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Last Updated March 15, 2009

• 796.5223028 R164 - Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Aaron Ralston
  Aron Ralston's searing account of his six days trapped in one of the most remote spots in America, and how one inspired act of bravery brought him home.
• 796.8155 P777 - American Shaolin: Flying Kicks, Buddhist Monks, and the Legend of Iron Crotch by Matthew Polly
  Bill Bryson meets Bruce Lee in this raucously funny story of one scrawny American's quest to become a kung fu master at China's legendary Shaolin Temple.
• B B365 - A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ismael Beah
  At 12 years of age, Ishmael, is forced to join Sierra Leone's army in their brutal civil war or starve to death. A journey from a normal boy to a drug addicted killing machine and back.
• ACITO - How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater by Mark Acito
  A deliciously funny romp of a novel about one overly theatrical and sexually confused New Jersey teenager’s larcenous quest for his acting school tuition.
• ALLEN - Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
  Orphaned at birth, Eliza Sommers is raised in the British colony of ValparaIso, Chile, by the well-intentioned Victorian spinster Miss Rose and her more rigid brother Jeremy. Just as she meets and falls in love with the wildly inappropriate JoaquIn Andieta, a lowly clerk who works for Jeremy, gold is discovered in the hills of northern California. By 1849, Chileans of every stripe have fallen prey to feverish dreams of wealth. JoaquIn takes off for San Francisco to seek his fortune, and Eliza, pregnant with his child, decides to follow him.
• BRONT - Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  Jane Eyre, a mistreated orphan, becomes a governess and learns to survive by relying on her independence and intelligence.
• DAI - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Sijie Dai
  At the height of Mao’s infamous Cultural Revolution, two boys are among hundreds of thousands exiled to the countryside for “re-education.” The narrator and his best friend, Luo, guilty of being the sons of doctors, find themselves in a remote village where, among the peasants of Phoenix mountain, they are made to cart buckets of excrement up and down precipitous winding paths. Their meager distractions include a violin—as well as, before long, the beautiful daughter of the local tailor. But it is when the two discover a hidden stash of Western classics in Chinese translation that their re-education takes its most surprising turn.
• DOYLE - 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.
• FFORD - Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
  When Jane Eyre is plucked from the pages of Bronte's novel, Thursday Next, renowned Special Operative in literary detection, must track down the villain and enter the novel herself to avert a heinous act of literary homicide.
• GAIMA - Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
  From two delightful imaginations comes a comic masterpiece in which the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride motorcycles, the hound of the devil chases sticks, and the end of the world is subject to Murphy's Law.
• HOSSE - A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
  After her mother commits suicide, the fifteen-year-old, illigetimate daughter of an Afghan merchant is married off to a man in his forties and moved hundreds of miles from home to live in Kabul, Afghanistan. After several miscarriages and eighteen years of marriage, Mariam's husband marries a fourteen-year-old orphan named Laila for his second wife not knowing that she is pregnant and believes her lover is dead. At first enemies, the women unite against their abusive husband to become closer than sisters in this war-torn story set in the Taliban-run Afghanistan.
• JONES - Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
  On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.
• KESEY - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
  Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her.
• LIPPM - What the Dead Know by Laura Lippman
  Thirty years ago two sisters disappeared from a shopping mall. Their bodies were never found and those familiar with the case have always been tortured by these questions: How do you kidnap two girls? Who'or what'could have lured the two sisters away from a busy mall on a Saturday afternoon without leaving behind a single clue or witness? Now a clearly disoriented woman involved in a rush-hour hit-and-run claims to be the younger of the long-gone Bethany sisters. But her involuntary admission and subsequent attempt to stonewall investigators only deepens the mystery.
• MEYER - Host by Stephanie Meyer
  The earth has been invaded by a species that take over the minds of their human hosts while leaving their bodies intact, and most of humanity has succumbed. But Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. Wanderer, the invading "soul" who has been given Melanie's body, knew about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the too vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn't expect: the former tenant of her body refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.
• OBRIE - Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
  The Things They Carrieddepicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and of course, the character Tim O'Brien who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.
