fiction

While mourning her best friend, Natalie, an aspiring teen paranormal investigator, stays at the purportedly haunted Harlow Hotel where she finds more than she expected.

In a twenty-four-hour span, Rafael Alvarez led North Amistad High School's Mariachi Alma de la Frontera to their eleventh consecutive first-place win in the Mariachi Extravaganza de Nacional; and met, made out with, and almost hooked up with one of the cutest guys he's ever met. Now eight months later, Rafie's ready for one final win. What he didn't plan for is his family moving to San Antonio before his senior year, forcing him to leave behind his group while dealing with the loss of the most important person in his life--his beloved abuelo. Another hitch in his plan: The Selena Quintanilla-Perez Academy's Mariachi Todos Colores already has a lead vocalist, Rey Chavez--the boy Rafie made out with--who now stands between him winning and being the great Mariachi Rafie's abuelo always believed him to be. Despite their newfound rivalry for center stage, Rafie can't squash his feelings for Rey. Now he must decide between the people he's known his entire life or the one just starting to get to know the real him.

"Seventeen-year-old Alonda finds friendship, fame, and love on the streets of Coney Island when she befriends a group of teen wrestlers"--Provided by publisher.

"When small-town athlete Avery's morning run leads her to a strange pond in the middle of the forest, she awakens a horror the townspeople of Crook's Falls have long forgotten. The black water has been waiting. Watching. Hungry for the souls it needs to survive. Avery can smell the water, see it flooding everywhere; she thinks she's losing her mind. And as the black water haunts Avery--taking a new form each time--people in town begin to go missing. Though Avery had heard whispers of monsters from her Kanien'k?ha:ka (Mohawk) relatives, she has never really connected to her Indigenous culture or understood the stories. But the Elders she has distanced herself from now may have the answers she needs. When Key, her best friend and longtime crush, is the next to disappear, Avery is faced with a choice: listen to the Kanien'k?ha:ka and save the town but lose her friend forever . . . or listen to her heart and risk everything to get Key back"--Dust jacket.

Seventeen-year-old Jen is shocked to discover that the dad she grew up with is not her biological father. Jen loves to sing. But the rest of her family can't carry a tune. When a stranger named Mike gives her roses at her concert and reveals that he is her birth father, Jen's world flips upside down. Mike is a musician, just like Jen, and now she understands why she looks nothing like Steve, the only dad she's ever known. When Steve learns the truth Jen's mom has been hiding all these years, he moves out, and Jen can't help but feel responsible. Worse, she doesn't know who she is anymore. It feels like her whole life has been a lie. Is Steve still her dad? What about Mike? When it feels like her family is falling apart, Jen doesn't know where she belongs.

At the elite Essex Academy Cal Ware, a poor, queer kid from Mississippi, is an outsider, but when he learns about a secret society on campus, he thinks that he may have found a way to reinvent himself--but as the initiation rituals grow riskier he must decide who to trust and how far he is willing to go to belong.

One summer during the Financial Crisis, fourteen-year-old Karthik Raghavan makes deliveries for his father's ailing Indian grocery, but he is secretly cast in a play about the young Leonard Bernstein. Includes author's note.

Mac has never really felt like he belonged. Definitely not at home--his dad's politics and toxic masculinity make a real connection impossible. He thought he fit in on the baseball team, but that's only because he was pretending to be someone he wasn't. Finding his first gay friend, Cammy, was momentous; finally, he could be his authentic self around someone else. But as it turned out, not really. Cammy could be cruel, and his "advice" often came off way harsh. And then, Mac meets Flor, who shows him that you can be both fierce and kind, and Mikey, who is superhot and might maybe think the same about him. Over the course of one hot, life-changing summer, Mac will stand face-to-face with desire, betrayal, and letting go of shame, which will lead to some huge discoveries about the realness of truly belonging. Told in Mac's infectious, joyful, gay AF voice, Hot Boy Summer serves a tale as important as hope itself: four gay teens doing what they can to connect and have the fiercest summer of their lives. New friendships will be forged, hot boys will be kissed...and girl, the toxic will be detoxed.

Life's not easy for Nicky. His mother is gone, his dad's out on bail, and his older brother, Kenny, needs looking after like a little kid. When Kenny drags Nicky out of bed one dark morning, Nicky has no idea that he is about to witness a terrible act of destruction, and the senseless killing of an innocent animal. But Nicky manages to save something precious from the disaster, and his and Kenny's lives are changed forever.

When Kenny and Nicky spot a glint of gold in the murky waters of Bacon Pond, they can't leave it alone. It means money, and money helps patch things up when you haven't got any. But sometimes it's better not to look too deep. Not when there are local gangsters involved, and tough questions about your own family's past. But Nicky can't help looking back. He knows it's a bad idea, and it could ruin everything. Can he save himself and his family, or will the secrets of the lake take them all down?.