2008 ALA Best Books for Young Adults (Fiction Part 1)
Discover the top fiction picks from the 2008 ALA Best Books for Young Adults list (Part 1). Explore award-winning titles perfect for teens and young adult readers.
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
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Flight
by Sherman Alexie
On the verge of committing an act of violence, a troubled, orphaned Indian teenager finds himself hurtled through time and into various bodies, before returning to himself, forever altered by his experiences.
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Twisted
by Laurie Halse Anderson
After getting busted for doing graffiti and having to work all summer to pay for the damages, invisible Tyler's physique changes greatly and brings with it unexpected perks, including the attention of his father's boss's daughter, Bethany Millbury, and a change in the unspoken hierarchy at school.
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Thirteen Reasons Why
by Jay Asher
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER **THE BOOK THAT STARTED IT ALL, NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES** “Eerie, beautiful, and devastating.” —Chicago Tribune “A stealthy hit with staying power. . . . thriller-like pacing.” —The New York Times “Thirteen Reasons Why will leave you with chills long after you have finished reading.” —Amber Gibson, NPR’s “All Things Considered” You can’t stop the future. You can’t rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play. Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah's voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he'll find out why. Clay spends the night crisscrossing his town with Hannah as his guide. He becomes a firsthand witness to Hannah's pain, and as he follows Hannah’s recorded words throughout his town, what he discovers changes his life forever. Need to talk? Call 1-800-273-TALK (8255) anytime if you are in the United States. It’s free and confidential. Find more resources at 13reasonswhy.info. Find out how you can help someone in crisis at bethe1to.com.
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A Long Way Gone
by Ishmael Beah
My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life. “Why did you leave Sierra Leone?” “Because there is a war.” “You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?” “Yes, all the time.” “Cool.” I smile a little. “You should tell us about it sometime.” “Yes, sometime.” This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child soldiers. Ishmael Beah used to be one of them. What is war like through the eyes of a child soldier? How does one become a killer? How does one stop? Child soldiers have been profiled by journalists, and novelists have struggled to imagine their lives. But until now, there has not been a first-person account from someone who came through this hell and survived. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, now twenty-five years old, tells a riveting story: how at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
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Evolution, Me & Other Freaks of Nature
by Robin Brande
Your best friend hates you. The guy you liked hates you. Your entire group of friends hates you. All because you did the right thing. Welcome to life for Mena, whose year is starting off in the worst way possible. She's been kicked out of her church group and no one will talk to her—not even her own parents. No one except for Casey, her supersmart lab partner in science class, who's pretty funny for the most brilliant guy on earth. And when Ms. Shepherd begins the unit on evolution, school becomes more dramatic than Mena could ever imagine . . . and her own life is about to evolve in some amazing and unexpected ways. From the Hardcover edition.
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Mistik Lake
by Martha Brooks
Seventeen-year-old Odella is haunted by family secrets. Why doesn't her great-aunt Gloria visit anymore? Why does her mother, Sally, drink so much? Sally's tragic car accident on a frozen lake when she was sixteen seems to have cast a spell over her life that no one can break. Odella tries to hold her family together, but when her mother runs off, the family is left reeling. Then Odella meets Jimmy Tomasson, whose dreams of prophetic flying fish seem to have led him to her. In the heat and tenderness of their deepening feelings and in his belief in her, Odella begins to find the strength to unravel the web of secrets that has ensnared them all. This stunning novel, written in spare, elegant prose and told from multiple points of view, explores the lives of three generations of women in one family, revealing what happens when you don't have the courage to follow your own heart, and what can happen when you do.
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Bloodsong
by Melvin Burgess
The new hope of the Volson clan, Sigurd, battles a highly advanced, gold-hoarding dragon, resulting in his fall into the underworld. But hope remains as Sigurd encounters his true love, Bryony, and accepts his destiny to reunite England.
