When brain surgery makes a mouse into a genius, dull-witted Charlie Gordon wonders if it might also work for him. When high school student Clay Jenkins receives a box in the mail containing 13 cassette tapes recorded by his classmate Hannah, who committed suicide, he spends a bewildering and heartbreaking night crisscrossing their town, listening to Hannah's voice recount the events leading up to her death.
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically gifted, autistic boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secrets about his mother. After being raped at a party, teenage Melinda is unable to tell angry partygoers why she called the police — and eventually stops speaking all together. Speak follows Melinda as she overcomes her past, and finds her voice. Bella must choose between vampire Edward and werewolf Jacob, while avoiding the attentions of less friendly vampires. Scott Westerfeld's four-part series follows teenage Tally as she uncovers the truth about her future world, where a mandatory operation at age 16 converts natural "Uglies" into conformist "Pretties.
Tessa Gray's search for her missing brother leads her into Victorian London's supernatural underworld, where she must learn to trust the demon-killing Shadowhunters if she wants to learn to control her powers and find her brother. The Tuck family is confronted with an agonizing situation when it discovers that a year-old girl and a malicious stranger now share their secret, about a spring of magical water that prevents the drinker from ever growing any older. Sherman Alexie's humorous, semiautobiographical novel, illustrated by Ellen Forney, follows year-old Junior — poor, skinny and with a freakishly big head — as he leaves his school on the Spokane Indian Reservation for a mostly white school in a nearby town.
Alexie captures the pain and awkwardness of adolescence while also meditating on the devastation that poverty, racism and alcoholism have wreaked on Native American communities. During their first summer break spent apart, longtime friends Lena, Tibby, Carmen and Bridget each embark on adventures that they share with each other through a pair of jeans that they have decided will be worn by all, and so will absorb all of their stories. Jack London's classic novel presents the adventures of an unusual dog, part Saint Bernard and part Scotch shepherd, forcibly taken to the Klondike gold fields, where he eventually becomes the leader of a wolf pack.
When two teens, one gay and one straight, meet accidentally and discover that they share the same name, their lives become intertwined as one begins dating the other's best friend, who produces a play revealing his relationship with them both. Originally sold as the real diary of an actual teenager, Go Ask Alice is the faux-memoir of a year-old girl whose life is dominated by her drug problems, following her experiences from her indoctrination into the world of drugs to just before her death from an overdose.
The eldest of three sisters in a land where being the eldest is considered a misfortune, Sophie is resigned to her fate as a hat shop apprentice — until a witch turns her into an old woman, and she finds herself in the castle of the greatly feared wizard Howl.
A story about the perils of popularity, the courage of nonconformity, and the thrill of first love. Introverted, intellectual Gene and his daredevil best friend, Phineas, are roommates at a posh New England boarding school just before World War II, but a conflict of loyalties leads them to tragedy. Two years after a horrible incident made them run away, vampire princess Lissa and her guardian-in-training Rose are found and returned to St. Vladimir's Academy, where one girl focuses on mastering magic, the other on physical training, while both try to avoid the perils of gossip, cliques, gruesome pranks and sinister plots.
In the Old Kingdom, magic is real and the dead walk — and sometimes, they walk right across the magical Wall and into the New Kingdom. The series follows skilled necromancer Sabriel and her companions as they fight to send the dead back into the realm of Death. Paul Atreides, the son of a betrayed duke, is given up for dead on a treacherous desert planet and adopted by its fierce, nomadic people, who help him unravel his most unexpected destiny. In a remote corner of Terry Pratchett's Discworld, a young witch-to-be named Tiffany Aching teams up with the Wee Free Men, a clan of rowdy, 6-inch-high blue men, to rescue her baby brother and ward off a sinister invasion from Fairyland.
Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Anna begins to question her moral obligations in light of countless medical procedures, and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body. Five novels steeped in British and Welsh mythology follow the story of year old Will Stanton, seventh son of a seventh son and last of the Old Ones, in his quest to vanquish the powers of the Dark.
In the Graceling realms, rare people are Graced with a special skill — cooking, fighting, singing, building, lying — and all the Graced are marked with eyes of two different colors. Katsa, niece of the tyrannical king, is graced with fighting — or so she thinks. Katherine and Michael, along with various friends and acquaintances in suburban New Jersey, discover the possibilities and limitations of love and personal commitment — and some interesting names for body parts.
