An extremely gritty and shocking story that still ends on a note of hope, about a homeless boy, who is running from the police with a fifteen-year-old, drug-addicted prostitute, her boyfriend who just killed his own parents, and a baby, and who gets the chance to make a better life for himself.

Blaming herself for the car accident on the Tappan Zee Bridge that killed her mother, fifteen-year-old Jenna undergoes a difficult physical and emotional recovery.

A teenage boy must face the harsh realities of inner city life, a disintegrating family, and destructive temptations as he struggles to find his identity as a young man.

A visit to his Harlem neighborhood and the discovery that the girl he loves is using drugs give sixteen-year-old Anthony Witherspoon a new perspective both on his home and on his life at a Connecticut prep school.

Sixteen-year-old Hector is the hope of his family, but when he seeks revenge after his brother's gang-related death and is sent to a San Antonio reform school, it takes an odd assortment of characters to help him see that hope is still alive.

Two star high school basketball players, one black and one white, experience the justice system differently after committing a crime together and getting caught.

Seventeen-year-old loner Maggy Klass, who frequently seeks refuge from her alcoholic mother's apartment by sitting and drawing in a local cafe, becomes involved in a destructive relationship with a charismatic homeless boy named Cole.

Principal Giraldi has given Pip an ultimatum: Either he stops skipping classes and begins seeing a counselor after school, or he's expelled. But what really scares Pip is the thought that Giraldi might call his father. His father is what really scares Pip. From an outstanding new author comes this heartrending story of a sixteen-year-old boy on the edge. Pip has been killing his time by getting high-trying to avoid thinking about his family life, trying not to notice that his younger brother isn't the same sweet, happy kid he used to be. Now Pip's being forced to think. Will he follow his father's destructive path, or will he invent his own future, one that might not include addiction and cruelty?

Brent Runyon was fourteen years old when he set himself on fire. In this biography, he describes that suicide attempt and his recovery over the following year.

Seventeen-year-old Pattyn, the eldest daughter in a large Mormon family, is sent to her aunt's Nevada ranch for the summer, where she temporarily escapes her alcoholic, abusive father and finds love and acceptance, only to lose everything when she returns home.

Tired of being hungry, cold, and dirty from living on the streets of New York City with a tribe of other homeless teenagers who are dying, one by one, a girl named Maybe ponders her future and longs for someone to care about her.

When Joe meets Candy, it seems like a regular boy-meets-girl scenario. But then Joe is drawn into Candy's world--a world of drugs, violence, and desperation. As the dark truth about Candy's life emerges, Joe finds himself facing real danger at every twist and turn.

Seventeen-year-old Christy wants only to finish high school and escape her Flint, Michigan, home, where she cooks, cleans, cares for her niece, and tries to fend off her half-brother, a drug dealer who has been abusing her since she was eleven.

Kristina Georgia Snow is the perfect daughter, gifted high school junior, quiet, never any trouble. But on a trip to visit her absentee father, Kristina disappears and Bree takes her place. Bree is the exact opposite of Kristina. Through a boy, Bree meets the monster: crank. And what begins as a wild ecstatic ride turns into a struggle through hell for her mind, her soul - her life.

While confined to a mental hospital, thirteen-year-old Callie slowly comes to understand some of the reasons behind her self-mutilation, and gradually starts to get better.

In the journal she is keeping for English class, sixteen-year-old Tish chronicles the changes in her life when her abusive father returns home after a two-year absence.

After her older sister runs away, sixteen-year-old Caitlin decides that she needs to make a major change in her own life and begins an abusive relationship with a boy who is mysterious, brilliant, and dangerous.

Seventeen-year-old Edna refuses to visit her mother, who is in a New York City hospital undergoing cancer treatment, and barely speaks to her father, who finally puts her in psychotherapy, while her crush on an art teacher turns into a full-blown affair.

This is the story of Katie, a teen from an abused home, and her journey through foster care. Katie is always surrounded by wealth, but feels terribly alone because of the secret horror of her angry, abusive father. When she's thrown out of her house and put into foster care, it seems like the end of the world. But as she moves through the foster care system, she begins to realize that she can help others. Can she, at last, find courage and strength of her own?

