• The City of Ember
  by Jeanne DuPrau
  The city of Ember was built as a last refuge for the human race. Two hundred years later, the great lamps that light the city are beginning to flicker. When Lina finds part of an ancient message, she’s sure it holds a secret that will save the city. She and her friend Doon must decipher the message before the lights go out on Ember forever!
• The Giver
  by Lois Lowery
  Given his lifetime assignment at the Ceremony of Twelve, Jonas becomes the receiver of memories shared by only one other in his community and discovers the terrible truth about the society in which he lives.
• The House of the Scorpion
  by Nancy Farmer
  In a future where humans despise clones, Matt
  enjoys special status as the young clone of El
  Patron, the 142-year-old leader of a corrupt drug empire nestled between Mexico and the United States.
• The Maze Runner
  by James Dashner
  Sixteen-year-old Thomas wakes up with no memory in the middle of a maze and realizes he must work with the community in which he finds himself if he is to escape.
• Uglies
  by Scott Westerfeld
  Just before their sixteenth birthdays, when they will will be transformed into beauties whose only job is to have a great time, Tally’s best friend runs away and Tally must find her and turn her in, or never become pretty at all.

• Stand the Storm
  by Breena Clarke
  Sewing Annie Coats and her son Gabriel have managed to buy their freedom and operate a tailor’s shop and laundry, but they still struggle with their former owner. As they prepare for the imminent war, they assist escaped slaves seeking freedom.
• Someone Knows My Name
  by Lawrence Hill
  Abducted from Africa as a child and enslaved in South Carolina, Aminata dreams of returning to her home. Sold and torn away from her husband, she winds up in Manhattan and helps pen the Book of Negros, a list of blacks rewarded for service to the king with a safe passage to Nova Scotia.
• The Secret Life of Bees
  by Sue Monk Kidd
  Fourteen-year-old Lily is on the run with motherly servant Rosaleen, fleeing both Lily’s abusive father and the police who beat Rosaleen for defending her new right to vote. The two take refuge with three middle-aged black sisters who produce the well liked Black Madonna Honey and help Lily come to terms with her past.
• Cane River
  by Lalita Tademy
  A family saga following four generations of strong-willed women born into slavery near the Cane River in Louisiana. Slaves on a Creole plantation, Elizabeth and her daughter, Suzette win freedom after the Civil War, but their own children still struggle to gain financial independence and security.
• The King of Colored Town
  by Darryl Wimberley
  Cilla Handsom and Joe Billy King must endure the backlash of the integration of their segregated school with an all-white one run by an all-white board. Cilla falls for Joe Billy, who helps her with her gift with music, but Joe Billy sacrifices himself to protect her during an assault by the KlanClick here for more information on Kathryn Stockett’s The Help.
  William – Reference.

• Green Rider series
  by Kristen Britain
  In the first book, Green Rider, Karigan G’ladheon meets a dying horseman in the forest on her way home from school. At his request, she takes on a mission to deliver a life or death message to the king. With the help of the ghost of the dead messenger and pursued by supernatural beings, she becomes a member of the Green Riders, an equestrian messenger corps that uses magic.
• Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow
  by Orsen Scott Card
  Like Harry Potter, Andrew Wiggen, or Ender, is a child with a special destiny. An illegal third child, he is discovered by members of the International Fleet after a fight with a school bully and taken to a space station to train for military command. In the parallel novel, Ender’s Shadow, Bean is an orphan genetically engineered for extreme intelligence. He becomes Ender’s friend and lieutenant.
• His Dark Materials series
  by Phillip Pullman
  Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, two twelve-year-olds with daemon animal companions, travel between worlds to rescue kidnapped children from evil experiments, release captive spirits, and recover powerful magical weapons. They are aided by a bevy of beasts and wondrous creatures, including armored bears, former nuns, angels, and a Texas aeronaut.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians
  by Rick Riordan
  In the first book, The Lightning Thief, twelve-year-old Percy learns that he is the son of a mortal woman and Poseidon, god of the sea, and is sent to a summer camp for demigods like himself. He joins his new friends on a quest to prevent a war between the gods.
• The Lost Journals of Ven Polypheme
  by Elizabeth Haydon
  Venn Polypheme was a hobbit-like, Nain explorer who traveled much of the known and unknown world where magic thrives. Recently discovered by archaeologists, a few fragments of his original journals are reproduced the books The Floating Island, The Thief Queen’s Daughter, and The Dragon’s Lair.

