Showing titles in Coming of Age

Raja has been raised in captivity. Not behind the bars of a zoo, but within the confines of an American home. He was stolen when he was young to be someone's pet. Now he's grown up and is about to be sent away again, to a place from which there will be no return. John grew up with Raja. The orangutan was his friend, his brother, never his pet. But when John's parents split up and moved him across the country, he left Raja behind. Now Raja is suffering.

Step into Mackinac Island's scorching summer of 1979, where reality and fantasy blend in a whirlwind of murder, movies, and magic. Meet Jack McGuinn, a paperboy with life on the island all figured out until Hollywood descends to film "Somewhere in Time" with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. Jack's world unravels amidst the movie madness.

In this absorbing new novel, Summer makes a choice that changes the whole course of the season ahead of her. When her story divides, Summer finds herself alternately face-to-face with a longtime crush and worlds away. She is both living amid secrets and kept from them. But what matters more - the choices she makes or the experiences that shape her?

Convention doesn’t carry much weight in Alder Creek. It doesn’t in Amoris Westmore’s family either. Daughter of a massage therapist and a pothead artist, inheritor of her grandmother’s vinyl collection, and blissfully entering her senior year in high school, Amoris never wants to leave her progressive hometown. Everything changes when Jamison Rush moves in next door. Jamison was Amoris’s first crush, and their last goodbye still stings. One of the few Black students in Alder Creek, Jamison sees Amoris’s idyllic town through different eyes.

Seventeen-year-old Kira Fujikawa has never had it easy. She’s bullied by the popular girls in school. Her parents ignore her. And she’s also plagued with a secret: She can see yokai, the ghosts and demons that haunt the streets of Kyoto. But things accelerate from bad to worse when she learns that Shuten-doji, the demon king, will rise at the next blood moon to hunt down an ancient relic and bring the world to a catastrophic end. Not exactly skilled at fighting anything, much less the dead, Kira enlists the aid of seven powerful death gods to help her slay Shuten-doji.

Princess Lorilys has spent the last three years preparing to rule the kingdom she inherited from her sister. As her ascension approaches, a rebellion emerges, endangering everything she has sworn to protect: her family and the future of the molecularly talented citizens of Lawrencia.

For fans of Stand by Me and Stranger Things. Devil’s Backbone dirt road weaves through tall East Texas trees. The eerie Claymore mansion sits silently along the path. Thirteen-year-old Kevin Bishop and friends plan to spend their summer swimming, playing baseball, and erecting a massive fort in the nearby woods. Their daily journey requires a bike ride down that road and by that mansion—the site of a gruesome unsolved murder near the turn-of-the-century.

Madison didn’t want to be the last hope for humanity, she just wanted chocolate cake. Now, rather than dining on delicious, sugary, baked happiness, she finds herself elbows deep in undercooked oatmeal. What starts as a last ditch effort to save her family unravels into a last rites ceremony for everything she knew.

After a life-changing summer, four friends are finally ready for senior year. Gabriel is thrilled to create his school's first LGBTQ+ advocacy group, but his long-distance relationship is fading from summer love to something else. Heath feels secure for the first time in years, but with his future riding on a baseball scholarship each pitch triggers his anxiety. Reese is set on pursuing a career in fashion design, but his creativity takes him in an unexpected direction. Sal wants to be in politics. After a chat with his aunt, he is ready for an unlikely path.

A neglected 12-year-old boy does nothing to report the death of his mother in order to compete in a spelling bee. A tragic coming-of-age tale of horror and drama in the setting of a hot New Orleans summer.

Fifteen-year-old Brandy Shaw, like most girls her age, deals with private demons. Forced to leave her hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for Denton, Florida, she manages to forget the boy she left behind for a new one, Travis Daly. But Travis has his own problems that end up affecting Brandy in a number of destructive ways.

Jolie Lam, a high school sophomore in San Jose, is known for two things: her bizarre freakout at last year’s swim meet and her fortuneteller grandfather with visions of dragons and earthquakes. Friendless and ostracized, Jolie's life takes a dramatic turn for the better when she saves the school's it-girl, Huong Pham, during a haunting vision of her own. Taken under Huong's wing, Jolie's world transforms, in more ways than one.

Natalie Armstrong has everything: She's smart and beautiful, has the perfect boyfriend, early acceptance to college, and a loving family. But the summer she turns 17, she finally decides to ask some unanswered questions: Who are her biological parents, and why did they give her up when she was born? These questions take her on a journey from the deep woods of Maine to the streets of New York City, from the pages of old phone books and a tattered yearbook photo to the realization that she might actually meet her biological mother face-to-face.

Liana Sarkar lives and breathes music, hoping to follow in the footsteps of her A&R coordinator father. Maybe if she succeeds, he’ll finally give her the time of day instead of drowning himself in work to distract from the grief of her mother’s passing. When Liana accidentally sabotages an up-and-coming local band, Third Eye, she makes it her mission to steer them towards success—without them discovering her role in their setback. But as she gets closer to Third Eye, especially their enigmatic leader Skyler Moon, it becomes harder to hide the truth.

As a young nation begins to take shape, Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler are on top of the world. But new additions to Alex and Eliza's little family mean change is afoot in the Hamilton household. When they agree to take in an orphaned teenage girl along with Eliza's oldest brother, John Schuyler, Eliza can't help but attempt a match. It's not long before sparks start to fly...if only Eliza can keep herself from interfering too much in the course of true love.

When her father pulls her out of high school to care for her invalid mother and little brother, sixteen-year-old Magda is devastated—but the greater challenge is saving her family in the face of a war and pandemic. In 1916, the world is at war, even if America has not yet joined the effort. But for Magda, the growing hostility her German immigrant family faces hits close to home. Despite her domestic obligations, Magda persists with her education, determined to find an independent role for herself.

When the precocious Zeze grows up, he wants to be a poet in a bow tie. But for now he entertains himself playing clever pranks on the residents of his Rio de Janeiro shantytown, stunts for which his parents and siblings punish him soundly. Now that his father is out of work, the beatings have become harsher, and life has gotten bleaker. Zeze’s only solace comes from his time at school, his hours secretly spent singing with a Bahian street musician, or his time of refuge with his magical orange tree, which both listens and offers him sage advice.

One way or another...she will be the end of the world. With powers that weren't supposed to be touched by mortal hands, Vi Solaris is determined to free herself and the world from the deadly vortex it's trapped in. This mission has taken her to forbidden lands and has transformed her from a sheltered princess to a fearsome warrior. But the ultimate triumph requires the ultimate sacrifice, forcing Vi to choose between the last tethers to her humanity and the very people she's sworn to protect.

Dantess wants to follow in the footsteps of his dead grandfather—a legendary priest of War—but his father forbids it. In fact, his father’s hatred of war lands him in a cell within the god’s temple. The only way to free him is from the inside, so Dantess must choose: let his father die or defy his upbringing, become a priest, and win his father’s freedom in the temple’s deadly Game of War. Torn between the legacies of his father and grandfather, Dantess finds that both paths hide secrets that threaten to destroy everything he cares about, including his sanity.

Growing up in a world of wealth and pastel-tinted entitlement, 15-year-old Carly has always relied on the constancy - and authenticity - f her sister, Anna. But when 14-year-old Anna turns plastic-perfect-pretty over the course of a single summer, everything starts to change. And there are boys involved, complicating things as boys always do.