Ketchvar III travels to Earth to inhabit the body of an average teenager and assess the damage humans have done to their planet. But even his highly advanced alien intelligence can't prepare him for life as an American teen.

An award-winning picture book about resilience, self-esteem, and the power of talking about emotions Lili Macaroni loves drawing butterflies, counting the stars, and being exactly who she is-Lili Macaroni. That is, until she starts kindergarten. There her classmates tell her that her hair is like a pumpkin, her eyes are squinty blueberries, and her laugh is like a parrot's squawk. She has never felt such unhappiness before. It makes her want to erase herself and draw a brand-new Lili. Then she reconsiders. Does she really want to erase her hair that's just like Mom's? Her eyes just like Grandma's? Her Grandpa's infectious laugh? With her parents' help, she creates a polka-dotted butterfly to wear at her collar, publicly announcing her own resilience and symbolically letting her sorrows be flown away. And when she explains the butterfly to her classmates, Lili discovers she has begun a powerful conversation, and that everyone has some trouble to be carried away on butterfly wings. In this accessible exploration of emotions and self-esteem, Nicole Testa and Annie Boulanger create a relatable heroine with inborn ingenuity and warm family support.

Orange Is the New Black meets Walter Dean Myer’s Monster in this gritty, twisty, and haunting debut by Tiffany D. Jackson about a girl convicted of murder seeking the truth while surviving life in a group home.

Mary B. Addison killed a baby.

Allegedly. She didn’t say much in that first interview with detectives, and the media filled in the only blanks that mattered: a white baby had died while under the care of a churchgoing black woman and her nine-year-old daughter. The public convicted Mary and the jury made it official. But did she do it?

There wasn’t a point to setting the record straight before, but now she’s got Ted—and their unborn child—to think about. When the state threatens to take her baby, Mary’s fate now lies in the hands of the one person she distrusts the most: her Momma. No one knows the real Momma. But does anyone know the real Mary?

The first ten lies they tell you in high school. "Speak up for yourself--we want to know what you have to say." From the first moment of her freshman year at Merryweather High, Melinda knows this is a big fat lie, part of the nonsense of high school. She is friendless, outcast, because she busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops, so now nobody will talk to her, let alone listen to her. As time passes, she becomes increasingly isolated and practically stops talking altogether. Only her art class offers any solace, and it is through her work on an art project that she is finally able to face what really happened at that terrible party: she was raped by an upperclassman, a guy who still attends Merryweather and is still a threat to her. Her healing process has just begun when she has another violent encounter with him. But this time Melinda fights back, refuses to be silent, and thereby achieves a measure of vindication. In Laurie Halse Anderson's powerful novel, an utterly believable heroine with a bitterly ironic voice delivers a blow to the hypocritical world of high school. She speaks for many a disenfranchised teenager while demonstrating the importance of speaking up for oneself. "Speak "was a 1999 National Book Award Finalist for Young People's Literature.