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Yearning for knowledge and power, Sparrowhawk, a young student at the School for Wizards, becomes overanxious and tries his dangerous powers too soon, unleashing a terrible evil throughout the land, as he prepares for his destiny as the greatest sorcerer in the history of Earthsea. The series that began with Eragon follows poor farm boy Eragon as he grows into a master swordsman who fights alongside his dragon, Saphira, to help save the Empire from evil and darkness.
Fourteen-year-old Mia, who is trying to lead a normal life as a teenage girl in New York City, is shocked to learn that her father is the Prince of Genovia, a small European principality, and that she is a princess and the heir to the throne. Eleven-year-old Alanna wants to be a knight. Her brother Thom wants to be a wizard. So she disguises herself as a boy and the two switch places, leading Alanna to a lifetime of adventure as the Kingdom of Tortall's first Lady Knight.
While going through the possessions of a deceased guest who owed them money, an innkeeper and her son find a treasure map that leads them across the Spanish Main to a notorious pirate's treasure. This classic novel introduced the world to the dreaded Long John Silver. In a dystopian near future America, the government has classified love as a disease. All citizens, once they turn 18, receive a government operation to cure the unwanted emotion.
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Lena looks forward to her operation and a safe, predictable and happy life — until, just a few months before her 18th birthday, she meets the mysterious Alex and falls in love. When Anna's romance-novelist father sends her to an elite American boarding school in Paris for her senior year of high school, she goes reluctantly — and meets the amazing Etienne St. Will their year of near-misses lead to love? In the first volume of the "Hush, Hush" saga, high school sophomore Nora Grey must deal with her feelings for Patch, a classmate — and biology partner — who turns out to be a fallen angel.
When year-old Ginny receives a bequest — a packet of mysterious envelopes — from her favorite aunt Peg, she leaves New Jersey to crisscross Europe on a whirlwind tour and scavenger hunt that transforms her life. An ambitious new student at Manhattan's prestigious Executive Pre-Professional High School, Craig Gilner suddenly discovers that he has become an average kid among a group of brilliant students, a discovery that leads to increasing anxiety and a battle with clinical depression, during which he encounters a motley crew of fellow patients battling their own problems.
After the suspicious death of her mother in , year-old Gemma returns to England, after many years in India, to attend a finishing school. There, she becomes aware of her magical powers and ability to see into the spirit world. But what will she find in that strange world? After a family tragedy, Jacob feels compelled to explore an abandoned orphanage on an island off the coast of Wales, discovering that the children once kept there — including his own grandfather — may have been dangerous, and may be still alive.
For Esperanza, a young girl growing up in the Hispanic quarter of Chicago, life is an endless landscape of concrete and rundown tenements. She tells her story in a series of vignettes, as she tries to rise above the hopelessness of her surroundings and come into her own power.
The world of Trinity School is turned upside down when freshman Jerry Renault refuses to sell chocolates for the school's annual fundraiser. Jerry becomes a nonconformist hero for some — and a target of hatred for others. Suddenly unpopular year-old Annabel finds an ally in classmate Owen, whose honesty and passion for music help her to face what really happened at the end-of-the-year party that changed her life.
The Great Alone
Struggling to confront her grandfather's impending death, year-old Vicky Austin finds herself the center of attention for three young men, one of whom is a dolphin researcher. When the inevitable crisis comes, she must rely on the love of others — both human and dolphin — to overcome her grief. The summer after her father's death, Macy plans to work at the library and wait for her brainy boyfriend to return from camp; instead, she goes to work at a catering business where she makes new friends and finally faces her grief.
In an alternate London, where magic is real and the Crystal Palace never burned down, magician's apprentice Nathaniel summons the 5,year-old djinni Bartimaeus — but summoning and controlling are two different things. When alchemist Sydney is ordered into hiding to protect the life of Moroi princess Jill Dragomir, the last place she expects to be sent is a human private school in Palm Springs, Calif.
There, amid the wealthy students, Sydney and Jill must attempt to pass as normal. Luce ends up at reform school after her boyfriend dies in a mysterious fire. While there, she finds herself drawn to Daniel — feeling almost as if she'd met him before. That feeling turns out to be true: Luce and the supernatural Daniel are doomed lovers, fated to lose each other in lifetime after lifetime.
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Cast and Kristin Cast. Sixteen-year-old Zoey Redbird is Marked as a fledging vampyre and joins the House of Night school, where she will train to become an adult vampyre — if she makes it through the Change. And even for Changed vampyres, the House of Night can be a treacherous place. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain lives with her older sister, blocked-writer father and bohemian stepmother in a crumbling English castle.