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Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
by Peter Cameron
It’s time for eighteen-year-old James Sveck to begin his freshman year at Brown. Instead, he’s surfing the real estate listings, searching for a sanctuary—a nice farmhouse in Kansas, perhaps. Although James lives in twenty-first-century Manhattan, he’s more at home in the faraway worlds of Eric Rohmer or Anthony Trollope—or his favorite writer, the obscure and tragic Denton Welch. James’s sense of dislocation is exacerbated by his willfully self-absorbed parents, a disdainful sister, his Teutonically cryptic shrink, and an increasingly vague, D-list celebrity grandmother. Compounding matters is James’s growing infatuation with a handsome male colleague at the art gallery his mother owns, where James supposedly works at his summer job but where he actually plots his escape to the prairie. In the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Booklist has hailed Cameron as “one of the best writers about middle-class youth since Salinger”), Peter Cameron paints an indelible portrait of a teenage hero holding out for a better grownup world. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
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Dragon's Keep
by Janet Lee Carey
In 1145 A.D., as foretold by Merlin, fourteen-year-old Rosalind, who will be the twenty-first Pendragon Queen of Wilde Island, has much to accomplish to fulfill her destiny, while hiding from her people the dragon's claw she was born with that reflects only one of her mother's dark secrets.
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Re-gifters
by Mike Carey
Korean-American Jen Dik Seong, known as Dixie to her friends, puts most of her money and energy into the martial art of hapkido, but she nearly loses her competitive edge when she falls for fellow hapkido enthusiast Adam--a boy who soon makes it obvious he is not worthy of her affection.
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Looking for JJ
by Anne Cassidy
Seventeen-year-old Alice, released from prison with a new identity after serving six years for murdering a child, tries to keep her anonymity from the British tabloids, while haunted by memories of her past trauma.
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Beige
by Cecil Castellucci
From the author of "Boy Proof" comes an edgy novel full of humor and heart. Katy really doesn't want to spend two weeks in L.A. with her father, a recovered addict and drummer for a punk band. But she won't fuss. After all, she is a nice girl--a girl who is, well, beige. Or is she?
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One Whole and Perfect Day
by Judith Clarke
Summary: As her irritating family prepares to celebrate her grandfather's eightieth birthday, sixteen-year-old Lily yearns for just one whole perfect day together.
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Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party
by Ying Chang Compestine
Drawing from her childhood experience, the author brings hope and humor to this fascinating story of a young girl growing up and fighting to survive during the Cultural Revolution in China.
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Derby Girl
by Shauna Cross
Bliss Cavendar takes up Roller Derby and soon embarks on an epic journey full of a few not-so-awesome realities. Now adapted as the feature film "Whip It!" starring Ellen Page ("Juno") and Drew Barrymore, who also directs.
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I Am Rembrandt's Daughter
by Lynn Cullen
In Amsterdam in the mid-1600s, Cornelia's life as the illegitimate child of renowned painter Rembrandt is marked by plague, poverty, and despair at ever earning her father's love, until she sees hope for a better future in the eyes of a wealthy suitor.
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A Swift Pure Cry
by Siobhan Dowd
Set in Ireland in 1984, this novel tells a story of a pregnant teenage girl who is left to care for her younger siblings following the death of their mother and their father's descent into an alcoholic depression.
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Before I Die
by Jenny Downham
A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and carries out a list of things to do before she dies.
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I Love You, Beth Cooper
by Larry Doyle
Denis Cooverman didn't want to give a typical graduation speech, cherishing memories and embracing challenges and crap. So, instead, he stood up in front of his 512 class-mates and their 3,000 relatives and said some-thing really important: "I love you, Beth Cooper." It would have been such a sweet, romantic moment. Except that: Beth, the head cheerleader, has only the vaguest idea who Denis is. And Denis, the captain of the debate team, is so far out of her league he is barely even the same species. And then there's Kevin, Beth's remarkably large boyfriend, in town on furlough from the United States Army. Complications ensue. Denis comes of age overnight in this exhilar-ating, endearing novel that reminds us why we can't wait to escape high school but can never leave it behind.
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This is what I Did
by Ann Dee Ellis
Bullied because of an incident in his past, eighth-grader Logan, an awkward outcast, is unhappy at his new school and has difficulty relating to others until he meets a quirky girl and a counselor who believe in him.