• The Bottoms
  by Joe R. Lansdale
  Lansdale’s widely praised homage to To Kill a Mockingbird is part bittersweet coming-of-age story and part white-knuckled murder mystery. From a distance of seventy years, Harry Crane looks back on his youth in Depression-era East Texas, spinning a tale of race, murder, and a small town sheriff trying to do the right thing.
• Clover
  by Dori Sanders
  Like Lee’s Scout, Sanders’ young narrator Clover Hill is simultaneously innocent and wise beyond her years. When her father dies tragically on his wedding day, Clover—ten years old and black—begins living with a white stepmother she barely knows. Set in South Carolina in the 1980s, Clover is a touching, heartfelt story of a child coming to terms with grief and change.
• Cold Sassy Tree
  by Olive Ann Burns
  This exuberant, quirky, crowd-pleaser of a novel is set in Cold Sassy, Georgia in 1906. Burn’s young narrator Will Tweedy tells the story of his grandfather’s scandalous second marriage to a much younger woman, and has plenty of adventures of his own.
• Cry, the Beloved Country
  by Alan Paton
  First published in 1947, Cry, the Beloved Country put a human face of the injustices of apartheid, became an international bestseller, and was hailed by critics as an instant classic. The beauty of Paton’s novel–the story of a Zulu priest who travels to Johannesburg to find his missing family–hasn’t diminished with time.
• A Lesson Before Dying
  by Ernest J. Gaines
  In 1940s rural Louisiana, a young, uneducated black man is sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit. Wanting him to die with dignity, his godmother convinces a local black school teacher to educate him. Gaines’ award-winning novel tells the simple but rich and moving story of the lessons both men teach each other as their relationship deepens.
• Mudbound
  by Hillary Jordan
  In 1946, Laura McAllan reluctantly moves to the Mississippi Delta after her husband purchases a farm. Narrated by six distinctive voices, Mudbound is an emotional but expertly rendered portrait of a particular place and time, and a poignant reminder of the toll of blind racism.
• My Last Days as Roy Rogers
  by Pat Cunningham Devoto
  The summer of 1954 in Bainbridge, Alabama is a season of high adventure and, ultimately, sobering drama for ten-year-old tomboy Tab and her best friend Maudie. Warm, humorous, and entertaining, Devoto’s debut is a knowing but loving portrait of the 1950s south.
• The Queen of Palmyra
  by Minrose Gwin
  It is 1963 and Florence Forrest, the child of an abusive father and an alcoholic mother, spends most of her days shuttled back and forth between the home of her grandparents and the home of Zenie, their black housekeeper. The Queen of Palmyra is an atmospheric, spellbinding story the tragedies wrought by racism.
• Right as Rain
  by Bev Marshall
  Full of humor, but also heartbreak, Right as Rain spans two decades in the intertwined lives of three families–two black and one white–in Zebulon, Mississippi. With intimately and vividly drawn characters, Marshall takes on the complexities of race in the South before and during the civil rights movement.
• The Secret Life of Bees
  by Sue Monk Kidd
  In Kidd’s much loved novel about the remarkable bonds between women, Lily and Rosaleen are taken in by three eccentric, bee-keeping sisters, after escaping from an abusive father and racist local policemen in 1960s South Carolina. The Secret Life of Bees is a vivid, hopeful story of the power of love.
• Snow in August
  by Pete Hamill
  Micheal Devlin, twelve-years-old and an Irish Catholic altar boy, develops an unlikely relationship with an aging rabbi who, in exchange for lessons about baseball and English, teaches him Yiddish and tells him stories about his life in Prague. Snow in August is an endearing tale of growing up and accepting others, and astrong evocation of 1940s Brooklyn.
• The Year the Colored Sisters Came to Town
  by Jacqueline Guidry
  In rural Louisiana in 1957, the arrival of two black nuns to teach at an all-white Catholic elementary school sends shockwaves through the community. It also teaches Guidry’s wide-eyed and precocious ten-year-old narrator some painful, and sometimes complicated, lessons about the results of racism.
• Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine
  by Bebe Moore Campbell
  A racially-motivated beating in rural pre-civil rights era Mississippi echoes through the generations in Campbell’s poignant, poetic saga of family and race. Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine was compared favorably to the work of Harper Lee, Alice Walker, and Flannery O’Connor.

