Librarian Picks for the Best Teen Books of 2008:

SHIFT
by Charlotte Agell
In fifteen-year-old Adrian Havoc's world, HomeState rules every aspect of society and religious education is enforced but Adrian, refusing to believe that the Apocalypse is at hand, goes north through the Deadlands and joins a group of insurgents.

CHAINS: SEEDS OF AMERICA
by Laurie Halse Anderson
As the Revolutionary War begins, thirteen-year-old Isabel wages her own fight...for freedom. Promised freedom upon the death of their owner, she and her sister, Ruth, in a cruel twist of fate become the property of a malicious New York City couple, the Locktons, who have no sympathy for the American Revolution and even less for Ruth and Isabel. When Isabel meets Curzon, a slave with ties to the Patriots, he encourages her to spy on her owners, who know details of British plans for invasion. She is reluctant at first, but when the unthinkable happens to Ruth, Isabel realizes her loyalty is available to the bidder who can provide her with freedom.

GIRL FROM MARS
by Tamara Bach
Miriam dreams of escaping from her boring small-town life and going to the big city to start her own life, especially when she develops romantic feelings for a girl named Laura and forms a new outlook after a weekend in the city.

THE BOY WHO DARED
by Susan Campbell Bartoletti
In October, 1942, seventeen-year-old Helmuth Hübener, imprisoned for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets, recalls his past life and how he came to dedicate himself to bring the truth about Hitler and the war to the German people.

AUDREY, WAIT!
by Robin Benway
While trying to score a date with her cute co-worker at the Scooper Dooper, sixteen-year-old Audrey gains unwanted fame and celebrity status when her ex-boyfriend, a rock musician, records a breakup song about her that soars to the top of the Billboard charts.

THE COMPOUND
by S. A. Bodeen
After his parents, two sisters, and he have spent six years in a vast underground compound built by his wealthy father to protect them from a nuclear holocaust, fifteen-year-old Eli, whose twin brother and grandmother were left behind, discovers that his father has perpetrated a monstrous hoax on them all.

WHAT I SAW AND HOW I LIED
by Judy Blundell
When Evie's father returned home from World War II, the family fell back into its normal life pretty quickly. But Joe Spooner brought more back with him than just good war stories. When movie-star handsome Peter Coleridge, a young ex-GI who served in Joe's company in postwar Austria, shows up, Evie is suddenly caught in a complicated web of lies. She finds herself falling for Peter, ignoring the secrets that surround him...until a tragedy occurs that shatters her family and breaks her life in two. As she begins to realize that almost everything she believed to be a truth was really a lie, Evie must get to the heart of the deceptions and choose between her loyalty to her parents and her feelings for the man she loves. Someone will have to be betrayed. The question is...who?

GRACELING
by Kristin Cashore
In a world where some people are born with extreme and often-feared skills called Graces, Katsa struggles for redemption from her own horrifying Grace, the Grace of killing, and teams up with another young fighter to save their land from a corrupt king.

THE HUNGER GAMES
by Suzanne Collins
In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss' skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place.

WAITING FOR NORMAL
by Leslie Connor
Twelve-year-old Addie tries to cope with her mother's erratic behavior and being separated from her beloved stepfather and half-sisters when she and her mother go to live in a small trailer by the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Schenectady, New York.

RIDICULOUS/HILARIOUS/TERRIBLE/COOL: A YEAR IN AN AMERICAN HIGH SCHOOL
by Elisha Cooper
Emily has big goals. Like leading her soccer team to States. Maya is the best actor in school. She doesn't have a boyfriend...yet. Diana has big worries. Things are happening at home. Daniel is class president. Naturally, he's applying to Harvard. Anais just wants to dance. Anthony is failing almost everything, and then there's The Girl. Aisha is the only new student in her class, and the only Muslim. Zef can't stay awake in class–all this and prom–a year in the life of a high school.

LOVE ME TENDER
by Audrey Couloumbis
Thirteen-year-old Elvira worries about her future when, after a fight, her father heads to Las Vegas for an Elvis impersonator competition and her pregnant mother takes her and her younger sister to Memphis to visit a grandmother the girls have never met.

LOCK AND KEY
by Sarah Dessen
When she is abandoned by her alcoholic mother, high school senior Ruby winds up living with Cora, the sister she has not seen for ten years, and learns about Cora's new life, what makes a family, how to allow people to help her when she needs it, and that she too has something to offer others.

LITTLE BROTHER
Cory Doctorow
After being interrogated for days by the Department of Homeland Security in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco, California, seventeen-year-old Marcus, released into what is now a police state, decides to use his expertise in computer hacking to set things right.

BOG CHILD
by Siobhan Dowd
In 1981, the height of Ireland's "Troubles," eighteen-year-old Fergus is distracted from his upcoming A-level exams by his imprisoned brother's hunger strike, the stress of being a courier for Sinn Fein, and dreams of a murdered girl whose body he discovered in a bog.

