I Beat the Odds- The NFL athlete made famous by
the book and movie "
The Blind Side" reflects on
the
disparity between his youth and his present-day circumstances, sharing
perspectives on his inner-city childhood, relationship with his adoptive
family, and views on role models
The Knife and the Butterfly- After a brawl with a rival gang, sixteen-year-old Azael, a member of Houston's MS-13 gang
and the
son of illegal Salvadoran immigrants, wakes up in an unusual juvenile
detention center where he is forced to observe another inmate through a
one-way mirror.
DJ Rising- Sixteen-year-old Marley Diego-Dylan's career as "
DJ Ice" is skyrocketing, but his mother's heroin addiction keeps dragging him back to earth.
Bitter End- When seventeen-year-old Alex starts dating Cole, a new boy at her high
school, her two closest friends increasingly mistrust him as the
relationship grows more serious.
Clean- A group of teens in a Seattle-area rehabilitation center form an
unlikely friendship as they begin to focus less on their own problems
with drugs and alcohol by reaching out to help a new member, who seems
to have even deeper issues to resolve.
Shine- When her best friend falls victim to a vicious hate crime,
sixteen-year-old Cat sets out to discover the culprits in her small
North Carolina town.
Variant-After years in foster homes, seventeen-year-old Benson Fisher applies to
New Mexico's Maxfield Academy in hopes of securing a brighter future,
but instead he finds that the school is a prison and no one is what he
or she seems.
Going Underground- Interest in a new girl and pressure from his parole officer cause
seventeen-year-old Del, a gravedigger, to recall and face the "sexting"
incident three years earlier that transformed him from a straight-A
student-athlete into a social outcast and felon.
The Girl of Fire and Thorns- A fearful sixteen-year-old princess discovers her heroic destiny after being married off to
the king
of a neighboring country in turmoil
and pursued by enemies seething with dark magic.
Anna and the French Kiss- When
Anna's romance-novelist father
sends her to an elite American boarding school in Paris for her senior
year of high school, she reluctantly goes,
and meets an amazing boy who becomes her best friend, in spite of
the fact that they both want something more.
Ashfall- After the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano destroys his city and
its surroundings, fifteen-year-old Alex must journey from Cedar Falls,
Iowa, to Illinois to find his parents and sister, trying to survive in a
transformed landscape and a new society in which all the old rules of
living have vanished.
