Featured: Teens

Want to vote for the Iowa Teen Award book of 2012-13? Start now by reading one of these nominated titles.

Chains

By Laurie Halse Anderson

After being sold to a cruel couple in New York City, a slave named Isabel spies for the rebels during the Revolutionary War.

 

 

I Am Number Four

By Pittacus Lore

In rural Ohio, friendships and a beautiful girl prove distracting to a fifteen-year-old who has hidden on Earth for ten years waiting to develop the Legacies, or powers, he will need to rejoin the other six surviving Garde members and fight the Mogadorians who destroyed their planet, Lorien.

 

 

Incarceron

By Catherine Fisher

To free herself from an upcoming arranged marriage, Claudia, the daughter of the Warden of Incarceron, a futuristic prison with a mind of its own, decides to help a young prisoner escape.

 

 

Leviathan

By Scott Westerfeld

In an alternate 1914 Europe, fifteen-year-old Austrian Prince Alek, on the run from the Clanker Powers who are attempting to take over the globe using mechanical machinery, forms an uneasy alliance with Deryn who, disguised as a boy to join the British Air Service, is learning to fly genetically-engineered beasts.

 

 

Lockdown

By Walter Dean Myers

Teenage Reese, serving time at a juvenile detention facility, gets a lesson in making it through hard times from an unlikely friend with a harrowing past.

 

 

The Maze Runner

By James Dashner

Sixteen-year-old Thomas wakes up with no memory in the middle of a maze and realizes he must work with the community in which he finds himself if he is to escape.

 

 

Out of My Mind

By Sharon Draper

Considered by many to be mentally retarded, a brilliant, impatient fifth-grader with cerebral palsy discovers a technological device that will allow her to speak for the first time.

 

 

Payback Time

By Carl Deuker

Overweight, somewhat timid Mitch reluctantly agrees to be the sports reporter for the Lincoln High newspaper because he’s determined to be a writer, but he senses a real story in Angel, a talented football player who refuses to stand out on the field–or to discuss his past.

 

Ruined

By Paula Morris

Rebecca Brown, a 15-year-old transplanted New Yorker, is living with a family friend in New Orleans while her father travels overseas. The house she is staying in is creepy and her prep school classmates treat her like she’s invisible. Only Anton Grey takes the time to be friendly. But does he have a hidden agenda? One night she meets Lisette, a ghost who has haunted a city cemetery since her death 155 years earlier. The encounter uncovers startling truths about Rebecca’s own family history.

 

Virals

By Kathy Reichs

The niece of famed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan, fourteen-year-old Tory and her three friends are exposed to a rare strain of canine parvovirus that gives them special powers which they use to try to solve a murder.

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