Calvert Library's Book Bites for Teens

Caught between her poor neighborhood and her fancy prep school, sixteen-year-old Starr Carter becomes the focus of intimidation and more after witnessing the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend, Khalil, by a police officer.

The gods are dead. Decades ago, they turned on one another and tore each other apart. When 15-year-old Hark finds the still-beating heart of a terrifying deity, he risks everything to keep it out of the hands of smugglers, military scientists, and a secret fanatical cult so that he can use it to save the life of his best friend, Jelt. But with the heart, Jelt gradually and eerily transforms. How long should Hark stay loyal to his friend when he's becoming a monster and what is Hark willing to sacrifice to save him?

Sixteen-year-old Morgan Stockhour lives in Internment, a floating city utopia. But when a murder occurs, everything she knows starts to unravel

Today’s story takes place during the Spanish Civil War. Ofelia and her pregnant mother, Carmen, have come to live with her mother’s new husband in a forest north of Spain. Ofelia is afraid of her new stepfather, whom she has nicknamed "The Wolf," and worries that he will hurt her mother. In the forest she encounters a small twig-like creature that she knows immediately is actually a fairy. She follows it through the forest, where she meets a half-man, half-goat creature, the Faun. He tells her that she is the reincarnation of an Underworld princess but her memories were erased by the sun. Ofelia’s true father, the king of the Underworld, has left portals open all over the word so she can return to him. Only one portal is still open, and Ofelia must pass a series of tests before she is allowed to return to the Underworld.

When Long Island teens Miri, Soleil, Penny, and Jonah befriend a bestselling YA novelist, they find their deepest, darkest secrets in the pages of her next novel, with devastating consequences. Told from different perspectives as interviews, journal entries, and book excerpts.

Sixteen-year-old Simon is a junior in high school, and his year has gotten very complicated. Martin, the class clown, managed to get a screen shot of one of Simon’s secret emails, and he’s using it as blackmail. If Simon doesn’t help Martin out by playing wingman, his email will be revealed and his sexual identity will become everyone’s business. And even worse, the privacy of Blue, the pen name of the boy he’s been emailing with, will be jeopardized.

Norris Kaplan is clever, cynical, and quite possibly too smart for his own good. A Black French Canadian, he knows from watching American sitcoms that those three things don’t bode well when you are moving to Austin, Texas.

Cammie may be an elite spy-in-training, but in her sophomore year, she's beginning her most dangerous mission - falling in love.

In today’s story, a 17-year-old girl from a conservative family teams up with her wild former friend to get an out-of-state abortion. Their emotional road trip is a comedy of errors full of unexpected challenges, kind strangers and reckonings with the past.

In 1906, sixteen-year-old Mattie, determined to attend college and be a writer against the wishes of her father and fiance, takes a job at a summer inn where she discovers the truth about the death of a guest. Based on a true story.