SHOOTING THE MOON
by Frances O'Roark Dowell
When her brother is sent to fight in Vietnam, twelve-year-old Jamie begins to reconsider the army world that she has grown up in.

DIAMOND WILLOW
by Helen Frost
In a remote area of Alaska, twelve-year-old Willow helps her father with their sled dogs when she is not at school, wishing she were more popular, all the while unaware that the animals surrounding her carry the spirits of dead ancestors and friends who care for her.

THE PATRON SAINT OF BUTTERFLIES
by Cecilia Galante
When her grandmother takes fourteen-year-old Agnes, her younger brother, and best friend Honey and escapes Mount Blessing, a Connecticut religious commune, Agnes clings to the faith she loves while Honey looks toward a future free of control, cruelty, and preferential treatment.

OWNING IT: STORIES ABOUT TEENS WITH DISABILITIES
edited by Donald R. Gallo
Presents ten stories of teenagers facing all of the usual challenges of school, parents, boyfriends and girlfriends, plus the additional complications that come with having a physical or psychological disability.

SUN AND MOON, ICE AND SNOW
by Jessica Day George
A girl travels east of the sun and west of the moon to free her beloved prince from a magic spell.

LET IT SNOW: THREE HOLIDAY ROMANCES
by John Green, Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle
In three intertwining short stories several high school couples experience the trials and tribulations along with the joys of romance during a Christmas Eve snowstorm in a small town.

IN THE SMALL
by Michael Hague
When a mysterious cataclysmic event, "the blue flash," causes the population of the earth to shrink in size to six inches tall, suddenly humanity has the tables turned on itself: The very civilization it has created becomes its greatest obstacle to survival. Amid the confusion and turmoil, two strong teenagers, 18-year-old Mouse and his younger sister Beat, emerge as the most promising leaders, eventually setting out on a quest to discover the secret that could redeem this strange new world.

RAPUNZEL'S REVENGE
by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale
Rapunzel is raised in a grand villa surrounded by towering walls. Rapunzel dreams of a different mother than Gothel, the woman she calls Mother. She climbs over the wall and finds out the truth. Her real mother, Kate, is a slave in Gothel's gold mine. In this Old West retelling, Rapunzel uses her hair as a lasso and to take on outlaws–including Gothel.

THE BOOK OF JUDE
by Kimberley Heuston
In 1989, when fifteen-year-old Jude's mother wins a Fulbright fellowship to study art in Czechoslovakia, the family postpones a planned move to Utah to join her, but the political situation and the move itself are too much for Jude, who is overwhelmed by a previously undiagnosed psychological disorder.

PRETTY FACE
by Mary Hogan
When an overweight high school student from Santa Monica spends the summer in Italy, she learns to relish life and understand the true meaning of beauty.

IDENTICAL
by Ellen Hopkins
Sixteen-year-old identical twin daughters of a district court judge and a candidate for the United States House of Representatives, Kaeleigh and Raeanne Gardella desperately struggle with secrets that have already torn them and their family apart.

THE MYSTERIOUS UNIVERSE: SUPERNOVAE, DARK ENERGY, AND BLACK HOLES
by Ellen Jackson
The universe is rapidly expanding. Of that much scientists are certain. But how fast? And with what implications regarding the fate of the universe?
Ellen Jackson and Nic Bishop follow Dr. Alex Fillippenko and his High-Z
Supernova Search Team to Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, where they will study space phenomena and look for supernovae, dying stars that explode with the power of billions of hydrogen bombs. Dr. Fillippenko looks for black holes--areas in space with such a strong gravitational pull that no matter or energy can escape from them--with his robotic telescope. And they study the effects of dark energy, the mysterious force that scientists believe is pushing the universe apart, causing its constant and accelerating expansion.

OUTSIDE BEAUTY
by Cynthia Kadohata
Thirteen-year-old Shelby and her three sisters must go to live with their respective fathers while their mother, who has trained them to rely on their looks, recovers from a car accident that scarred her face.

MY MOST EXCELLENT YEAR: A NOVEL OF LOVE, MARY POPPINS & FENWAY PARK
by Steve Kluger
Three teenagers in Boston narrate their experiences of a year of new friendships, first loves, and coming into their own.

SNOW FALLING IN SPRING: COMING OF AGE IN CHINA DURING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION
by Moying Li
Moying Li is twelve years old when the Cultural Revolution sweeps across China. Studying at a prestigious language school in Beijing, she seems destined for a promising future. But everything changes when student Red Guards orchestrate brutal assaults, public humiliations, and forced confessions throughout the country.

THE DISREPUTABLE HISTORY OF FRANKIE LANDAU-BANKS
by E. Lockhart
Sophomore Frankie starts dating senior Matthew Livingston, but when he refuses to talk about the all-male secret society that he and his friends belong to, Frankie infiltrates the society in order to enliven their mediocre pranks.

