Kategoria BISAC: Young Adult Fiction >> Social Themes - Sexual Abuse

Short-listed for the Forest of Reading Red Maple Award, 2012

Before you judge me, there are two things you should know about why I did it.

Shana Tremain is a good kid. She knows right from wrong and she's never been in any serious trouble. But when her best friend, Carrie, comes to her for help, Shana agrees to break the law to save Carrie from a molester. She even feels good about it for a while.

Then trouble starts. Someone in their group of friends is stealing from the others. As she searches for the truth, Shana uncovers evidence that...

Levi was simple, like a child. It was the best thing about him, and it was the worst, too.

When high school senior Jonas moves to Seattle, he is glad to meet Levi, a nice, soft-spoken guy and fellow basketball player. Suspense builds like a slow drumbeat as readers start to smell a rat in Ryan Hartwell, a charismatic basketball coach and sexual predator. When Levi reluctantly tells Jonas that Hartwell abused him, Jonas has to decide whether he should risk his future career to report the coach. Pitch-perfect basketball plays, well-developed characters, and fine storytelling...

When Annie discovers she's pregnant by her boyfriend, she's devastated. She has never felt so alone. With no one she can talk to, she pours her heart out to her diary, confiding her feelings of panic, self-doubt, and the desperate hope that some day she can turn her life around. She decides she wants to keep her baby and dreams of loving and caring for this little person. But after the baby is born, it's in her diary that she faces the agonizing question: Can she really raise this child on her own?

Annie and Sarah are fifteen-year-old fraternal twins--who only spend time together because they're under the same roof. Annie's life has long been focused around her appearance and the beauty pageants that celebrate it, whereas Sarah's interests are sports and her runner boyfriend, Jeremy.

Then Annie begins to gain more and more weight, and all she seems to hear from her mother is, "You used to be so pretty," followed by the latest diet to try.

Things begin to unravel for Sarah as well. Jeremy--her boyfriend of more than a year--decides to see if he and Sarah are "right" for...