National Network for Equitable Library Service

Owen’s plan to sail away on an adventure puts him on a collision course with some very dangerous people. When Owen’s parents leave him on his own for a week, the sixteen-year-old gets bored and hatches a crazy idea: sneak onto the yacht that’s visiting the sleepy Pacific Coast island where he lives and stow away on an adventure! Once on board the vessel, Owen quickly finds this is anything but innocent fun. The ship is packed with teenagers from Central America, and it looks like Owen has stumbled into a people-smuggling operation.

A fatal collision — who’s to blame? Two bodies, two souls switch in search of justice. When fifteen-year-old Hallie gets knocked flying by a Hurricane SUV, her life ends without her ever having kissed a boy. At an otherworldly carnival, she meets and argues with the eighty-two-year-old driver, Susan. Both return to life, only with one catch — they’ve swapped bodies. Now Hallie has wrinkled skin and achy joints while Susan deals with a forehead zit and a crush on a guy who’s a player. Hallie faces a life in a long-term care residence. Susan gets picked up for shoplifting.

Dating, fashion, and drama: Clementine never has a dull day at the Parsons School of Design. When Clementine Liu arrives in New York City to study at the Parsons School of Design, she knows that she’s found her place. It isn’t long before she meets her fashionista soulmate, the loud and charismatic Jake, and Jonathan, a dreamy fashion photographer who turns her world upside down. Between schoolwork and glitzy fashion shows, Clementine launches a blog, Bonjour Girl, and her wit, originality, and flair quickly catapult the site to cult status.

It is the summer of 1933 and young Haven Cattrell, seeking work, finds himself abandoned in the small northern Ontario town of Davisville. At an exclusive summer camp for girls he befriends Wetherby Moss and his son Jude who introduce him to the joys and heartaches of jazz. Jazz had taken a hard blow, during the first-half of the 1930s. Although there was still work to be had for some in places like New York, musicians in other parts of the country were barely existing on what venues remained.

The terror of fire is known to all but when fire erupts into its most terrifying form, Rank 6, mayhem and death are often not far behind. So the question is: Why would someone willingly approach an inferno that swirls with fireballs and whirls with temperatures that can reach 1000 degrees Celsius? For Emily who makes such a decision, there is no quick, easy answer. She already knows something about destructive power. Her struggles with depression and her own suicidal thoughts had recently brought her face to face with destruction and death.

Seventeen-year-old Jemma's older brother took her in when she needed to get away from her abusive ex-boyfriend, Razor. All Jemma wants now is to be a good mom to her baby daughter, Violet. But one night she needs to go out, just for a few minutes, to get diapers and ice cream. On her way back, she witnesses the drive-by shooting of a kid, Kwame, who lives in the same building. The driver is Razor. Jemma is terrified. If she tells anyone what she saw, they'll know she left her baby alone and she might lose custody. But if she doesn't, Kwame's killer will go free.

Howard is a lonely, geeky tenth-grader dealing with a father who's had some kind of breakdown, a flaky, overprotective mother and frightening waking dreams. Then he meets Cate, a strange girl who convinces him that he is an Adept, which means he can communicate through dreams with other dimensions and, under certain circumstances, travel between them. Howard discovers that our world is only one of several dimensions swirling in time and space, and that one of the others, peopled by unimaginably powerful monsters, is approaching Earth for the first time in millennia.

Seventeen-year-old Christina McBurney has led a sheltered life. But when her twin brother, Jonathan, dies of consumption, Christina, unwilling to be farmed out as a nursemaid or teacher, runs away from home and her destiny. In Owen Sound she boards the Asia, a steamship that transports passengers and freight throughout the Great Lakes. She doesn't really have a plan other than to get to Sault Ste. Marie. She'll figure things out once she's settled. But a violent storm suddenly rises on Georgian Bay, and the overloaded and top-heavy steamship begins to sink.

Fifteen-year-old Natalie is obsessed with ballet and plans to spend the entire summer in dance class with her two best friends. But when her mom gets a job out of town, Natalie gets shipped off to stay with cousins she barely knows. Natalie is thrilled when her cousins invite her to join them at the local dance studio. But it turns out it's not a ballet class; it's Irish dance. Skeptical at first, Natalie is surprised to learn she really enjoys the new dance style and agrees to take part in an upcoming competition.

Seventeen-year-old Lucy "Lucky" Graves is devoted to her championship rugby team, but her dreams of a scholarship are destroyed when she breaks her leg during an important game. If it doesn't heal properly, Lucy could be benched for the rest of the year. Goodbye pro career, goodbye college, goodbye future. Without rugby, who is she? Now her anxiety is getting worse, and a past trauma has resurfaced to haunt her. Lucy needs to get real about what happened when she was twelve, and about what it really means to be a team player.