VCL Young Adult Reading Suggestions: Explore New York (Teens and older Summer 2018)

After five years on the road, Hayley and her father, an ex-soldier suffering from PTSD, try to make a new life in an upstate New York town. But will the past get in the way of their future?

Harry Jones was horribly disfigured in a childhood accident and despite years of therapy, he has never been able to move beyond his scarred appearance until he plays with The Scar Boys, a punk rock band.

A high school music festival goes awry when a young prodigy disappears from the most infamous room in the Bellweather Hotel in a town in New York State.
2015 Alex Award Winner

Over the course of a single day in New York City, two teenagers meet and fall in love. Natasha is a practical young woman trying to keep her family from being deported in a matter of hours, and Daniel is on his way to a college interview. Told in alternating chapters, with additional characters adding their voices.
2017 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Author Award
2017 Michael L. Printz Honor Book

Fifteen-year-old Wren and her three lifelong best friends are celebrating the opening of a major exhibit curated by her father at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when Wren finds first love with her brother's new friend, Nolan. The relationship transforms her and her life.

Kim Chang and her mother move to Brooklyn from Hong Kong after Kim’s father dies. Kim goes to school during the day, and then joins her mother working in a sweatshop owned by her bitter older sister. Kim excels, winning a scholarship to a private school, and falls in love with a boy who also helps his mother fill the sweatshop quotas.

Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun. Now, months later, alone in an emptied dorm for winter break, Marin waits. Mabel is coming to visit, and Marin will be forced to face everything that’s been left unsaid and finally confront the loneliness that has made a home in her heart.

Darius and Twig are an unlikely pair: Darius is a writer whose only escape is his alter ego, a peregrine falcon named Fury, and Twig is a middle-distance runner striving for athletic success. But they are drawn together in the struggle to overcome the obstacles that Harlem life throws at them.

Ali lives in Bed-Stuy, a Brooklyn neighborhood known for guns and drugs, but he and his sister, Jazz, and their neighbors, Needles and Noodles, stay out of trouble until they go to the wrong party, where one gets badly hurt and another leaves with a target on his back.
2015 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe New Talent Winner

If Harlem high school senior Drew Lawson is going to realize his dream of playing college, then professional, basketball, he will have to improve at being coached and being a team player, especially after a new--white--student threatens to take the scouts' attention away from him.

Soon after his mother’s death, Matt takes a job at a funeral home in his tough Brooklyn neighborhood and, while attending and assisting with funerals, begins to accept her death and his responsibilities as a man.
2016 Coretta Scott King Author Honor

In the poor town of Carp, New York, a group of teens enters a high-stakes game that involves a series of secretive, possibly deadly challenges throughout the summer, with the winner receiving more than $50,000--enough money to start a new life.

Fourteen-year-old Nadira, her sister, and their parents leave Bangladesh for New York City, but the expiration of their visas and the events of September 11, 2001, bring frustration, sorrow, and terror for the whole family.

Five kids in upstate New York have been the subject of documentaries recording their lives every five years. Now as teens, they spend a weekend together to try and figure out their lives.

Told from alternating points of view, this is the story of three very different girls living together in New York City as they struggle to find the balance between their dreams, their pasts, and their complicated hearts.

The story of a girl, told in a second-person voice, desperate to escape her mysterious assailants and with no memory of her past, is forced to put her life in the hands of others in New York City. Sequel to Blackbird

While studying the Harlem Renaissance, students at a Bronx high school read aloud poems they've written, revealing their innermost thoughts and fears to their formerly clueless classmates.

In an upstate New York farming community, high school reporter Hildy Biddle investigates a series of strange occurrences at a house rumored to be haunted.

It’s the end of 1977, and high school senior Nick is trying to reinvent himself. In his effort to become a better person, he makes a list consisting of four phrases to live by: Stand Up, Stand Out, Stand By, Stand Fast. Adhering to the list proves to be difficult when Zod, a lowlife from Nick’s past, reappears and persuades Nick to deal drugs. Nick is able to convince himself that delivering cocaine is just a means to an end- a way to get enough money so he and his new crush, Dawn, can escape snowy upstate New York and move to Florida. Despite the danger and illegal nature of his activities, Nick comes to believe that he has achieved his metamorphosis into a better self though his drug deals.

