Anderson, Laurie Halse. Wintergirls.
Eighteen-year-old Lia comes to terms with her best friend's death from anorexia
as she struggles with the same disorder.
Morrison, Toni. A Mercy.
In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young
slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for
love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then
from a handsome free blacksmith, in a novel set in late seventeenth-century
America.
Morton, Kate. The Forgotten Garden.
Abandoned on a 1913 voyage to Australia, Nell is raised by a dock master and
his wife who do not tell her until she is an adult that she is not their
child, leading Nell to return to England.
Picoult, Jodi. House Rules.
Unable to express himself socially but possessing a savant-like knack for investigating
crimes, a teenage boy with Asperger's Syndrome is wrongly accused of killing
his tutor when the police mistake his autistic tics for guilty behavior.
Polak, Monique. What World is Left.
Survivor guilt is the dramatic secret in this Holocaust novel of Theresienstadt,
where Polak’s mother, Anneke, was saved by her artist father, who helped
beautify the camp for Red Cross inspection.
Sparks, Nicholas. The Last Song.
Seventeen-year-old Veronica 'Ronnie' Miller's life was turned upside-down when
her parents divorced and her father moved to Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.
Three years later, she remains alienated from her parents, particularly her
father until her mother decides it would be in everyone's best interest if
she and her brother spent the summer with him.