realistic fiction

This coming-of-age story follows eighteen-year-old Adrian Carter as he graduates from high school and confronts difficult decisions about his future, all while dealing with the stress and pressure he feels to please those closest to him. As Adrian navigates the emotional highs and lows of the summer between graduation and the post-secondary future, he negotiates the difficulties of forging a path in life against others? expectations. Despite his wish to follow his longtime girlfriend Mel on her cross-country trip with her band, Adrian is hesitant about spending too much time in the punk?s scenes majority-white spaces. Adrian struggles with these feelings and works to find common ground with his emotionally distant father. Meanwhile he starts to understand that his own passion is grounded in a desire to support a community he?s forged on his own. Dealing with important themes (a desire for independence, identity, first love, familial tensions) from the nuanced perspective of a biracial teen, this story tackles key contemporary social issues. Class differences, colourism in the Black community and the structural barriers limiting access to post-secondary education for Black youth are all embedded in Andre Fenton?s readable narrative.

"This summer, Reese Camden is trading sweet tea and Southern hospitality for cold brew and crisp coastal air. She's landed her dream marketing internship at Friends of Flavor, a wildly popular cooking channel in Seattle. The only problem? Benny Beneventi, the relentlessly charming, backwards-baseball-cap-wearing culinary intern--and her main competition for the fall job. Reese's plan to keep work a No Feelings Zone crumbles like a day-old muffin when she and Benny are thrown together for a video shoot that goes viral, making them the internet's newest ship. Audiences are hungry for more, and their bosses at Friends of Flavor are happy to deliver. Soon Reese and Benny are in an all-out food war, churning homemade ice cream, twisting soft pretzels, breaking eggs in an omelet showdown--while hundreds of thousands of viewers watch. Reese can't deny the chemistry between her and Benny. But the more their rivalry heats up, the harder it is to keep love on the back burner"--Provided by publisher.

Sixteen-year-old Shira is on a mission to find the perfect boyfriend over Hanukkah, but after getting snowed in on Nantucket with her nemesis-slash-former-crush her plans begin to go off the rails.

"A heroic girl in Mumbai fights for her belief that water should be for everyone. Minni lives in the poorest part of Mumbai, where access to water is limited to a few hours a day and the communal taps have long lines. Lately, though, even that access is threatened by severe water shortages and thieves who are stealing this precious commodity--an act that Minni accidentally witnesses one night. Meanwhile, in the high-rise building where she just started to work, she discovers that water streams out of every faucet and there's even a rooftop swimming pool. What Minni also discovers there is one of the water mafia bosses. Now she must decide whether to expose him and risk her job and maybe her life. How did something as simple as access to water get so complicated?"--Provided by publisher.

Eleven-year-old Ellis discovers family secrets, makes new friends, and adjusts to his parents' recent divorce during a hijinks-filled summer helping his father open the world's first chocolate chip cookie store in 1976 Hollywood.