I highly recommend Looking for Alaska by John Green. A Printz gold-medal winner and IA High School Book Award choice, this is one of the best novels I've read this year.
For mature teen readers through adults, the story is told by Miles, a new student in a southern boarding school, where he meets a close-knit group of friends, including a wild and mildly cryptic girl named Alaska. The voice of this coming-of-age story, although more contemporary, reminds me somewhat of A Separate Peace by John Knowles.
The characters are relateable and multi-layered, from Miles' roomate, nicknamed "the Colonel," to the stern headmaster the students try to outsmart with a sure-to-be-legendary senior prank. This is the best kind of novel....it made me laugh out loud at times, reach for the kleenex at others, and continue to think about it long after I finished the last page.
I will likely seek out Green's other books, An Abundance of Katherines, which earned a Prinz silver medal, and Paper Towns, a well-reviewed novel published this year.
This is cool, especially if you are a fan of author Khaled Hosseini's works, The Kite Runner, and A Thousand Splendid Suns:
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6618147.html
I was relieved to hear that the novel 13 Reasons Why survived a recent censorship scare that was even more disturbing than a typical challenge because there was an effort to circumvent due process and simply remove the book from a central Iowa high school without going through the steps in place.
This book, which I listened to on CD a few months ago (and posted about on this blog), is a mature look at the issue of suicide. As a mother of teens AND someone who cares a great deal about the teens I work with through the library, I admit at times as I listened to this story, it was scary to think of the message teens would hear, especially with the "voice from the grave" narration by Hannah, the character who killed herself before the book even started.
However, the book, overall, makes you think a lot about how each of our actions affects others and can have unintended ripples in others' lives that we may not even realize. I also have faith in teens' abilities to read about all kinds of situations and characters and intermingle their observations with their own values.