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Touching Snow
by M. Sindy Felin
In her debut novel, Felin tells the story of a young girl coming of age amid the violent waters that run just beneath the surface of suburbia--a story that has the courage to ask how far one will go to protect a loved one.
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For Now
by Gayle Friesen
In this novel by Gayle Friesen, the sequel to Losing Forever, change and heartbreak make Jes's life more confusing than ever.
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Notes for a War Story
by Gipi
" ... an astonishing urban fable of life in a lawless, war-torn nation, heightened by the uncanny artwork of Italy's maestro graphic novel author."--Front inside flap.
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Leonardo's Shadow
by Christopher Grey
Fifteen-year-old Giacomo--servant to Leonardo da Vinci--helps his procrastinating master finish painting "The Last Supper" while also trying to find clues to his parentage and pursue his own career as an artist in late fifteenth-century Milan.
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Your Own, Sylvia
by Stephanie Hemphill
The author interprets the people, events, influences and art that made up the brief life of Sylvia Plath.
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Beowulf
by Gareth Hinds
A retelling in graphic format of the Anglo-Saxon epic about the heroic efforts of Beowulf, son of Edgetheow, to save the people of Heorot hall from the terrible monster, Grendel.
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
by Khaled Hosseini
Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, the #1 New York Times bestseller A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. “Just as good, if not better, than Khaled Hosseini’s best-selling first book, The Kite Runner.”—Newsweek Khaled Hosseini returns with a beautiful, riveting, and haunting novel that confirms his place as one of the most important literary writers today. Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival. A stunning accomplishment, A Thousand Splendid Suns is a haunting, heartbreaking, compelling story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely friendship, and an indestructible love.
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Repossessed
by A. M. Jenkins
In this devilishly funny look at the complexities of being a teen, Jenkins tells the story of an unforgettable--and irresistibly endearing--demon's sojourn on earth, where he learns more than he ever expected about humans and himself.
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How it Happened in Peach Hill
by Marthe Jocelyn
When fifteen-year-old Annie Grey and her "clairvoyant" mother arrive in Peach Hill, New York, in 1924, each finds a reason for wanting to finally settle down, but to reach their goals they will have to do some serious lying and Annie will have to stand up for herself.
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Bone by Bone by Bone
by Tony Johnston
In 1950s Tennessee, ten-year-old David's racist father refuses to let him associate with his best friend Malcolm, an African American boy.
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Mister Pip
by Lloyd Jones
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, on which survival is a daily struggle, eccentric Mr. Watts, the only white man left after the other teachers flee, spends his day reading to the local children from Charles Dickens's classic Great Expectations.
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Alabama Moon
by Watt Key
For as long as 10-year-old Moon can remember, he has lived out in the forest in a shelter with his father. When his father dies, Moon follows his dad's last instructions: to travel to Alaska and find others like himself. An ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
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Firestorm
by David Klass
His mother is not his mother; his father is not his father. If Jack hadn't broken the high school rushing record that night, he never would have known and nothing would have changed. Jack plunges into a space-time-bending game of survival with no way out. The rules are shrouded in secrets. But one thing he learns fast: Trust no one.
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Dreamquake
by Elizabeth Knox
Aided by her family and her creation, Nown, Laura investigates the powerful Regulatory Body's involvement in mysterious disappearances and activities and learns, in the process, the true nature of the Place in which dreams are found. Suggested level: secondary.
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Strays
by Ronald Koertge
Recently orphaned, sixteen-year-old Ted O'Connor is sent to a foster home
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Red Spikes
by Margo Lanagan
A collection of ten tales to take you to places that you do not usually go.
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Skulduggery Pleasant
by Derek Landy
Meet Skulduggery Pleasant Ace Detective Snappy Dresser Razor–tongued Wit Crackerjack Sorcerer and Walking, Talking, Fire-throwing Skeleton —as well as ally, protector, and mentor of Stephanie Edgley, a very unusual and darkly talented twelve-year-old. These two alone must defeat an all-consuming ancient evil. The end of the world? Over his dead body.