2006 ALA Best Books for Young Adults (Fiction Part 2)
Discover the top 2006 ALA Best Books for Young Adults (Fiction Part 2)—curated picks for teens and young readers. Explore award-winning titles and must-read fiction!
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All Rivers Flow to the Sea
by Alison McGhee
After a car accident in the Adirondacks leaves her older sister Ivy brain-dead, seventeen-year-old Rose struggles with her grief and guilt as she slowly learns to let her sister go.
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Autobiography of My Dead Brother
by Walter Dean Myers
The thing was that me and Rise were blood brothers, but sometimes I really didn't know him. . . . And so Jesse fills his sketchbook with drawings and portraits of his blood brother, Rise, and his comic strip, Spodi Roti and Wise, as he makes sense of the complexities of friendship, loyalty, and loss in a neighborhood where drive–bys, vicious gangs, and abusive cops are everyday realities. Printz Award winner Walter Dean Myers delivers an unforgettable novel about life's hardest lessons, illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist Christopher Myers.
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Skybreaker
by Kenneth Oppel
Matt Cruse, a student at the Airship Academy, and Kate de Vries, a young heiress, team up with a gypsy and a daring captain, to find a long-lost airship, rumored to carry a treasure beyond imagination.
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A Room on Lorelei Street
by Mary E. Pearson
To escape a miserable existence taking care of her alcoholic mother, seventeen-year-old Zoe rents a room from an eccentric woman, but her earnings as a waitress after school are minimal and she must go to extremes to cover expenses.
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Keeper
by Mal Peet
In an interview with a young journalist, World Cup hero, El Gato, describes his youth in the Brazilian rain forest and the events, experiences, and people that helped make him a great goalkeeper and renowned soccer star.
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Ball Don't Lie
by Matt de la Peña
Sticky, a beat-around-the-head foster kid, discovers that basketball may be his way out in this novel that takes place where the street and the court meet and where a boy can be anything if he puts his mind to it.
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Criss Cross
by Lynne Rae Perkins
Debbie is wishing something would happen. Something good. To her. Soon. In the meantime, Debbie loses a necklace and finds a necklace (and boy does the necklace have a story to tell), she goes jeans shopping with her mother (an accomplishment in diplomacy), she learns to drive shift in a truck (illegally), she saves a life (directly connected to being able to drive, thus proving something), she takes a bus ride to another town (in order to understand what it feels like to be from "elsewhere"), she meets a boy (who truly is from "elsewhere"), but mostly she hangs out with her friends: Patty, Hector, Lenny, and Phil. Their paths cross. Their stories crisscross. And in Lynne Rae Perkins's remarkable book, a girl and her wish grow up. Illustrated throughout with black–and–white pictures, comics, and photographs by the author. Ages 10+
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Just Like that
by Marsha Qualey
A tragic accident ending with the death of two people her own age changes life forever for an eighteen-year-old woman.
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The Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book One: Lightning Thief
by Rick Riordan
Percy Jackson is a good kid, but he can't seem to focus on his schoolwork or control his temper. And lately, being away at boarding school is only getting worse-Percy could have sworn his pre-algebra teacher turned into a monster and tried to kill him. When Percy's mom finds out, she knows it's time that he knew the truth about where he came from, and that he go to the one place he'll be safe. She sends Percy to Camp Half Blood, a summer camp for demigods (on Long Island), where he learns that the father he never knew is Poseidon, God of the Sea. Soon a mystery unfolds and together with his friends -- one a satyr and the other the demigod daughter of Athena -- Percy sets out on a quest across the United States to reach the gates of the Underworld (located in a recording studio in Hollywood) and prevent a catastrophic war between the gods.
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Eyes of the Emperor
by Graham Salisbury
Following orders from the United States Army, several young Japanese American men train K-9 units to hunt Asians during World War II.
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Kipling's Choice
by Geert Spillebeen
In 1915, mortally wounded in Loos, France, eighteen-year-old John Kipling, son of writer Rudyard Kipling, remembers his boyhood and the events leading to what is to be his first and last World War I battle.
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Under the Persimmon Tree
by Suzanne Fisher Staples
During the 2001 Afghan War, the lives of Najmah, a young refugee from Kunduz, Afghanistan, and Nusrat, an American-Muslim teacher who is awaiting her huband's return from Mazar-i-Sharif, intersect at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan.
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Light Years
by Tammar Stein
"He went to school to learn how to kill me. The Israeli girl who ruined his life. Seven people were killed instead. A single mother of two. A computer programmer. Two college students. A grandmother and her four-year-old grandson sharing an ice cream. And Dov, my boyfriend, my heart, the man I wanted to marry, who was there waiting for me. Maya leaves Israel to study astronomy at the University of Virginia, running from the violence, guilt, and memories of her past. As the narrative switches between Virginia and Israel, we learn about Maya's life as a soldier, her ambiguous devotion to Israel, and her love for her boyfriend, Dov, who is tragically killed in a suicide bombing. Now, in Virginia, amid the day-to-day pressures of classes, roommates, and fraternity parties, Maya attempts to reconcile her Israeli past with her American future. "From the Hardcover edition.
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Mimus
by Lilli Thal
Prince Florin is enslaved as a lowly apprentice to the spiteful court jester, Mimus, in the kingdom of Moltovia.
