New Young Adult Books

Ashfall - Mike Mullin
After the eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano destroys his city and its surroundings, fifteen-year-old Alex must journey from Cedar Falls, Iowa, to Illinois to find his parents and sister, trying to survive in a transformed landscape and a new society in which all the old rules of living have vanished.

Crow - Barbara Wright
In 1898, Moses Thomas's summer vacation does not go exactly as planned as he contends with family problems and the ever-changing alliances among his friends at the same time as he is exposed to the escalating tension between the African-American and white communities of Wilmington, North Carolina.

In Darkness - Nick Lake
In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, fifteen-year-old Shorty, a poor gang member from the slums of Site Soleil, is trapped in the rubble of a ruined hospital, and as he grows weaker he has visions and memories of his life of violence, his lost twin sister, and of Toussaint L'Ouverture, who liberated Haiti from French rule in the 1804.

Hades: Lord of the Dead - George O'Connor
A fictionalized account, in graphic novel format, of the Greek myth of Hades, God of the Underworld, and his abduction of the goddess Demeter's daughter, Persephone, to make her his wife, and the chaos that ensued.

Miles to Go For Freedom - Linda Barrett Osborne
Describes the lives of African Americans during the Jim Crow years, a period of legal segregation and discrimination from the 1890s through the 1950s, including photographs and interviews with African Americans who were young during this time and other primary resources.