National Network for Equitable Library Service

After the death of her boyfriend, sixteen-year old Valentine stops going to school, quits seeing her friends and, finally, won't leave her bed. Desperate for her daughter to recover, Valentine's mother takes her on a trek in Thailand. In the mountains north of Chiang Mai, Valentine finds a world she didn't know existed, where houses are on stilts and elephants still roam wild. She learns about the Burmese civil war and the relentless violence against the Karen and Rohingya peoples.

Just as fourteen-year-old Lucy is starting to figure out life after her mom's death, her dad ships her off to Cape John, her mom's hometown, for the summer. Worse, she has to live with her nutty great-aunt Josie, who doesn't cook edible food or suffer fools. Soon Lucy meets Colin, freshly moved from the West Coast, who's digging an enormous hole in his new yard. He spends every day digging deeper in protest of his family's unilateral decision to move to this tiny oceanside community.

Fourteen-year-old Tanya Kofsky is invisible. She hates that no one listens to her, at home or at her new school. So as student elections get underway, Tanya starts secretly painting controversial images on the walls of the school. Soon everyone is talking about this amazing artist with a lot to say. The election results turn out to be a catalyst for more rebellion. And not just from students. Teachers, tired of the principal's authoritarian leadership, start promoting self-expression.

High-school football star Matt Barnes was on the top of the world until a freak snowboarding accident ended his promising sports career and left him with a permanent limp. As he struggles to accept his changed body, Matt becomes depressed and isolated. Instead of college football camp, he faces a summer job at the local golf club. Then by chance Matt lands an internship at the Justice Project, an organization that defends the wrongly convicted. The other intern is his high-school nemesis, Sonya Livingstone, a quick-witted social activist with little time for jock culture.

Seventeen-year-old Erich is a prisoner of war working at a northern Alberta logging camp. Twelve-year-old Max goes to school-reluctantly-in the nearby town. The two would be unlikely friends, except that neither has anyone else to turn to. At the height of World War II, nobody wants to befriend a German. It doesn't matter that Erich was forced into the military by his father, or that Max was proudly born in Canada. They are both easy targets for the locals' grief and anger against the Nazis.

Seeking cell phone reception after a remote plane crash, city kid Jared and local Kyle scale a hill that Kyle's Cree grandmother has forbidden him to climb. Coming down the next day, the boys find that the plane has disappeared, the forest has changed, and something is hunting them. A modern imagining of the Cree Wîhtiko legend. Jared's plane has crashed in the Alberta wilderness, and Kyle is first on the scene. When Jared insists on hiking up the highest hill in search of cell phone reception, Kyle hesitates; his Cree grandmother has always forbidden him to go near it.

Seventeen-year-old Nova Abbott grew up dancing barefoot in the backyard with her aunt Ivy, whose dreams of becoming a professional ballerina were cut short by cystic fibrosis. Nova is invited to attend a prestigious ballet school's summer intensive program. She is a bit overwhelmed by New York City: the bustle of people, the talent of the other dancers, the demands of the instructors and being separated from her beloved aunt, whose health is deteriorating rapidly.

For Amber Fang, life used to be simple: study library science by day, read by night and, when she got hungry, enjoy an ethical meal straight from the jugular. Her mother taught her well. It's just good manners for vampires to eat only murderers. But now her mom has vanished, and Amber is alone. Her contract work as an assassin has been terminated. But the secret organization ZARC is still trying to hunt her down, using algorithms, drones and a murderess with metal hands.

After moving into a dank and drafty basement suite in West Edmonton with her truck- driving father, nasty stepmother and taciturn twin brother, Ash, seventeen-year-old Greta doesn't have high expectations for her last year of high school. When she blacks out at a party and is told the next day that she's had sex, she thinks things can't get any worse. She's wrong.

Alexia Falls is eighteen, living in her parents' New York penthouse and working with superstar boyband The Keep. But with her heart set on independence and a career behind the camera, she trades it all for a take-it-or-leave-it internship at London's Bright Star Productions. There, she meets fellow intern Greta. Greta's East End upbringing couldn't have been more different from Alexia's, but she's every bit as hungry for her big break. But both girls have secrets.