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Ariel
by Grace Tiffany
Ariel is beautiful and magical, a creator of dreams and of mischief. Sprung from the mind of a dazed sailor shipwrecked in the Bermuda Triangle, she rules half of her enchanted isle, dreaming of the savior from the east who will help her conquer all. When Prospero, a lost mariner, appears on the beach, his young daughter, Miranda, in tow, Ariel entices him with her visions of conquest. Together, she promises, they will defeat the mysterious tribe whose drums beat beyond the island's rain forest. The homesick Prospero struggles to resist Ariel's charms, but he almost falls under her spell when Miranda falls in love with their servant, the island boy Caliban. Ariel wants to march west, Prospero wants to sail east, and daughter Miranda wants to play on the beach with her boyfriend. Their clash comes to a head when Ariel, summoning her full powers, creates a cataclysmic storm that will change their lives and the island forever. Shakespeare scholar Grace Tiffany looks at the dark side of Shakespeare's The Tempest, investing a female Ariel with tremendous strength. The Tempest takes on new meaning for new readers, as Tiffany explores the imagination's power to transform grief into dangerous dreams.
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Far Traveler
by Rebecca Tingle
When King Edward gives his niece Elfwyn two choices--marry one of his allies or become a nun--Wyn is at a loss to decide. Her strong, warrior mother has just died, so it's impossible to know what she would have wanted. Wyn takes the first risk of her life and flees. Disguising herself as a boy, she adopts a new identity as a traveling storyteller called Widsith (far traveler) and reinvents herself, drawing upon the books she has loved all her life. Soon she finds her fate inextricably tied with the dark-eyed King Wilfrid, who knows her only as Widsith, and wants her help in a plot against her own uncle.
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Runaways
by Brian K. Vaughan
When six young friends discover that their parents are all secretly super-powered villains, they run away together and find strength in one another to overcome their evil legacy.
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Stormwitch
by Susan Vaught
In Pass Christian, Mississippi, in 1969, sixteen-year-old Ruba, trained by her Haitian grandmother in both voodoo and Amazonian warrior tactics, uses her skills to fight against racism and the African witch Zashar, now coming ashore in the form of Hurricane Camille.
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Black and White
by Paul Volponi
Marcus and Eddie are best friends who found the strength to break through the racial barrier. Marcus is black; Eddie is white. Stars of their school basketball team, they are true leaders who look past the stereotypes and come out on top. They are inseparable, watching each other's backs, both on and off the basketball court. But one night—and one wrong decision—will change their lives forever. Will their mistake cost them their friendship . . . and their future? An ALA Best Book for Young Adults An ALA Quick Pick “Top Ten” IRA Children’s Book Award (Young Adult)
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Superman Birthright
by Mark Waid
Originally published in single magazine form as Superman birthright 1-12.
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Full Service
by Will Weaver
In the summer of 1965, sixteen-year-old Paul Sutton, a northern Minnesota farm boy, takes a job at a gas station in town, where his strict religious upbringing is challenged by new people and experiences.
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Peeps
by Scott Westerfeld
Cal Thompson is a carrier of a parasite that causes vampirism, and must hunt down all of the girlfriends he has unknowingly infected.
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A Certain Slant of Light
by Laura Whitcomb
In the class of the high school English teacher she has been haunting, Helen feels them: for the first time in 130 years, human eyes are looking at her. They belong to a boy, a boy who has not seemed remarkable until now. And Helen--terrified, but intrigued--is drawn to him. The fact that he is in a body and she is not presents this unlikely couple with their first challenge. But as the lovers struggle to find a way to be together, they begin to discover the secrets of their former lives and of the young people they come to possess.
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Sandpiper
by Ellen Wittlinger
When The Walker, a mysterious boy who walks constantly, intervenes in an argument between Sandpiper and a boy she used to see, their lives become entwined in ways that change them both.
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Poison
by Chris Wooding
Taken! Poison must travel to the end of the world to outwit the Phaerie Lord and get her sister back. But are those she meets on the way trying to help her \- or lead her into a trap? This is no fairy tale...
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A Thief in the House of Memory
by Tim Wynne-Jones
The death of an apparent stranger in the Steeple family's old home triggers troubling questions for sixteen-year-old Declan as he tries to make sense of his fragmented dreams, random memories, and unexplained coincidences, hoping to learn the truth about the mother who suddenly left when he was ten.
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I Am the Messenger
by Markus Zusak
DON’T MISS BRIDGE OF CLAY, MARKUS ZUSAK’S FIRST NOVEL SINCE THE BOOK THIEF. From the author of the extraordinary #1 New York Times bestseller The Book Thief, I Am the Messenger is an acclaimed novel filled with laughter, fists, and love. A MICHAEL L. PRINTZ HONOR BOOK FIVE STARRED REVIEWS Ed Kennedy is an underage cabdriver without much of a future. He's pathetic at playing cards, hopelessly in love with his best friend, Audrey, and utterly devoted to his coffee-drinking dog, the Doorman. His life is one of peaceful routine and incompetence until he inadvertently stops a bank robbery. That's when the first ace arrives in the mail. That's when Ed becomes the messenger. Chosen to care, he makes his way through town helping and hurting (when necessary) until only one question remains: Who's behind Ed's mission?