Reese needs to stay on track to get early release from the Progress juvenile detention facility in the Bronx.
Page 11 of 15
2011 Coretta Scott King Author Honor
2015 YALSA Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults Top Ten

Piddy Sanchez’s life is turned upside down when she finds out that Yaqui Delgado wants to kick her ass. While struggling to deal with the threat on her own, Piddy explores her identity, her culture, and the role of others in her life. A powerful story about bullying and resilience, set in a Queens school.
2014 Pura Belpré Author Award Winner

Luna’s mother died a year ago when she was hit by a car on the busy streets of New York City’s East Village. Devastated by the sudden death of her mother, it takes Luna a full year to finally begin to clean out her mother’s office. When she does, she finds seven voicemails on her mother’s cell phone that reveal her mother’s death was not what it originally seemed.

Myers uses 10 short stories to create snapshots of a pulsing, vibrant community with diverse ethnic threads.

The owner of Harlem’s National Memorial African Bookstore, Lewis Michaux, was passionate about knowledge. His bookstore became a legendary influence on people worldwide.
2013 Coretta Scott King Honor

Under the alias GirlOnline, Penny blogs about school dramas, boys, her mad, whirlwind family--and the panic attacks she's suffered from lately. When things go from bad to worse, her family whisks her away to New York, where she meets the gorgeous, guitar-strumming Noah. Suddenly Penny is falling in love--and capturing every moment of it on her blog.

It’s 1963 in New York City and sixteen-year-old JJ Green defies her parents by getting a summer job at the Brill Building, the musical epicenter for rock and roll. While writing music and trying to get one of her songs recorded, JJ must contend with a murder and a romance.

Sixteen-year-old Carlos Duarte is on the verge of realizing his dream of becoming a famous make-up artist, but first he must face his jealous boss at a Macy's cosmetics counter, his sister's abusive boyfriend, and his crush on a punk-rocker classmate.
2012 Stonewall Book Award

When Maggie Silver's parents are falsely accused of stealing priceless gold coins, she must use her safecracking skills to try to clear their names, with help from the "team" she has formed as an undercover operative in a New York City high school.

Evie O’Neill is sent from her small town in Ohio to live with her uncle in New York City. But there, the 17-year-old and her uncle get thrust into the investigation of numerous murders

Set in 1920s New York City, this is the story of budding magician Anna Van Housen, who may or may not be the daughter of Harry Houdini. She has spent her whole life playing sidekick to her faux-medium mother and trying to hide the fact that she possesses the very abilities her mother lacks

Written in 1821, this historical novel is Cooper's paean to the Revolutionary War Protagonist Harry Birch finds himself wrongly accused of selling vital information to the British.

A young woman in nineteenth-century New York City must struggle against gender and class boundaries when her father is found dead of a supposed suicide. To uncover the truth, she will have to decide how much she is willing to risk and lose.

With the atmosphere of a noir thriller, Egan’s first historical novel follows Anna and Styles into a world populated by gangsters, sailors, divers, bankers, and union men. Manhattan Beach is a deft, dazzling, propulsive exploration of a transformative moment in the lives and identities of women and men, of America and the world. It is a magnificent novel by the author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, one of the great writers of our time.

In 1996 in Queens, two girls become friends through the music of Tupac Shakur; the music continues to touch their lives as they deal with their families and their futures.

Kyle’s high school is evacuated on the morning of September 11, 2001. On his way home, he rescues a girl ready to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge wearing giant wings and covered in ash. Suffering from temporary amnesia, the girl develops an intimate relationship with Kyle in the chaotic week following the terrorist attack.

For her graduation from high school in 1920, Frankie Pratt receives a scrapbook and her father's old Corona typewriter. Through a kaleidoscopic array of vintage postcards, letters, magazine ads, ticket stubs, catalog pages, fabric swatches, candy wrappers, fashion spreads, menus, and more, we meet and follow Frankie on her journey in search of success and love.

Teenagers Jon and Ray dream of escaping from their dysfunctional and even dangerous parents in their rural New York town in this novel set in 1969. Themes of friendship and violence reflect the tensions of the Vietnam War.
2014 Alex Award
2013 SLJ Best Books Adult Books for Teens

Enza and Ciro meet at the turn of the 20th century as teens in the Italian Alps. Through unfortunate circumstances, both are forced to immigrate to America, and they find each other again in New York City. A wonderful depiction of the immigrant experience and of New York City during the early 20th Century.