When teenage Ray and his two friends, Prem and Tyronne, form a successful rap band in the London's East End where they live, they soon find themselves embroiled in increasingly violent gang warfare.

Eighteen-year-old Kristina is determined to manage her crystal meth addiction in order to take care of her newborn son, but when the pull of the drug becomes too strong, her greatest fears are quickly realized.

A fifteen-year-old drug user chronicles her daily struggle to escape the pull of the drug world.

Two fifteen-year-olds, Rosie and Asher, upset over the various unhappy circumstances of their lives in the Australian city of Perth, decide to run away.

This famous children's and young adult author relates how, as a young man, he became a drug user and smuggler, was arrested, did time in prison, and eventually got out and went to college, all the while hoping to become a writer.

Sixteen-year-old identical twin daughters of a district court judge and a candidate for the United States House of Representatives, Kaeleigh and Raeanne Gardella desperately struggle with secrets that have already torn them and their family apart.

Three teens who meet at Reno, Nevada's Aspen Springs mental hospital after each has attempted suicide connect with each other in a way they never have with their parents or anyone else in their lives.

While helping a stranger solve the murder of a neighbor, thirteen-year-old Charlie and her younger brother are endangered by what they learn about gangs and drugs in the neighborhood.

High school senior and football player Keir sets out to enjoy himself on graduation night, but when he attempts to comfort a friend whose date has left her stranded, things go terribly wrong, and he finds himself accused of rape. But was it?

Andrea Robin Kaplan is a clique unto herself. In other words, she has no friends. Her only goal is get through high school with the least amount of humiliation possible, which should be easy— nothing ever happens in the suburbs, right? Wrong. One day, as Andi walks home from school, a little brown VW drives up and she meets Frank. Frank makes her feel beautiful and special. With Frank, Andi forgets how alone she is. From boundary breaking author Lesléa Newman comes a haunting story about a girl who is all alone, and a man old enough to know better.

Still reeling from his drug-dealing father's murder, moving in with the wealthy mother he never knew, and transferring to a private school, fifteen-year-old Jude is tricked into pleading guilty to a crime he did not commit.

Isolated from friends who believe the worst because she has not been truthful with them, sixteen-year-old Annabel finds an ally in classmate Owen, whose honesty and passion for music help her to face and share what really happened at the end-of-the-year party that changed her life.

When she is abandoned by her alcoholic mother, high school senior Ruby winds up living with Cora, the sister she has not seen for ten years, and learns about Cora's new life, what makes a family, how to allow people to help her when she needs it, and that she too has something to offer others.

A chance encounter reunites Enny with her childhood friend Orfe, whose brilliant musical future is threatened, and ultimately destroyed, by her doomed love for Yuri, a recovering drug addict.

In this young adult classic, Ponyboy and Johnny, both members of the ``Greasers,'' hide from the police after a ``soc'' from the opposing, richer gang is killed.

More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters that comprise this story are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, andThe Rocky Horror Picture Show,when all one requires is that perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite.

Matt Rydeck, co-captain of his high school football team, endures a traumatic season as he witnesses the rape of a rookie player by teammates and grapples with his own use of performance-enhancing drugs.

Three boys are charged with a hate crime after an African-American high school student is beaten with a baseball bat in a white neighborhood.

Still reeling from seeing police shoot his unarmed cousin to death on the roof of a New York City housing project, seventeen-year-old Clay is dragged into the whirlwind of political manipulation that follows.

After running away from her fifth foster home, Holly, a twelve-year-old orphan, travels across the country, keeping a journal of her experiences and struggle to survive.

Iggy Corso, who lives in city public housing, is caught physically and spiritually between good and bad when he is kicked out of high school, goes searching for his missing mother, and causes his friend to get involved with the same dangerous drug dealer who deals to his parents.

After reluctantly taking on the leadership of the Harlem gang, the Scorpions, Jamal finds that his enemies treat him with respect when he acquires a gun--until a tragedy occurs.

After running away from home, fifteen-year-old Dana finds friends on the Toronto streets, and, eventually, a way to come to terms with what has happened to her.

