Kategoria BISAC: Young Adult Fiction >> Social Themes - Self-Esteem & Self-Reliance

For Bobby Marks, summer does not equal fun.

While most people are happy to take off their heavy jackets and long pants, Bobby can't even button his jeans or reach over his belly to touch his toes. Spending the summer at Rumson Lake is sheer torture.

This particular summer promises to be worse than usual. His parents can't stop fighting. His best friend, Joanie, goes home to New York City and won't tell him why. Dr. Kahn, a rich, stingy estate owner who hires him to manage an enormous lawn, is working him to death. And to top it off, a local bully won't stop torturing...

"Later, I would think of it as crossing over. From a known territory into an unknown. From a place where people know you to a place where people only think they know you."

Sometimes Franky Pierson has a hard time dealing with life. Like when her parents separate and her mother vanishes, Franky wants to believe that her mom has simply pulled a disappearing act. Yet deep within herself, a secret part of her she calls Freaky Green Eyes knows that something is terribly wrong. And only Freaky can open Franky's eyes to the truth.

Jenna Boller is dripping with newfound maturity after her life-altering summer on the road. She has a job she loves at Gladstone Shoes, a best friend who makes her laugh, and a dysfunctional family she's learning how to handle. Jenna feels ready for anything--until Tanner Cobb, a guy with a past, a police record, and dangerously good looks, walks into her life. Suddenly Jenna's surrounded by crises, including a shoe empire on the verge of crumbling. Tanner's street smarts seem to be...

In her heart, Nina Goldman knows that beauty is only skin deep. But as a teenager growing up in Akron, Ohio - with her larger-than-life father Artie, a colorblind carpet salesman and frustrated musician - the only thing Nina wishes for is...to be beautiful. Or at least normal. As if having such an eccentric dad wasn't enough, Nina has another issue to face: the mirror. Born with a strawberry birthmark over her eye, Nina spends countless hours applying makeup and trying out ridiculous hairstyles designed to hide her eye. Convinced that her birthmark is the only reason she's not popular and...

A room is not much. It is not arms holding you. Not a kiss on the forehead. Not a packed lunch or a remembered birthday. Just a room. But for seventeen-year-old Zoe, struggling to shed the suffocating responsibility of her alcoholic mother and the controlling guilt of her grandmother, a rented room on Lorelei Street is a fierce grab for control of her own future. Zoe rents her room from Opal Keats, an eccentric old lady who has a difficult past of her own, but who chooses to live in the possibility of the future. Zoe tries to find that same possibility in her own future, promising that she...

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him-including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. He would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days...

In this delightful romantic adventure, a 16-year-old overachiever learns how to seize the day.

"I've got my entire life planned out for the next ten years -- including my PhD and Pulitzer Prize," claims 16-year-old overachiever Vassar Spore, daughter of overachiever parents, who in true overachiever fashion named her after an elite women's college.

Vassar expects her sophomore summer to include AP and AAP (Advanced Advanced Placement) classes. Surprise Enter a world-traveling relative who sends her plans into a tailspin when she blackmails Vassar's parents into...

Me: Lucas Swain--I'm nearly sixteen years old and live in London. I was fairly normal until the night I found Violet. Then everything changed.

The missing: Dad. He disappeared five years ago. Nobody knows what happened to him, and nobody cares except me. It's enough to drive you crazy.

The dead: That's Violet . . . in the urn. Speaking of crazy--I know she's trying to tell me something, and I think it's about my father. . . .

I may have met Violet after she died. But it didn't stop me from getting to know her. . . .

This year, Austin Gray is going to wave to the crowd from the hood of a shiny pickup truck in the annual No-Jesus Christmas Parade, and finally show the town bully that she's got what it takes to be the Sweetheart of Prosper County Austin will do almost anything to become Sweetheart, including joining the Future Farmers of America and raising an animal--a rooster with an attitude named Charles Dickens. She has lots of support: her oldest friend, Maribel, her new FFA friends (including the reigning Sweetheart and a very cute cowboy), a mysterious Cajun outcast, and an evangelical Elvis...

Seventeen-year-old Bianca Piper may not be the prettiest girl in her high school, but she has a loyal group of friends, a biting wit, and a spot-on BS detector. She's also way too smart to fall for the charms of man-slut and slimy school hottie Wesley Rush, who calls Bianca the Duff--the Designated Ugly Fat Friend--of her crew.

But things aren't so great at home and Bianca, desperate for a distraction, ends up...

An unforgettable narrative collage told in poems

Keesha has found a safe place to live, and other kids gravitate to her house when they just can't make it on their own. They are Stephie - pregnant, trying to make the right decisions for herself and those she cares about; Jason - Stephie's boyfriend, torn between his responsibility to Stephie and the baby and the promise of a college basketball career; Dontay - in foster care while his parents are in prison, feeling unwanted both inside and outside the system; Carmen - arrested on a DUI charge, waiting in a...