Four kids from different parts of the country are dealing with life, as they know it, before it all changes. And then it changes...and we travel with these characters as they deal with the attacks.

In 1944, an Upstate New York teenager (setting is Oswego and the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter) named Christine meets and falls in love with Adam, a Yugoslavian Jew living in a refugee camp, despite their parents' conviction that they do not belong together.

When she drops out of school and struggles to start a career on Broadway in the fall of 1950, seventeenyear-old Kit Corrigan accepts help from an old family friend, a lawyer said to have ties with the mob, who then asks her to do some favors for him.

This exciting adventure story is set during the Seven Year’s War fought between France and England in North America. Hawkeye and his American Indian companions become involved in the bloody war.

Set in 1975, this coming of age story explores the cross-cultural friendship of Lewis Blake, a Native American teen living on the Tuscarora Reservation in Western New York, and George Haddonfield, a military kid from a nearby Air Force base.

Letty, Astrid, and Cordelia must navigate the glamour, despairs, and scandals of life in New York City during the Roaring Twenties.

In New York City’s Spanish Harlem in 1969, 14-year-old Evelyn is trying to spread her wings and break free from her conservative family. When her activist grandmother comes to stay, she finds life getting more complicated and dangerous. 2013 Pura Belpré Award

A collection of 11 short stories that illuminate the life of the enigmatic, flashy, and flamboyant High Warlock of Brooklyn, Magnus Bane, a character in The Mortal Instruments series.

In alternating chapters, 18-year-old Darcy Patel navigates the New York City publishing world and Lizzie, the heroine of Darcy’s novel, slips into the “Afterworld” to survive a terrorist attack and becomes a spirit guide, as both face many challenges, and both fall in love.

A group of Tribeca high school kids go in for flu shots … and end up being able to read each others’ minds.

Prenna arrives in New York from 80 years in the future, where a mosquito-borne illness has left the world in ruins. She and her fellow time travelers must follow strict rules to survive in the present day.

A deathbed promise to her grandmother takes Rebecca on a journey to discover the truth behind the woman’s claim that she is Briar Rose. A chilling variation on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale set in multiple locations, including Oswego, New York, which once served as a haven for Holocaust survivors

In this mystery/thriller, Kate tries to prove that her 15-year-old daughter, Amelia, didn’t jump from the roof of her prestigious Brooklyn private school. The story is told in alternating voices, Kate’s and Amelia’s, as well as through text messages, Facebook updates, and blog posts revealing that the teen was involved with a secret club.

While conducting research for a school paper on smallpox, Mitty finds an envelope containing 100-year old smallpox scabs. Has he infected himself and all of New York City?

Two decades into the future, humans are battling for their very survival when a powerful AI computer goes rogue, and all the machines on earth rebel against their human controllers.
2012 Alex Award

A blind London teenager and her younger brother travel to New York to find their missing father, using clues from his notebook.

In 1969, a police raid on a gay bar in a New York City neighborhood becomes a riot that ushers in a national gay rights movement in America.

The story of how those waves of millions cascaded upon American shores is told brilliantly, even unforgettably…while this is a New York story, it really is an American story, one that belongs to all of us.

This is an enthralling account that follows the often unglamorous but monumentally important careers of two forensic pioneers in early 20th-century New York. Poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime; corruption ran wild within the police department and the coroner’s office. In 1918 Dr. Charles Norris, Manhattan's first trained chief medical examiner, and Alexander Gettler, its first toxicologist turned the justice system and forensic chemistry upside down with their trailblazing scientific detective work.

The complete libretto of the hit Broadway musical, with fascinating author’s notes and remarks.

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter introduces these fabulous pieces written between 1913 and 1936, when the magazine published a murderers’ row of the world’s leading literary lights. Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells features great writers on great topics, including F. Scott Fitzgerald on what a magazine should be, Clarence Darrow on equality,

Kevin Cook examines the truths and myths surrounding the life and death of Kitty Genovese, a native Brooklynite who was murdered in Kew Gardens in 1964.

