bildungsromans

A traumatic event near the end of the summer has a devastating effect on Melinda's freshman year in high school.

Collects two love novels in which two very different girls search for their own identities and long for romance. One has it all, seemingly, until an unexpected romance makes her question everything she believes in; the other is hiding a secret, one that will destroy her own illusions and force her to listen to the truths of others in her life.

Each year, the people of the Protectorate think they must sacrifice an infant to Xan, the witch who lives in the forest. Xan finds the abandoned babies and feels sorry for them, feeding them starlight and delivering them to good homes on the other side of the forest. One year, though, she accidentally gives one baby moonlight, which imbues her with magic. Xan and her friends, Glerk the wise swamp monster and Fyrian, a tiny dragon, decide to raise baby Luna by themselves. However, just as Luna's magic is emerging at her thirteenth birthday, Xan goes to gather the next baby at the same time a young man arrives to kill the witch and end the sacrifices. Glerk and Fyrian try to save Xan, but it is up to Luna to protect those who raised her.

As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself.

Saul Indian Horse is in trouble, and there seems to be only one way out. As he journeys his way back through his life as a northern Ojibway, from the horrors of residential school to his triumphs on the hockey rink, he must question everything he knows.

"Juliet, a self-identified queer, Bronx-born Puerto Rican-American, comes out to her family to disastrous results the night before flying to Portland to intern with her feminist author icon--whom Juliet soon realizes has a problematic definition of feminism that excludes women of color"--Provided by publisher.

While spending a summer with her famous mother and her criminal boyfriend, Sydney Reilly, age fifteen, finds love with Nicco but her premonition of something bad coming proves dreadfully accurate.

"Hidden away from a harsh and chaotic outside world, five young people have cobbled together a home for themselves in an abandoned airplane, a relic of their country's tumult. At seventeen, Elimane, the bookworm, is as street-smart as he is wise: the group's father figure. Clever Khoudimata is mother by default, helping scheme how to keep the younger boys-athletic, pragmatic Ndevui and thoughtful Kpindi-and especially little Namsa, their newest and youngest member-safe and fed. When Elimane makes himself of service to the shadowy William Handkerchief, it seems as if the small group may be able to keep the world at bay and their ad hoc family intact. But when Khoudi comes under the spell of the 'Beautiful People' -the fortunate sons and daughters of the powerful and corrupt-the desire to resume an interrupted coming of age and forge her own destiny proves impossible to resist"--Provided by publisher.

"A gang leader's son finds his effort to go straight for the sake of his child challenged by a loved one's brutal murder"--Provided by publisher.

"It's 1970's Chicago. Eleven-year-old Matasha Wax is in the sixth grade and just starting to feel the pressures of growing up. Her best friend Jean has been blowing her off, while her parents are in a standoff over her mother's desire to adopt a refugee from Vietnam. And while the bullies in school have started to grow breasts and inches, Matasha remains a puny four-foot-four--which means she will need growth hormone shots, and she is terrified of needles . . . a poignant look at resilience in the face of adolescent loneliness, divorce, bullying and slow development"--Amazon.