YA Bingham
Shark Girl by Kelly Bingham
After a shark attack causes the amputation of her right arm, fifteen-year-old Jane, an aspiring artist, struggles to come to terms with her loss and the changes it imposes on her day-to-day life and her plans for the future.

YA Bogert
Hormone Jungle by Brad Bogert
College-bound Christina Curtis is creating a scrapbook of the Digital Poets, her middle-school poetry group, which, interwoven with her narrative, reflects the hormonal angst of middle school.

YA Creech
Love That Dog by Sharon Creech
A young student, who comes to love poetry through a personal understanding of what different famous poems mean to him, surprises himself by writing his own inspired poem.

YA Frost
Keesha’s House by Helen Frost
Seven teens facing such problems as pregnancy, closeted homosexuality, and abuse each describe in poetic forms what caused them to leave home and where they found home again.

YA Fullerton
Walking on Glass by Alma Fullerton
A teenage boy recounts, in a free verse journal, his attempts to come to terms with the realities of his mother's near-death coma.

YA Grimes
Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes
While studying the Harlem Renaissance, students at a Bronx high school read aloud poems they've written, revealing their innermost thoughts and fears to their formerly clueless classmates.

YA Grimes
Dark Sons by Nikki Grimes
Alternating poems compare and contrast the conflicted feelings of Ishmael, son of the Biblical patriarch Abraham, and Sam, a teenager in New York City, as they try to come to terms with being abandoned by their fathers and with the love they feel for their younger stepbrothers.

YA Grover
Loose Threads by Lorie Ann Grover
A series of poems describes how seventh-grader Kay Garber faces her grandmother's battle with breast cancer while living with her mother and great-grandmother and dealing with everyday junior high school concerns.

YA Hemphill
Things Left Unsaid: a Novel in Poems by Stephanie Hemphill
After a lifetime of conforming to the image of what her parents and high school friends want her to be, Sarah must come to terms with her own identity when her destructive best friend tries to commit suicide. Told in the form of free-verse poems.

YA Hesse
Witness by Karen Hesse
A series of poems express the views of various people in a small Vermont town, including a young black girl and a young Jewish girl, during the early 1920s when the Ku Klux Klan is trying to infiltrate the town.

YA Hesse
Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
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.

YA Hopkins
Burned by Ellen Hopkins
Seventeen-year-old Pattyn, the eldest daughter in a large Mormon family, is sent to her aunt's Nevada ranch for the summer, where she temporarily escapes her alcoholic, abusive father and finds love and acceptance, only to lose everything when she returns home.

YA Hopkins
Crank by Ellen Hopkins
Kristina Snow is the perfect daughter, but she meets a boy who introduces her to drugs and becomes a very different person, struggling to control her life and her mind.

YA Hopkins
Glass by Ellen Hopkins
In a powerful sequel to Crank, Kristina is determined to manage her addiction to crack in order to keep her newborn child, but when she is unable to manage her use of the drug and the pull becomes too strong, her greatest fears are quickly realized.

YA Hopkins
Impulse by Ellen Hopkins
Three teens who meet at Reno, Nevada's Aspen Springs mental hospital after each has attempted suicide connect with each other in a way they never have with their parents or anyone else in their lives.

YA Kearney
The Secret of Me by Meg Kearney
This novel in verse follows 14-year-old Lizzie through a year in which, despite her loving family, a circle of good friends, and a potential first boyfriend, she is plagued with a personal secret. She desperately wants to find out the story behind her adoption and her own identity, and while her parents and brother and sister (also adopted) are sympathetic, they discourage her from pursuing it.

YA Koertge
The Brimstone Journals by Ron Koertge
In a series of short interconnected poems, students at a high school nicknamed Brimstone reveal the violence existing and growing in their lives.

YA Mass
Heaven Looks a Lot Like the Mall by Wendy Mass
When high school junior Tessa Reynolds falls into a coma after getting hit in the head during gym class, she experiences heaven as the mall where her parents work, and she revisits key events from her life, causing her to reevaluate herself and how she wants to live.

YA Rosenberg
Seventeen: a Novel in Prose Poems by Liz Rosenberg
Seventeen-year-old Stephanie journeys from fall to spring and from childhood to womanhood as she experiences first love and deals with her fear of inheriting her mother's mental illness.

YA Rylant
God Went to Beauty School by Cynthia Rylant
A novel in poems that reveal God's discovery of the wonders and pains in the world He has created.

YA Sandell
Song of the Sparrow by Lisa Ann Sandell
In fifth-century Britain, nine years after the destruction of their home on the island of Shalott brings her to live with her father and brothers in the military encampments of Arthur's army, seventeen-year-old Elaine describes her changing perceptions of war and the people around her as she becomes increasingly involved in the bitter struggle against the invading Saxons.

YA Schutz
I Don’t Want to Be Crazy: a Memoir of Anxiety Disorder by Samantha Schutz

YA Smith
The Geography of Girlhood by Kirsten Smith
Novel in poetry about a girl navigating the unknown, the difficult limbo between youth and adulthood. A novel written in verse follows Penny Morrow in her transition from middle school to high school as her father remarries, she acquires a new stepbrother, and she experiences her first dance, first kiss, and other hazards of growing up.

YA Sones
One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies by Sonya Sones
Fifteen-year-old Ruby Milliken leaves her best friend, her boyfriend, her aunt, and her mother's grave in Boston and reluctantly flies to Los Angeles to live with her father, a famous movie star who divorced her mother before Ruby was born.

YA Sones
Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy by Sonya Sones
A younger sister has a difficult time adjusting to life after her older sister has a mental breakdown.

YA Sones
What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones
Fourteen-year-old Robin Murphy is so unpopular at high school that his name is slang for "loser," and so when he begins dating the beautiful and popular Sophie her reputation plummets, but he finds acceptance as a student in a drawing class at Harvard.

YA Sones
What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones
Sophie describes her relationships with a series of boys as she searches for Mr. Right.

YA Testa
Almost Forever by Maria Testa
A young girl describes what she, her brother, and their mother do during the year that her doctor father is serving in the Army in Vietnam.

YA Testa
Something About America by Maria Testa
Inspired by true events that occurred in Maine in 2002, this powerful, lyrical novel explores immigration in contemporary America, narrated by a 13-year-old girl from Kosovo.

YA Wild
Jinx by Margaret Wild
With the help of her understanding mother and a close friend, Jen eventually outgrows her nickname, Jinx, and deals with the deaths of two boys with whom she had been involved.

YA Wild
One Night by Margaret Wild
In this novel written in free verse and narrated by alternating characters, a teenaged girl decides to have her baby and care for it on her own after a "one night stand" results in pregnancy.

YA Wolff
Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff
In order to earn money for college, fourteen-year-old LaVaughn babysits for a teenage mother.

YA Wolff
True Believer by Virginia Euwer Wolff
Living in the inner city amidst guns and poverty, fifteen-year-old LaVaughn learns from old and new friends, and inspiring mentors, that life is what you make it--an occasion to rise to.

YA Yeomans
Rubber Houses by Ellen Yeomans
A novel in verse that relates seventeen-year-old Kit's experiences as her younger brother is diagnosed with and dies of cancer and as she withdraws into and gradually emerges from her grief.

811.54 Nelson (YA)
A Wreath for Emmett Till by Marilyn Nelson
The book represents a poetry collection in memory of Emmett Till. The fourteen year old was murdered in 1955 while visiting his uncle in Mississippi.

811.54 Plath (YA)
Your Own, Sylvia: a Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill
The author interprets the people, events, influences and art that made up the brief life of Sylvia Plath.