A secluded beach, luxurious villa, discreet servants, and bottomless margaritas ought to spell a week of paradise for Jenna Carlson, her family, and friends. Yet secret phone calls are just the first sign of trouble. Read full book review >

In an ill-advised effort to set his life straight, 17-year-old River Dean fakes a weed addiction and joins a support group for teens. Read full book review >

Nell's discovery of her sister's secret tests the powerful emotional bond between them. Read full book review >

Odessa Green-Light discovers a loophole in time. Now she can fix all kinds of things, especially the de-hyphenation of her family. Read full book review >

In the lazy days of summer in a California coastal town, Drew works at her mom's struggling cheese shop and indulges her crush on an older co-worker, until she discovers Emmett and becomes involved in his very different world. Read full book review >

Levi's older brother Boaz enlisted in the Marines after graduating from high school rather than attend an elite university as expected. Levi has felt the distance grow between them prior to and throughout his enlistment. Now, Boaz—renamed Bo—is returning home from the Middle East. The person who arrives bears little resemblance to his previous self, holing up in his room and barely communicating. When Bo announces his intention of hiking the Appalachian Trail, Levi (who has snooped in Bo's Internet history) knows better. With a little help from best friends Pearl and Zim, he joins Bo on his personal hegira. The first-person, present-tense narration takes readers steadily toward the core of what has happened to Bo. Levi's reflections and observations are crisply apt and express essentials succinctly. The emotional journey is leavened with humor and a little romance, but it moves toward the conclusion with an inevitability that grabs and doesn't let go. Every character contributes and brings a point of view that adds to a fuller picture of the personal consequences of war without being simplistically pro or anti. Powerful. (Fiction. 12 & up)Read full book review >

Sixteen-year-old Harper lost her mother when she was two years old. Her father subsequently married Jane, a lawyer with two daughters, Rose and Tess, who became Harper's best friends. But because of her father's infidelity, Jane has left, and Harper's ideal home has been torn apart. The novel begins with Harper aboard a flight from her home in California to Bailey, Tenn., where she has joined a volunteer project to rebuild a house destroyed by a tornado. Scenes from the past alternate with Harper's present-tense account of her summer to provide background for her emotional travails. There: stepsister Tess seethes at her stepfather's betrayal; here: construction partner Teddy becomes increasingly attractive as more than a building buddy. The author juxtaposes the metaphorical (Harper learns to rebuild her own "house") with the concrete in a well-paced first-person narrative spiced with summer flings and teen romance. Readers will find Harper absolutely charming, even at her most sardonic moments. (Fiction. 13 & up)Read full book review >

Reinhardt follows the success of A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life (2006) with the story of three friends who feel the consequences of a lie. Best friends Emma and Anna are not particularly popular, but are fairly well-adjusted teenagers nonetheless. Their social lives are enlivened with older boys and parties, however, when Mariah, a girl with a wild streak, befriends them. The girls begin to lie to their parents about their weekend plans; but when one of those lies doesn't pass the smell test, they devise a story to avoid being punished. Rather than allowing them to fly under the radar, the lie catapults the girls into the spotlight where they anxiously squirm in its unwelcome glare. The plot develops as it's told through the alternating perspectives of the three girls. Although each feels the effects of their lie a bit differently, they all wish they'd just told the truth. Reinhardt successfully avoids a sanctimonious tone in imparting this moral lesson and infuses the story with enough drama to avoid banality. Worthwhile, but not spectacular. (Fiction. YA)Read full book review >

Sixteen-year-old Simone has always known she's adopted, and has never wanted to know more, not even when her birth mother calls out of the blue. Simone's got plenty of other things going on already. There's collecting signatures for her mom (a lawyer for the ACLU) outside the Organic Oasis on the weekends; the Atheist Student Association and school paper; her crush on the paper's editor; her best friend who's starting to have sex with a jerk; and her younger brother who is suddenly a completely hot and popular freshman. Simone does get to know her birth mother, a 33-year-old estranged from her Hasidic family, and dying of cancer. Is there a little too much of every possible issue in this story? Possibly. Faith and agnosticism, drinking and puking, sex and virginity and love, Reinhardt brings it all to readers, but she does so in very realistic doses, with a sense of humor and a sense of hope. Simone's first-person voice is funny and unforgettable—a little too wise, perhaps, but her epiphanies are on target and are what readers will be looking for in this fabulous debut. (Fiction. YA)Read full book review >