National Network for Equitable Library Service

Fourteen-year-old Paisley loves to sing. She dreams of being a pop star just like her idol, Denzi, who also grew up in the small town of Stonehill. The problem is, Paisley suffers from severe stage fright. She can only sing in private. When word gets out that a famous Stratford actor who has worked with Denzi is staying at a local B&B, Paisley decides it's time to face her fears. She convinces the actor to tutor her and signs up to sing in a high-profile fundraiser.

When Emily, Tess, Cam and Dylan decide to ignore the new town curfew during their Friday-night game of hide-and-seek, they get more than they bargained for. Down by the river, they witness a shady deal go down involving some criminal types who recently moved into their neighborhood. When the teens are discovered, they are hunted through the dark streets and back alleys. They will have to use all their hide-and-seek skills to save each other. Ultimately, Emily, the youngest of the group and the best hider, discovers that sometimes staying hidden is the best way to escape.

Brett is president of her school's Unity Club. When a new group home for at-risk youth opens in the neighborhood, Brett becomes friends with Jude, one of the boys who lives at the home. After a series of acts of vandalism, the community starts demanding that the group home be shut down. Brett doesn't believe that Jude, or any of the other teens, is responsible, but when an elderly woman is seriously injured, Brett begins to have doubts.

Raised in a polygamous community, Jon starts to question the rules of his faith. After he is caught kissing a girl, he is forced to flee his town and the only life he knows. He finds a community of other Lost Boys, or "polygs," but is utterly unprepared for life outside his community of Unity. He spirals into a life of numbing booze, drugs and homelessness. When he hits rock bottom, someone from his past enters his new life and helps him find his way. Jon and several of the novel's other characters were introduced in Shelley Hrdlitschka's earlier novel Sister Wife.

Fourteen-year-old Rose is sure she's going to become a folk-music sensation, with her best friend, Shilo, at her side. But first she needs to convince her mom to keep paying for her expensive violin lessons. Her mom wants her to join the youth symphony and focus on classical music, in preparation for a music degree at university. When Rose enters a fiddle competition with a unique prize for the winner, she hopes to show her mom she can really can make it as a folk musician.

The Third Act deals with the intercultural struggles faced by Chinese students studying in North America in the present day and by an American playwright, Neil Peterson, caught up in the Nanjing Massacre of 1937. The contemporary story focuses on three Chinese friends (Tone, Pike and Theresa) who grapple in their own ways with the pressure to succeed in an unfamiliar culture. The historical tale concerns Peterson's effort to find his literary voice and save the woman he loves amidst the chaos and horror of the fall of Nanjing in the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Sixteen-year-old Jolene, named after the girl in the Dolly Parton song, is from a long line of lowlifes, but at least they're musical lowlifes. Her mother is a tanning-salon manager who believes she can channel her karaoke habit into a professional singing career. Jolene's dad, a failed bass player, has gone back to the family demolition business and lives by the company motto: "We do not build things; we only tear them down." But Jolene and her big brother, Matt, are true musicians, writing songs together that make everything Jo hates about their lives matter less.

After years of struggle by Blanchfleur to maintain its independence, the idyllic walled city of Aahimsa, a community of girls and women dedicated to making a life of peace free of the brutality and aggression of outsiders, and its prospering Manuhome, are suddenly victims of a brutal surprise attack by the forces of The World Federation of City States. Mabon and Nora are in hiding outside the city where they witness all the horrors of the assault. Adam, their adoptive son, is no longer with them, having been placed under the protection of Doctor Ueland at the Manuhome.

Inspired by the terrible breakups around her, sixteen-year-old Lizzie, strapped for cash and itching to go on the school's band trip to NYC, teams up with her best friend, Willa, to create a genius business: personalized gift baskets--breakup baskets--sent from dumper to dumpee. The Goodbye Girls operate in secret, and business is booming. But it's not long before someone begins sabotaging The Goodbye Girls, sending impossibly cruel baskets to seemingly random targets, undermining everything Lizzie and Willa have built and jeopardizing their anonymity.

Abandoned on the steps of a Belgian convent as a baby, thirteen-year-old Grace has grown up among the nuns. But her days as a caretaker and companion for her older sister, Dotty, have come to a sad end with Dotty's death, and now Grace is living among the girls who attend the convent's boarding school-the very same girls who taunted and bullied her sister for having Down syndrome. Grace desperately wants to know who left her at the convent; she wants a family and to not feel alone in the world.