Jr. High Reads

When thirteen-year-old African American Coal discovers he can turn invisible, he searches for answers about his past with the help of his friends and his new foster family.

"A girl named Petra Pena, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita. But Petra's world is ending. Earth has been destroyed by a comet, and only a few hundred scientists and their children - among them Petra and her family - have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race. Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet - and the discovery that she is the only person...

When the group dynamic among Jorge's friends starts to shift, he must learn to balance what his friends expect of him and what he really wants.

Living in a "perfect" world without social ills, a boy approaches the time when he will receive a life assignment from the Elders, but his selection leads him to a mysterious man known as the Giver, who reveals the dark secrets behind the utopian facade

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved, and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in. When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz--a certain death sentence--Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering...

In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

In a discontented kingdom, civil war is brewing. To unify the divided people, Conner, a nobleman of the court, devises a cunning plan to find an impersonator of the king's long-lost son and install him as a puppet prince. Four orphans are recruited to compete for the role, including a defiant boy named Sage. Sage knows that Conner's motives are more than questionable, yet his life balances on a sword's point -- he must be chosen to play the prince...

Two years after a tragedy saddles him with viral fame, twelve-year-old Simon O'Keeffe and his family move to Grin And Bear It, Nebraska, where the internet and cell phones are banned so astrophysicists can scan the sky for signs of alien life, and where, with the help of two new friends, a puppy, and a giant radio telescope, Simon plans to restart the narrative of his life.

"Have you ever noticed that there are unwritten rules that tell boys how to act, think, and feel? Nobody knows where they came from, but one day--BAM!--you suddenly feel these invisible forces pushing you to follow the rules of masculinity, even if they don't make you happy. This get-real guidebook isn't about learning the rules of the Boys' Club--it's about UNLEARNING them and figuring out how to be brave...smart...cool...confident...strong."-- Page...

Thirteen-year-old Bina faces her first summer without her best friend, Austin, who has left for soccer camp.