After running away from their troubled homes, two English teenagers move in with a group of squatters in the port city of Bristol and try to find ways to support their growing addiction to heroin.

Julia DiVino tries hard not to get mixed-up with the gangs at South Bay High School, but when Eric Valienté enters into her life, everything changes.

Halley's junior year of high school includes the death of her best friend Scarlett's boyfriend, the discovery that Scarlett is pregnant, and Halley's own first serious relationship.

A traumatic event near the end of the summer has a devastating effect on Melinda's freshman year in high school.

In Weaver Falls, New Hampshire, in 1975, seventeen-year-old Jocelyn looks for answers when her lifelong neighbor and friend, Gabe, turns up missing and she learns that, while her boyfriend has been telling everything to a priest, Gabe has been keeping terrible secrets.

Ty Johnson knows survival. Since inheriting his pop's business at sixteen, Ty's developed smarts, skills, and mad discipline. The supply game's in his blood. And life is pretty sweet when you're on top. But one slip - or one serious competitor - and life turns ugly fast -- Suddenly, Ty's got to rethink his whole strategy. And for the #1 dealer on the streets, strategy is not just about staying ahead. It's about survival.

After a lifetime of being a model student, sixteen-year-old Lucy Szabo is suddenly in trouble at school, at home, with the "proto-vampires" she has met online and in person, and most of all with her uncontrolled diabetes.

Having escaped from juvenile detention centers and foster care, two teenaged boys live on their own in an abandoned shack in a New York City park, making their way by stealing, occasionally working, and trying to keep from being arrested. A sad and powerful story of tenacity and friendship.

Sixteen-year-old Johanna, one of the best students in her class, develops a passionate attachment for troubled seventeen-year-old Paul and finds her plans for the future changing in unexpected ways.

When high school student Clay Jenkins receives a box in the mail containing thirteen cassette tapes recorded by his classmate Hannah, who committed suicide, he spends a bewildering and heartbreaking night crisscrossing their town, listening to Hannah's voice recounting the events leading up to her death.

Ashley spent nine years in foster care after being taken away from her mother. She endured many caseworkers, moving from school to school and manipulative, humiliating and abusive treatment from one foster family. See how she survives and eventually thrives against the odds.

Fifteen-year-old Tyrell, who is living in a Bronx homeless shelter with his spaced-out mother and his younger brother, tries to avoid temptation so he does not end up in jail like his father.

Sixteen-year-old Steve struggles to make sense of his mother's terminal breast cancer and his brother's suicide. He is in a facility called Burnstone Grove, a place for kids who are addicts, or those who have tried to commit suicide, like Silent Starla, whom Steve is getting a crush on. But Steve doesn't really fit in either group: He used to go to a gifted school--so why is he being held at Burnstone Grove? Keeping a journal, in which he recalls his confused and violent past, Steve is left to figure out who he is by examining who he was.

Sixteen-year-olds Serena and Kori look alike but have opposite personalities and live very different lives in Kismet, Colorado, but when tragedy strikes, Serena decides to complete Kori's list of "5 Secret Things" and uncovers, in the process, the mystery that has bound them together.

Shayla, an aspiring writer growing up in a poor section of Houston, can't figure out the new girl next door, Kambia Elaine, who tells fantastic stories. She slowly realizes that Kambia Elaine is in serious trouble and needs help, but Shayla doesn't know where to find it.

Six years after Cassie and Lia resolved to become the skinniest girls in their school, Cassie dies. Unable to bear the sadness and guilt following Cassie's death, Lia spirals deeper into her own eating disorder. Elijah, the last person to see Cassie alive, helps Lia find the strength to face her own demons and enter recovery.

Thirteen-year-old Cynnie has had to deal with her mother's alcoholism and stream of boyfriends all her life, but when her grandparents take custody of her brother, who has Down Syndrome, Cynnie becomes self-destructive and winds up in court-mandated Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Fourteen-year-old John creates alternative realities in his mind as he tries to deal with his mother's abusive boyfriend, his crush on a beautiful, but shallow classmate and other problems at school.