Presents a history of New York in sixteen momentous events, from the launch of the state's government in April 1777 to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In a remote community, out of sight of beaches along the South Shore of Long Island, the stories of five young missing women come together. It is a story of unsolved murders in an idyllic community and of the dark side of the Internet.

The story of New Netherland is told in a highly readable fashion; from the exploration of Henry Hudson in 1609 to the final transfer of the Dutch colony to the English in 1674. The work introduces the multicultural makeup of the population and the influence of distinctive Dutch traits such as tolerance, free trade, and social mobility, all of which persisted long after New Netherland became New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and parts of Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Chronicles the story of the early 1900s typhoid fever epidemic in New York, providing details as to how its infamous carrier was ultimately tracked down and stopped.

The story of how two wounded warriors, one soldier and one golden retriever, who had given so much and suffered the consequences, found salvation in each other. It is a story about war and peace, injury and recovery, psychological wounds and spiritual restoration. It is a story about the love between a man and a dog and how they healed each other’s souls.

In Five Points, New York, in the 1840s, African-American teenager William Henry “Juba” Lane works hard to achieve his dream of becoming a professional dancer, but his real break comes when he is invited to perform in England. Based on the life of Master Juba; includes historical note.

In a riveting biography that reads like a crime novel, Sibert Medalist and Newbery-Honor winner Susan Campbell Bartoletti uncovers the true story of Mary Mallon, a.k.a. Typhoid Mary, one of the most notorious and misunderstood women in American history.

Bruchac, now a well-known children's author and storyteller, relates his childhood and high school years spent living with his grandparents near Saratoga, NY, and his discovery of his Abenaki heritage, which he learns to honor.

Based on the memoir by Canada who was a small boy growing up scared on the mean streets of the South Bronx. His childhood world was one where "sidewalk boys" learned the codes of the block and were ranked through the rituals of fist, stick, and knife. Then the streets changed, and the stakes got even higher. In his memoir, Canada relives a childhood in which violence stalked every street corner.

True to the title, the book is a history of crime that permeated the underbelly of New York City and its boroughs in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Some of these gangs were so vicious they would post signs warning police to stay out of their neighborhoods -- or else!

Members of the American Association of University Women in New York State have meticulously researched the lives and actions of some of New York's finest women.

Grimes combines her own poetry with that of the poets of the Harlem Renaissance. The book includes artwork by African-American illustrators, as well as an introduction to the history of the Harlem Renaissance, author's note, and poet biographies

Contains accounts of paranormal activity in and around New York's Hudson River Valley, including hauntings, ghosts, and UFOs

Young Nellie Bly had ambitious goals, especially for a woman at the end of the nineteenth century, when the few female journalists were relegated to writing columns about cleaning or fashion. But fresh off a train from Pittsburgh, Nellie knew she was destined for more and pulled a major journalistic stunt that skyrocketed her to fame: feigning insanity, being committed to the notorious asylum on Blackwell's Island, and writing a shocking exposé of the clinic’s horrific treatment of its patients.

This compilation includes excerpts and poems from the work of Langston Hughes.

This fascinating and very readable history of Manhattan draws on 17th-century Dutch records that were recently translated by scholar Charles Gehring. Shorto brings to exuberant life the human drama behind the story of the colony's founding in 1623.

Nine real-life stories about couples who met in some of New York City’s iconic locations. Postscripts at the end of the book relate how the relationships turned out.

Brandon Stanton set out on an ambitious project: to single-handedly create a photographic census of New York City. Armed with his camera, he began crisscrossing the city, covering thousands of miles on foot, all in his attempt to capture ordinary New Yorkers in the most extraordinary of moments.
2016 Alex Award Winner

Freelance writer Hauser tracks the staff and students at the International High School at Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, N.Y., providing their personal histories as well as their day-to-day experiences.

From the Adirondacks and the Catskills to the depths of Lake Champlain and the shores of Montauk, Monsters of New York takes the reader on a journey covering bizarre beasts of the Empire State.

A collection of interesting facts and trivia about New York City, with walking tours

In this graphic novel, Ciara O'Dwyer is a young woman raising a daughter alone in the Five Points slums of 1870; Johnny McCormack is a struggling actor drawn to the nascent folk music movement in 1960 Greenwich Village; and Lewis Healy is a successful Irishman who's come to present-day Manhattan on his wife's anniversary-present promise to reveal a secret.