coming of age fiction

When Mary Porter-Malcolm, a teen obsessed with nineteenth-century literature, starts at a new high school, she depends on her favorite literature to help her survive. She soon discovers that real life is very different from classic fiction.

About the time her parents tell her they can no longer afford her tuition at a prestigious Beijing international boarding school, Chinese American Alice Sun realizes that she can turn invisible. With all of her hopes riding on getting a scholarship to a prestigious school, getting a good job, and lifting her family out of poverty, Alice decides to use her abilities for profit, by hiring herself out to her classmates. However, when the jobs get increasingly dangerous and morally questionable, she begins to wonder if the sacrifice is worth it.

Belly spends the summer she turns sixteen at the beach just like every other summer of her life, but this time things are very different.

Confined by high-powered parents, overachieving siblings, and a controlling boyfriend, sixteen-year-old Izzy has learned to keep a low profile and her thoughts to herself. When she accidentally enters a comedy club on open mic night, Izzy performs and meets a new group of aspiring comedians who quickly become her friends. Keeping her newfound activities a secret, Izzy begins a desperate ploy to keep her two lives separate, but must eventually reckon with her suspicious boyfriend and best friend.

Presents Charles Dickens's classic in which Pip, an orphan in Victorian England, learns that a mysterious benefactor has ensured that he will be educated and raised as a gentleman.

South American journalist Paul Faustino begins his interview with World Cup Soccer star El Gato and learns a fantastic story of a young, lonely boy growing up in the middle of a rain forest who wandered upon a mysterious soccer field and an apparition that appeared to him daily.

During the 1967 school year, on Wednesday afternoons when all his classmates go to either Catechism or Hebrew school, seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood stays in Mrs. Baker's classroom where they read the plays of William Shakespeare and Holling learns much of value about the world he lives in.

During the political turmoil in 1976 Jamaica, Irie and Jilly must navigate their opposing upbringings as they fall in love and choose between the futures decided for them and the futures they desire.

Chinese immigrant Ivy Lin comes to America and deeply wants to assimilate, especially when she meets golden boy Gideon Speyer and starts crushing on him. In order to get ahead in life and out from under the thumb of her stereotypical "Tiger Mom," Ivy Lin's grandmother, Meifeng, helps her learn the art of shoplifting, and she becomes proficient and addicted to winning and wealth. Years later, Ivy begins dating Gideon, but just as things start going well, another man from Ivy's past shows up, one with his own set of rules and from a completely different and equally alluring world. Ivy must choose.