feel when under its influence. Ecstasy, compassion, surprise, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and despair, all play a role as the brain releases chemicals like pheromones, dopamine, and serotonin. Sutherland’s seventeen-year-old protagonist, Henry Isaac Page experiences these emotions as he swings between highs and lows,Read More →