coming of age

Belly spends the summer she turns sixteen at the beach just like every other summer of her life, but this time things are very different.

Confined by high-powered parents, overachieving siblings, and a controlling boyfriend, sixteen-year-old Izzy has learned to keep a low profile and her thoughts to herself. When she accidentally enters a comedy club on open mic night, Izzy performs and meets a new group of aspiring comedians who quickly become her friends. Keeping her newfound activities a secret, Izzy begins a desperate ploy to keep her two lives separate, but must eventually reckon with her suspicious boyfriend and best friend.

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.

This fictionalised portrait of Joyce's youth is one of the most vivid accounts of the growth from childhood to adulthood. Dublin at the turn of the century provides the backdrop as Stephen Dedalus moves town and society, towards the irrevocable decision to leave - the decision made by Joyce himself and which resulted in the mature novels of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

As an 8th grader from a racially mixed family, Christina faces a new set of challenges, heartbreaks and triumphs.

Seventeen-year-old Christmas Miller's summer vacation in Sweet Lake, New York with her best friend Lexi takes a turn for the worse, when the pair have a disagreement and they find a friend, Lemy, face down in the lake. Christmas, who has ADHD, is determined to find out what happened to her friend, discover if it has anything to do with the lake's growing algae problem, and repair her friendship before summer's end.

Fifteen-year-old Eugene Jerome is trying to uncover life's mysteries in this adaptation of a Broadway hit about growing up in Brooklyn during the late 1930's.

Seventeen-year-old Evie Beckham has always been too occupied with her love of math and frequent battles with anxiety to want to date. Besides, she?s always found the idea of kissing to be kind of weird. But by senior year, thanks to therapy and her friends, she?s feeling braver than before. Maybe even brave enough to enter the national math and physics competition or flirt back with the new boy. Meanwhile, Evie?s best friend, Caleb Covic, has always been a little in love with her. So he?s horrified when he is forced to witness Evie?s meet-cute with the new guy. Desperate, Caleb uses an online forum to capture Evie?s interest?and it goes a little too well. Now Evie wonders how she went from avoiding romance to having to choose between two?or is it three??boys.

In the vein of Year of the Dog and The Higher Power of Lucky, this Middle Eastern coming-of-age story is told with warmth, spirit, and a mischievous sense of humor. Spunky eleven-year-old Wadjda lives in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia with her parents. She desperately wants a bicycle so that she can race her friend Abdullah, even though it is considered improper for girls to ride bikes. Wadjda earns money for her dream bike by selling homemade bracelets and mixtapes of banned music to her classmates. But after she's caught, she's forced to turn over a new leaf (sort of), or risk expulsion from school. Still, Wadjda keeps scheming, and with the bicycle so closely in her sights, she will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Set against the shifting social attitudes of the Middle East, The Green Bicycle explores gender roles, conformity, and the importance of family, all with wit and irresistible heart.

Burdened with the dark, dangerous, and seemingly impossible task of locating and destroying Voldemort's remaining Horcruxes, Harry, feeling alone and uncertain about his future, struggles to find the inner strength he needs to follow the path set out before him.