• Stones Into Schools: Promoting Peace With Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan
  by Greg Mortenson
  Picking up where Three Cups of Tea leaves off, Mortenson tells of his ongoing initiatives to build schools for Afghan girls as a way of promoting peace and understanding. He recounts the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake in the region as well as his harrowing abduction by the Taliban. A satisfying and moving follow-up to Three Cups of Tea.
• The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew — Three Women Search for Understanding
  by Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner
  Prompted by the 9/11 tragedy and questions about faith from her young children, a Muslim-American woman reaches out to two fellow mothers, one Christian and one Jewish, for help in writing a children’s book about the shared bonds of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. The women soon realize that they need an open and honest exploration of their faiths as much as their children and start what they call “The Faith Club”. This book inspired similar clubs and conversations all over the world.
• The Middle of Everywhere: The World’s Refugees Come to Our Town
  by Mary Pipher
  The author of Reviving Ophelia examines the lives of refugees from some of the world’s most war-torn areas as they make their new homes in Lincoln, Nebraska. She focuses on the lives of immigrant teenagers and their families (she herself takes in several of Sudan’s “lost boys”) as they struggle to understand American life and as the Midwesterners work to understand their new neighbors.
• Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World
  by Tracy Kidder
  This is the story of one man’s mission to change the world. Dr. Paul Farmer ventured from Harvard to Haiti and beyond in an effort to cure infectious disease and bring modern medicine to the farthest corners of the world. The major players in this inspirational story includes the Boston medical community, big pharmaceutical companies, and international governmental organizations. However, the heart of the story is Farmer, who makes great sacrifices to achieve his goals, and the people of the world’s poorest nations, who benefit from those sacrifices.
• There Is No Me Without You: One Woman’s Odyssey to Rescue Africa’s Children
  by Melissa Fay Greene
  A moving portrait of one woman’s stand against the AIDS crisis in Africa, this book tells the story of Haregewoin Teferra, an Ethiopian woman who lost her husband and daughter to AIDS and then opened her home to orphans of the disease. What started with a local priest delivering an abandoned child to her hut for care turns into a thriving orphanage that helps the children of the epidemic find new lives and adoptive parents all over the world.

• The Last Promise
  by Richard Paul Evans
  Living in Italy with a distant husband and a sick child, Ellen finds romance with the mysterious new American in town. She soon finds herself forced to choose between the love of her child and the romantic love she has always yearned for and finally found.
• The Lighthouse Keeper
  by James Michael Pratt
  Orphaned after a car accident, young Peter O’Banyon is sent to live with his uncle, a lighthouse keeper on Nantucket. There he learns lessons about life, loss, and love that he will carry with him as he later marries his childhood sweetheart and goes off to fight in WWII.
• Candles on Bay Street
  by K.C. McKinnon
  Although he has never forgotten his childhood sweetheart, Sam Thibodeau enjoys a quiet, settled life in his Maine hometown with his wife and their veterinary practice. Sam’s emotions are thrown into turmoil when DeeDee, his old flame, returns to town with a young child and a big secret.
• On Mystic Lake
  by Kristin Hannah
  After her daughter leaves to study abroad and her husband tells her he wants a divorce, lonely and alone Annie Colwater returns home to her widowed father and her high school boyfriend who is facing tragedies that pale in comparison to her own.
• Remembering Blue
  by Connie May Fowler
  Leaving her abusive, alcoholic family behind, Mattie O’Rourke heads to the Florida Coast to start a new life. She finds love and passion with rugged fisherman Nicholas Blue, but the legend of an old Blue family curse casts a shadow over the young lovers.
• Icebergs
  by Rebecca Johns
  A WWII pilot survives a plane crash only to face greater struggles when he returns home to his young wife and the widow of his crewmate who perished in the crash. Subsequent generations of these two families will struggle with love, jealousy, reconciliation and revenge that all stem from that fateful accident.
• The Smoke Jumper
  by Nicholas Evans
  Connor and Ed share a dangerous profession — parachuting into forest fires — and a love for Julia, Ed’s girlfriend. The love triangle takes a fateful turn when a raging forest fire traps Julia, blinds Ed, and turns Connor into a hero. In the years that follow, the three must grapple with guilt, jealousy, loyalty, and unrequited love.