Then, a well-to-do American family buys the castle, becoming the Mortmains' landlords. Cassandra uses a diary to record the tumultuous months that follow. High school student Nick O'Leary, member of a rock band, meets college-bound Norah Silverberg and asks her to be his girlfriend for five minutes in order to avoid his ex-sweetheart.
That fateful five minutes leads to an all-night quest to find their favorite band's secret show. Popular, thoughtless Samantha dies in a fiery car crash — but wakes up the next morning, and ends up living out her last day alive seven times in a row, until she finally unravels the mystery of her death. In a future world where those between the ages of 13 and 18 can have their lives "unwound" and their body parts harvested for use by others, three teens go to extreme lengths to survive until they turn The last unicorn leaves the protection of her enchanted lavender forest to search for her own kind, with the assistance of Schmedrick, the only occasionally successful magician, and dreamer Molly Grue.
Sixteen-year-old Thomas wakes up in the middle of a maze, with no memory, and realizes he must work with the community in which he finds himself if he is to escape. But once he escapes, he discovers the outside world is a new and dangerous place. Seventeen-year-old Mia is in a coma after a terrible car accident that killed her parents.
Awakening, she has no memory of the accident, and must put her life back together piece by piece — and decide what to do with it. Harry Crewe's boring life in the remote orange-growing province of Daria is disrupted when she's kidnapped by a native king. She discovers power within herself and becomes the heroic Harimad-sol, King's Rider and heir to a magical sword. Kristina Snow is the perfect daughter, until she meets a boy who introduces her to drugs.
She becomes a very different person, struggling to control her life and her mind, as she grows up and has children of her own. Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her, so when Xander appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows he is her ideal mate — until Ky Markham's face appears for an instant before the screen fades to black. Cammie Morgan can speak 14 different languages, hack CIA computer codes and kill a man seven different ways. She and her friends are students at the elite Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women, where martial arts and chemical warfare are on the curriculum, and the real mission is training spies.
On her way to marry a prince she's never met, Princess Anidori is betrayed by her guards and her lady-in-waiting, and must become a goose girl to survive until she can reveal her true identity and reclaim the crown that is rightfully hers. Alianne, the teenage daughter of Alanna, the first lady knight in Tortall, is kidnapped and sold into slavery, forced to serve an exiled royal family in the remote Copper Islands, where she is immersed in a world of murder, intrigue and warring gods.
The dull and drab life of Ed, an underage cab driver with a coffee-addicted dog, takes an unexpected turn when he accidentally stops a bank robbery and finds himself being placed in charge of watching out for the entire town. Thirteen-year-old Daine's magic allows her to speak to animals, hear their thoughts, and shift into their forms.
She uses her powers to help battle an invasion of terrible immortal creatures and prevent the overthrow of her king. Princess Cimorene of Lindenwall decides she's had enough of being a princess, and hires herself out to cook for the dragon Kazul. This boxed set follows her adventures, and those of her son Daystar. On a "New World" where all men can hear each other's thoughts — but women remain private — Todd and Viola are pursued by power-hungry Prentiss and mad minister Aaron as they search for answers about their colony's true past, and seek a way to warn a ship bringing settlers from the Old World.
Having been sent to Winding Circle Temple, Daja, Briar, Tris and Sandry begin to feel that they have finally found a place where their magical gifts are respected. As they learn and grow in their skills, they must face down everything from pirates to strange diseases. Seventeen-year-old Karou, a lovely, enigmatic art student living in Prague, has a necklace of wish-granting beads and a sketchbook of hideous, frightening monsters — the chimaerae who form the only family she has ever known. In the future, most people will have a Feed chip implanted in their heads that connects everyone to an evolved version of the Internet — at the cost of even basic privacy.
During spring break on the moon, Titus and Violet meet and build a relationship when their Feeds are hacked. Five novels of life in a magical modern Los Angeles, where Weetzie Bat and her friends and family — Dirk, Duck, My Secret Agent Lover Man and baby Cherokee — interact with ghosts from their past and with each other as they search for love, connection and acceptance.
When Auden goes to stay with her father, stepmother and new baby sister the summer before she starts college, all the trauma of her parents' divorce is revived, even as she is making new friends and learning that there's more to life than schoolwork and perfectionism. And can she keep Angus out of trouble? It's and Europe is on the precipice of war — the German Clankers and British Darwinists are armed with futuristic weaponry and biotechnology; in the midst of the chaos, Alek, a royal and potential threat to the throne, and Deryn, a common Darwinist, meet on the run and forge an uneasy alliance that will dramatically change the course of the Great War and their lives.