• PHILL - Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips
  The twelve gods of Olympus are alive and well in the twenty-first century, but they are crammed together in a London townhouse--and none too happy about it. Even more disturbingly, their powers are waning.... [and] a minor squabble between Aphrodite and Apollo escalates into an epic battle of wills.
• YA 741.5973 C348 - The Plain Janes by Cecil Castellucci
  Jane's parents make the decision to move from the city to suburbia and Jane is decidedly unhappy about it. Especially since everyone knows that suburbs are a gaping void of cultural activity. So she does what any girl would do in her situation, create her own guerilla art group to shake things up.
• YA ALEXI - 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 Native American is the school mascot. Cartoons are interspersed throughout the book as illustrations of Junior's style and spirit.
• YA ASHER - Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
  When high school student Clay Jenkins receives a box in the mail containing thirteen cassette tapes recorded by his classmate Hannah, who committed suicide, he spends a bewildering and heartbreaking night crisscrossing their town, listening to Hannah's voice recounting the events leading up to her death.
• YA CAMER - Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron
  Eighteen-year-old James living in New York City with his older sister and divorced mother struggles to find a direction for his life.
• YA CARY - Bloodline by Kate Cary
  In this story told primarily through journal entries, a British soldier in World War I makes the horrifying discovery that his regiment commander is descended from Count Dracula.
• YA COHN - Gingerbread by Rachel Cohn
  After being expelled from a fancy boarding school, Cyd Charisse's problems with her mother escalate after Cyd falls in love with a sensitive surfer and is subsequently sent from San Francisco to New York City to spend time with her biological father.
• YA CULLE - 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 weathy suitor.
• YA FLINN - Beastly by Alex Flinn
  A modern retelling of "Beauty and the Beast" from the point of view of the Beast, a vain Manhattan private school student who is turned into a monster and must find true love before he can return to his human form.
• YA GANTO - Love Curse of the Rumbaughs by Jack Gantos
  A young woman named Ivy, who made a shocking discovery in her small western Pennsylvania town when she was seven years old and learned a surprising secret nine years later, questions whether she has inherited the Rumbaugh curse of having excessive love for one's mother.
• YA GODBE - Luxe by Anna Godberson
  In Manhattan in 1899, five teens of different social classes lead dangerously scandalous lives, despite the strict rules of society and the best-laid plans of parents and others.
• YA HAUTM - Godless by Pete Hautmann
  When sixteen-year-old Jason Bock and his friends create their own religion to worship the town's water tower, what started out as a joke begins to take on a power of its own.
• YA JENKI - Repossessed by A.M. Jenkins
  A fallen angel, tired of being unappreciated while doing his pointless, demeaning job, leaves Hell, enters the body of a seventeen-year-old boy, and tries to experience the full range of human feelings before being caught and punished, while the boy's family and friends puzzle over his changed behavior.
• YA KLASS - Firestorm by David Klass
  After learning that he has been sent from the future for a special purpose, eighteen-year-old Jack receives help from an unusual dog and a shape-shifting female fighter.
• YA KOERT - Strays by Ron Koertge
  Recently orphaned, sixteen-year-old Ted O'Connor is sent to a foster home.
• YA LEAVI - Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt
  When Lord Death comes to claim sixteen-year-old Keturah while she is lost in the King's Forest, she charms him with her story and is granted a twenty-four hour reprieve in which to seek her one true love.
• YA NA - Wait for Me by An Na
  As her senior year in high school approaches, Mina yearns to find her own path in life but working at the family business, taking care of her little sister, and dealing with her mother’s impossible expectations are as stifling as the southern California heat, until she falls in love with a man who offers a way out.
• YA SHUST - Unwind by Neil Shusterman
  In a future world where those between the ages of thirteen and eighteen can have their lives "unwound" and their body parts harvested for use by others, three teens go to extreme lengths to uphold their beliefs--and, perhaps, save their own lives.
• YA ZEVIN - Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin
  After fifteen-year-old Liz Hall is hit by a taxi and killed, she finds herself in a place that is both like and unlike Earth, where she must adjust to her new status and figure out how to "live."
• N/A - Golden: A Retelling of Rapunzel by Cameron Dokey