SEASON OF ICE
by Diane Les Becquets
When seventeen-year-old Genesis Sommer's father disappears on Moosehead Lake near their small-town Maine home in mid-November, she must cope with the pressure of keeping her family together, even while rumors about the event plague her.

WAKE
by Lisa McMann
Ever since she was eight years old, high school student Janie Hannagan has been uncontrollably drawn into other people's dreams, but it is not until she befriends an elderly nursing home patient and becomes involved with an enigmatic fellow-student that she discovers her true power.

ALL WE KNOW OF HEAVEN
by Jacquelyn Mitchard
When Maureen and Bridget, two sixteen-year-old best friends who look like sisters, are in a terrible car accident and one of them dies, they are at first incorrectly identified at the hospital, and then, as Maureen achieves a remarkable recovery, she must deal with the repercussions of the accident, the mix-up, and some choices she made while she was getting better.

THE ADORATION OF JENNA FOX
by Mary E. Pearson
In the not-too-distant future, when biotechnological advances have made synthetic bodies and brains possible but illegal, a seventeen-year-old girl, recovering from a serious accident and suffering from memory lapses, learns a startling secret about her existence.

MEXICAN WHITEBOY
by Matt de la Peña
Sixteen-year-old Danny searches for his identity amidst the confusion of being half-Mexican and half-white while spending a summer with his cousin and new friends on the baseball fields and back alleys of San Diego County, California.

STREAMS OF BABEL
by Carol Plum-Ucci
Six teens face a bioterrorist attack on American soil as four are infected with a mysterious disease affecting their small New Jersey neighborhood and two others, both brilliant computer hackers, assist the United States Intelligence Coalition in tracking the perpetrators.

HOW TO BUILD A HOUSE
by Dana Reinhardt
Seventeen-year-old Harper Evans hopes to escape the effects of her father's divorce on her family and friendships by volunteering her summer to build a house in a small Tennessee town devastated by a tornado.

TROUBLE
by Gary D. Schmidt
Fourteen-year-old Henry, wishing to honor his brother Franklin's dying wish, sets out to hike Maine's Mount Katahdin with his best friend and dog. But fate adds another companion–the Cambodian refugee accused of fatally injuring Franklin–and reveals troubles that predate the accident.

BLACK BOX
by Julie Schumacher
When her sixteen-year-old sister is hospitalized for depression and her parents want to keep it a secret, fourteen-year-old Elena tries to cope with her own anxiety and feelings of guilt that she is determined to conceal from outsiders.

SKIM
by Mariko Tamaki
When her classmate Katie is dumped by her boyfriend, who then kills himself, the entire school goes into mourning overdrive. The popular clique starts a club to boost school spirit, but Skim sinks into an ever-deepening depression.

LIFE ON EARTH–AND BEYOND: AN ASTROBIOLOGIST'S QUEST
by Pamela S. Turner
NASA astrobiologist Dr. Christopher McKay has searched the earth's most extreme environments in his quest to understand what factors are necessary to sustain life. Pamela S. Turner offers readers an inside look at Dr. McKay's research, explaining his findings and his hopes for future exploration both on Earth and beyond. Behind-the-scenes photos capture Dr. McKay, his expeditions, and the amazing microbes that survive against all odds.

CLIMBING THE STAIRS
by Padma Venkatraman
In India, in 1941, when her father becomes brain-damaged in a non-violent protest march, fifteen-year-old Vidya and her family are forced to move in with her father's extended family and become accustomed to a totally different way of life.

HURRICANE SONG
by Paul Volponi
Twelve-year-old Miles Shaw goes to live with his father, a jazz musician, in New Orleans, and together they survive the horrors of Hurricane Katrina in the Superdome, learning about each other and growing closer through their painful experiences.

SKINNED
by Robin Wasserman
To save her from dying in a horrible accident, Lia's wealthy parents transplant her brain into a mechanical body.

IMPOSSIBLE
by Nancy Werlin
When seventeen-year-old Lucy discovers her family is under an ancient curse by an evil Elfin Knight, she realizes to break the curse she must perform three impossible tasks before her daughter is born in order to save them both.

THE DISAPPEARED
by Gloria Whelan
Silvia tries to save her brother, Eduardo, after he is captured by the military government in 1970s Argentina.

THE DAY THE WORLD EXPLODED: THE EARTHSHAKING CATASTROPHE AT KRAKATOA
by Simon Winchester
The almighty explosion that destroyed the volcano island of Krakatoa was followed by an immense tsunami that killed more than thirty thousand people. The effects of the waves were felt as far away as France, and bodies were washed up in Zanzibar. In this illustrated account, the colossal explosion is brought to vivid life. From the ominous warnings leading up to the eruption to the wave of killings it provoked, here is an engaging and insightful look at what happened on the day the world exploded.

See the Best Books of 2007

Want more recommendations? Try our Staff Picks Reviews!