In a future where humans despise clones, Matt enjoys special status as the young clone of El Patron, the year-old leader of a corrupt drug empire nestled between Mexico and the United States. Escape is his only chance to survive — but even that may not save him. Christopher Chant is a young boy who struggles with even the most basic spells — but when a wizard tests him, he discovers he's actually a powerful enchanter with nine lives, destined to become the next Chrestomanci, a government official in charge of supervising magic.
Remy, a girl who always knows how to end a relationship before it becomes emotional, meets her match in Dexter, a musician who embodies everything that she despises and reminds her of the father who abandoned her. Remy finds herself unable to dump Dexter — and learns to follow her heart.
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When everyone over the age of 14 suddenly disappears from a California town, a battle erupts between the remaining residents and the students from a local school, as well as those who have "The Power" and those who do not. Grace has been visited each winter by a yellow-eyed wolf — a werewolf, it turns out, who becomes her boyfriend in his human form as Sam. Grace and Sam must fight to stay together, while fellow werewolf Cole wrestles with his attraction for rich girl Isabel. Aerin, with the guidance of the wizard Luthe and the help of the blue sword Gonturan, wins the birthright due her as the daughter of the Damarian king and a witchwoman of the mysterious, demon-haunted North.
Estranged best friends Lia and Cassie both struggle with anorexia and bulimia. When Cassie dies, Lia must find a way to hold on to hope, and eventually to recover. The classic Betsy-Tacy series follows Minnesota girl Betsy Ray and her friends Tacy and Tib as they grow from making piano-box playhouses to traveling the world and getting married. Accessibility links Skip to main content Keyboard shortcuts for audio player. Now, after all the nominating, sorting and counting, the final results are in.
Here are the best teen novels, chosen by the NPR audience. Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email. Buck eventually beats Spitz in a fight. Spitz is killed by the pack after his defeat by Buck, and Buck eventually becomes the leader of the team. When Francois and Perrault reach Dawson with their dispatches, and are given new orders from the Canadian government, the team is then sold to a "Scottish half-breed" man, who is also working the mail service.
The dogs must carry heavy loads to the mining areas, and the journeys they make are tiresome and long. One of the team, a morose husky named Dave, becomes sick and is eventually shot. Buck's next owners are a trio of stampeders from the United States Hal, Charles, and a woman named Mercedes , who are inexperienced at surviving in the Northern wilderness. They struggle to control the sled and ignore helpful advice from others, in particular the warnings that the spring melt poses dangers. They overfeed the dogs and then starve them when the food runs out. On their journey they meet John Thornton, an experienced outdoorsman, who notices the dogs have been poorly treated and are in a weakened condition.
He warns the trio against crossing the river, but they ignore his advice and order Buck to move on. Exhausted, starving, and sensing the danger ahead, Buck refuses and continues to lie unmoving in the snow. After Buck is beaten by Hal, Thornton recognizes him to be a remarkable dog. Disgusted by the driver's treatment of Buck, Thornton hits Hal with the butt of his axe, cuts Buck free from his traces, and tells the trio he is keeping him, much to Hal's displeasure.
After some argument, the trio leaves and tries to cross the river, but as Thornton warned, the ice breaks, and the three fall into the river and drown, along with the sled and neglected dogs. Buck comes to love and grow devoted to Thornton as he nurses him back to health. He saves Thornton when the man falls into a river. After Thornton takes him on trips to pan for gold , a bonanza king someone who hit it rich in a certain area , named Matthewson, wagers Thornton on the dog's strength and devotion.
A king of the Skookum Benches offers a large sum to buy Buck, but Thornton has grown fond of him and declines.
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Using his winnings, John Thornton retires his debts, but elects to continue searching for gold. However, Buck decides not to join the wolves and elects to return to Thornton, mirroring John's refusal to sell Buck. However, Buck returns to the campsite to find Hans and Pete murdered, then sees John Thornton has suffered the same fate.
Buck finds out the murderers were a group of Yeehat Indians. Buck eventually kills the natives to avenge Thornton, and he then is attacked by an entire pack of wolves. Buck wins the fight, then finds that the same timber wolf he had socialized with was in the pack he fought. Buck then follows the wolf and its pack into the forest, and answers the call of the wild. Buck comes out of the backwoods once a year on the anniversary of his attack on the Yeehats, at the former campsite where he was last with John Thornton, Hans and Pete, in order to mourn their deaths.