• The Swallows of Kabul
  by Yasmina Khadra
  This short, compelling novel follows the lives of two men, one a jailer and the other a shopkeeper, and their wives as they struggle to live under the Taliban’s oppressive regime. An act of brutal public violence sets off a chain of events that affect them all in unforeseen ways and intertwine their lives forever.
• Madras on Rainy Days
  by Samina Ali
  Layla, a young Indian woman who spent much of her life in America, returns to India for an arranged Islamic marriage . There, she tries to reconcile the freedom she has experienced with the traditions she is now expected to uphold, all the while trying to keep secrets hidden and appearances proper.
• The Power of One
  by Bryce Courtenay
  A powerful coming of age story set in apartheid-era South Africa, this novel is told by young Peekay, a white boy who must fight to find his place amidst black and white, Boer and English, and ultimately good and evil as he makes his way from farm life to boarding school to the boxing ring to adulthood.
• Sister of My Heart
  by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
  Two cousins are born on the same day into vastly different worlds of Indian society, one is the daughter of a wealthy upper-caste scion and the other the child of the family’s black sheep. Despite their differences, the two girls always feel a deep, inexplicable bond that is eventually shattered by a dark family secret that will set them on two very different paths.
• Sons of Heaven
  by Terrance Cheng
  Xiao-Di is a an intelligent and idealistic young man who, having been blacklisted by the Chinese government and shunned by his older brother, joins the growing student protest movement in Beijing. Inspired by the famous photo of a lone, unknown young man standing in front of an army tank during the Tiananmen Square uprising, this novel speculates on the people and events that led up to that iconic moment.

• Blue Bloods
  by Melissa de la Cruz
  The students at an exclusive New York City prep school are rich, powerful, and have a thirst for human blood. When 15-year-old Shuyler Van Alen starts to crave raw meat and have flashbacks to ancient times, she begins to grasp her family’s deadly secret. Sequels: Masquerade and Revelations.
• Vampire High
  by Douglas Rees
  The students at Cody Elliot’s new high school seem a little odd. They avoid sunlight, have superhuman strength, and make frequent trips to the blood bank. Cody thinks they might be vampires and is a little worried about fitting in.
• Vampire Kisses Series
  by Ellen Schreiber
  A new family has moved into the local abandoned mansion. Raven, a 16-year-old, vampire-obsessed goth girl, suspects that they might be vampires and soon finds herself falling for the new boy in town. First book in the series is Vampire Kisses.
• Tantalize
  by Cynthia Leitich Smith
  Orphaned 17-year-old Quince Morris is reopening her parent’s vampire-themed restaurant with the help of her uncle. Her plans start to hemorrhage when the chef is mauled to death, possibly by Quince’s boyfriend who happens to be a werewolf.
• Companions of the Night
  by Vivian Vande Velde
  Kerry Nowicki, a 16 year-old girl, encounters a vampire-lynching party during a late night trip the laundromat. When she helps the accused vampire escape, a complicated game of cat and mouse follows.
• Peeps: A Novel
  by Scott Westerfeld
  After moving to New York, 19-year-old Cal Thompson contracts a parasite that causes vampirism. Luckily for Cal, though he is a “peep”, he is partly immune. Cal is recruited to work for a shadowy organization that tracks down dangerous peeps and starts to believe that things are not what they seem.
• Bloodline
  by Kate Cary
  This novel uses diary excerpts from each main character to piece together the story of a World War I nurse who falls in love with a descendant of count Dracula. She travels to Romania to be married before understanding the disturbing truth about her future in-laws. Followed by the sequel Bloodline: Reckoning

Books written for an adult audience:

• Southern Vampire Mysteries Series
  by Charlaine Harris
  Sookie Stackhouse is a cocktail waitress in rural Louisiana who tries to keep to herself for a good reason: She can read minds. Her life starts to get a little stranger, and a lot more violent, when she starts dating a vampire named Bill. First book in the series is Dead Until Dark.
• Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Series
  by Laurell K. Hamilton
  Anita Blake, a detective who happens to be able to temporarily raise the dead, lives in a version of St. Louis where vampires, werewolves, and other fantastic creatures have been partially integrated into society. First in the series is Guilty Pleasures.
• Sunshine
  by Robin McKinley
  On one eventful night, the self-proclaimed “Cinnamon Roll Queen of Charlie’s Coffeehouse” discovers her dormant magical powers after being chained to a good-hearted vampire named Constantine. Together, they’ll need to outrun and outwit the group of evil vampires that brought them together to begin with.
• Rachel Morgan Series
  by Kim Harrison
  Rachel Morgan is a witch from Cincinnati who is in the private investigator/bounty hunter business with a vampire and a four-inch-tall pixie as partners. Her problems, however, are all too human. First in the series is Dead Witch Walking.
• Black Dagger Brotherhood Series
  by J.R. Ward
  In this romance series, Beth, a twenty-five-year-old with dim career prospects, learns that she is half-vampire after she awakens one night to find a very large, very dangerous-looking man standing at her door. First in the series is Dark Lover.
• Dark-Hunter Series
  by Sherrilyn Kenyon
  This long-running and immensely popular romance series revolves around the Dark-Hunters–vampire-like creatures in and around New Orleans. Start with Night Pleasures, the story of an ancient warrior who falls for a human woman after nearly two thousand years alone.

• Amy and Isabelle
  by Elizabeth Strout
  A teenage girl’s affair with her teacher shatters her relationship with her mother, dredging up deep-seated guilt and long-buried secrets.
• The Condition
  by Jennifer Haigh
  After the youngest child of a well-to-do family is diagnosed with a rare disorder that prevents her from physically maturing, the family unravels over several decades.
• The Good Mother
  by Sue Miller
  A newly divorced mother’s affair leads to accusations of child abuse, a bitter custody battle, and gripping courtroom drama.
• Midwives
  by Chris Bohjalian
  When a home birth goes awry, a midwife finds herself at the center of a medical debate and on trial for murder.
• More Than It Hurts You
  by Darin Strauss
  A child’s sickness leads a doctor to suspect Munchausen-by-Proxy syndrome, a diagnosis that will forever change the lives of everyone involved.
• My Abandonment
  by Peter Rock
  A father and daughter’s “off the grid” homeless lifestyle is turned upside down when a jogger accidentally discovers them and reports them to the authorities.
• The Rest of Her Life
  by Laura Moriarity
  A teenager’s careless driving leads to a fatal accident that shatters a family’s already fragile existence and polarizes a small town in Kansas.
• The River Road
  by Karen Osborn
  Two brothers and the girl they both love make a reckless choice that ends in death for one and a lifetime of tragic consequences for the other two.
• A Theory of Relativity
  by Jacquelyn Mitchard
  A bitter family drama unfolds in the courtroom after a young child is left orphaned by a car crash, leaving relations to fight over her custody.
• We Need To Talk About Kevin
  by Lionel Shriver
  The mother of a 17-year-old in jail for a school shooting tries to resolve her parental guilt by writing a series of brutally honest letters to her estranged husband.

• Dewey: The Small Town Library Cat Who Touched the World
  by Vicki Myron
  A librarian rescues a kitten left in the overnight book return and is rewarded with a library mascot who has a positive impact on her own life and that of the entire Iowa town.
• Enslaved by Ducks
  by Bob Tarte
  An impulse purchase of a bunny at Easter time leads to the acquisition of a parrot, a couple of canaries, several cats, a turkey or two, and yes, ducks.
• Good Dog. Stay
  by Anna Quindlen
  A Pulitzer Prize-winning writer pays tribute to her beloved black lab, Beau, with heartwarming anecdotes of new tricks taught and old lessons learned.
• Merle’s Door: Lessons From A Freethinking Dog
  by Ted Kerasote
  A nature writer on a camping trip takes in a stray dog and spends thirteen years learning about and loving the animal’s independent, intelligent ways.
• My Cat, Spit McGee
  by Willie Morris
  A life long “dog man” marries a cat lover and finds himself won over by a quirky, cranky cat named Spit. By the author of My Dog Skip.
• Wesley the Owl: The Remarkable Love Story of An Owl and His Girl
  by Stacey O’Brien
  A young research biologist adopts an injured four-day-old barn owl and spends the next nineteen years learning about and loving the remarkable creature.
• Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
  by Caroline Knapp
  A renowned memoirist recounts the ways her canine confidante helped her through the death of her parents, a bad break-up, and the trials of sobriety.