NPM - YA Tough Topics

Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken,...

"Seventeen-year-old Tempe brings her dead sister back to life for twenty-four hours in hopes of unraveling the truth behind their parents' death"--

Told in multiple voices, when popular Mike Parker's girlfriend informs North Bay Academy's principal that he has been hitting her, students react differently, revealing their own insecurities and problems.

Secrets are revealed as OCD-afflicted Griffin grieves for his first love, Theo, who died in a drowning accident.

One year after the fire that claimed her parents' and cousin's lives and left her severely disfigured, sixteen-year-old Ava faces the return to high school.

Seventeen-year-old Chloe had a plan: work hard, get good grades, and attend a top-tier college. But after she collapses during cross-country practice and is told that she needs a new heart, all her careful preparations are laid to waste. Eight months after her transplant, everything is different. Stuck in summer school with the underachievers, all she wants to do now is grab her surfboard and hit the waves-which is strange, because she wasn't interested...

"Dills and his mom have returned to Hamilton, her hometown, hoping to leave the horrors of Wilkson behind. But it's impossible to really run from tragedy, and trouble always follows trouble. When Dills hurts a new classmate, it comes out in court that he was in the Wilkson Collegiate library when the shooter came in. But he won't talk about what he saw, what he still sees whenever he closes his eyes. He can't. He definitely can't tell anyone that...

As lead reporter for The Warrior Weekly, Eden has covered her fair share of stories at St. Joseph Secondary. And when intimate pictures of six female students are anonymously emailed to the entire school, Eden is determined to get to the bottom of it. In tracking down leads, Eden is shocked to discover not everyone agrees the students are victims. Some people feel the girls "brought it on themselves." Even worse, the school's administration seems...

Told from different points of view--protesters, students, National Guardsmen, and "townies"--recounts the story of what happened at Kent State in May 1970, when four college students were killed by National Guardsmen, and a student protest was turned intoa bloody battlefield.

Seventeen-year-old Quinn provides closure to grieving families by taking on the short-term role of a deceased loved one, until huge secrets come to the surface about Quinn's own past.