California native Jack London had traveled around the United States as a hobo , returned to California to finish high school he dropped out at age 14 , and spent a year in college at Berkeley , when in he went to the Klondike by way of Alaska during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush. Later, he said of the experience: He left California in July and traveled by boat to Dyea, Alaska , where he landed and went inland. They were successful in staking claims to eight gold mines along the Stewart River. London stayed in the Klondike for almost a year, living temporarily in the frontier town of Dawson City , before moving to a nearby winter camp, where he spent the winter in a temporary shelter reading books he had brought: In the spring, as the annual gold stampeders began to stream in, London left.
He had contracted scurvy , common in the Arctic winters where fresh produce was unavailable. When his gums began to swell he decided to return to California. There, he hired himself out on a boat to earn return passage to San Francisco. Horses were replaced with dogs as pack animals to transport material over the pass; [10] particularly strong dogs with thick fur were "much desired, scarce and high in price". London would have seen many dogs, especially prized Husky sled dogs, in Dawson City and in the winter camps situated close to the main sled route.
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Bernard - Scotch Collie dog about which London later wrote: The depiction of the California ranch in the beginning of the story was based on the Bond family ranch. On his return to California, London was unable to find work and relied on odd jobs such as cutting grass. He submitted a query letter to the San Francisco Bulletin proposing a story about his Alaskan adventure, but the idea was rejected because, as the editor told him, "Interest in Alaska has subsided in an amazing degree. Expecting to write a short story, London explains: Written as a frontier story about the gold rush, The Call of the Wild was meant for the pulp market.
The Call of the Wild falls into the genre of animal fiction, in which an animal is anthropomorphized and given human traits. In the story, London attributes human thoughts and insights to Buck, so much so that when the story was published he was accused of being a nature faker for attributing "unnatural" feelings to a dog. London's use of the genre gave it a new vibrancy, according to scholar Richard Lehan. The story is also an example of American pastoralism —a prevailing theme in American literature—in which the mythic hero returns to nature.
As with other characters of American literature, such as Rip van Winkle and Huckleberry Finn , Buck symbolizes a reaction against industrialization and social convention with a return to nature. London presents the motif simply, clearly, and powerfully in the story, a motif later echoed by 20th century American writers William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway most notably in " Big Two-Hearted River ". The enduring appeal of the story, according to American literature scholar Donald Pizer , is that it is a combination of allegory , parable , and fable. The story incorporates elements of age-old animal fables, such as Aesop's Fables , in which animals speak truth, and traditional beast fables, in which the beast "substitutes wit for insight".
In The Call of the Wild , London intensifies and adds layers of meaning that are lacking in these stories. As a writer London tended to skimp on form, according to biographer Labor, and neither The Call of the Wild nor White Fang "is a conventional novel". The format of the story is divided into four distinct parts, according to Labor. In the first part, Buck experiences violence and struggles for survival; in the second part, he proves himself a leader of the pack; the third part brings him to his death symbolically and almost literally ; and in the fourth and final part, he undergoes rebirth.
London's story is a tale of survival and a return to primitivism. Pizer also finds evident in the story a Christian theme of love and redemption, as shown by Buck's refusal to revert to violence until after the death of Thornton, who had won Buck's love and loyalty. Doctorow says the theme is based on Darwin 's concept of survival of the fittest.
London places Buck in conflict with humans, in conflict with the other dogs, and in conflict with his environment—all of which he must challenge, survive, and conquer. He learns that in a world where the "club and the fang" are law, where the law of the pack rules and a good-natured dog such as Curly can be torn to pieces by pack members, that survival by whatever means is paramount. London also explores the question of "nature vs. Buck, raised as a pet, is by heredity a wolf. The change of environment releases his innate characteristics and strengths to the point where he fights for survival and becomes leader of the pack.
Furthermore, Pizer maintains that the story appeals to human nature with the theme of the strong prevailing, particularly when faced with harsh circumstances, and a return to the wild. The veneer of civilization is thin and fragile, writes Doctorow, and in the story London exposes the brutality at the core of humanity and the ease with which humans revert to a state of primitivism. Doctorow sees the story as a caricature of a bildungsroman — in which a character learns and grows — in that Buck becomes progressively less civilized. John Myers O'Hara , Atavism.
The stanza outlines one of the main motifs of The Call of the Wild: