• By Jacquelyn White
• Posted Saturday, September 1, 2018

Emotionally Intense Reads for Teens

Too shattered for mending by Peter Brown Hoffmeister

“Little” McCardell is doing all he can just to keep it together after the disappearance of his grandfather “Big” and the arrest of his older brother, JT. He’s looking out for his younger cousin, trying to stay afloat in school, working in the town graveyard for extra cash, and in his spare time he's pining after Rowan—the girl JT was dating until he got locked up.

Girl made of stars by Ashley Blake

When Mara's twin brother Owen is accused of rape by her friend Hannah, Mara is forced to confront her feelings about her family, her sense of right and wrong, a trauma from her past, and the future with her girlfriend, Charlie.

These things I've done by Rebecca Phillips

Grappling with the consequences of choices that led to her best friend's death a year earlier, a 17-year-old girl reflects on how their relationship had become increasingly fraught, realizations that are complicated by her growing love for her late friend's brother.

Wild bird by Wendelin Van Draanen

In her most incisive and insightful book yet, Wendelin Van Draanen, award-winning author of The Running Dream and Flipped, offers a remarkable portrait of a girl who has hit rock bottom, but begins a climb back to herself at a wilderness survival camp in the desert.

The disturbed girl's dictionary by NoNieqa Ramos

Fifteen-year-old Macy, officially labeled "disturbed" by her school, records her impressions of her rough neighborhood and home life as she tries to rescue her brother from Child Protective Services, win back her overachieving best friend after a fight, and figure out whether to tell her incarcerated father about her mother's cheating.

Things I'm seeing without you by Peter Bognanni

Following the suicide of her online boyfriend, Tess drops out of school and moves in with her funeral director father, where she is forced to examine life, death, and the boy she thought she knew and loved in a brand new light..

You'll miss me when I'm gone by Rachel Lynn Solomon

Eighteen-year-old twins Adina, a viola prodigy, and Tovah, a future surgeon, find their relationship tested when they learn that one of them will develop Huntington's, the degenerative disease ravaging their mother.

Being Fishkill by Ruth Lehrer

Born in the backseat of a moving car, Carmel Fishkill was unceremoniously pushed into a world that refuses to offer her security, stability, love. At age thirteen, she begins to fight back. Carmel Fishkill becomes Fishkill Carmel, who deflects her tormenters with a strong left hook and conceals her secrets from teachers and social workers.