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Adult Books with Teenage Appeal

Titles for Teens @ the Tompkins County Public Library

Almond, Steve (338.4 Almond)
Candyfreak: A Journey Through The Chocolate Underbelly Of America **
A self-professed candyfreak, Steve Almond set out in search of a much-loved candy from his childhood and found himself on a tour of the small candy companies that are persevering in a marketplace where big corporations dominate.

Bates, Judy Fong (F)
Midnight At The Dragon Cafe **
The life of a young Chinese girl is torn apart by dark family secrets and divided loyalties in a small Ontario town in the 1950s

Cox, Lynne (B)
Swimming To Antarctica: Tales Of A Long Distance Swimmer **
Lynne Cox started swimming almost as soon as she could walk. By age sixteen, she had broken all records for swimming the English Channel. Her daring eventually led her to the Bering Strait, where she swam five miles in thirty-eight-degree water in just a swimsuit, cap, and goggles. In between those accomplishments, she became the first to swim the Strait of Magellan, narrowly escaped a shark attack off the Cape of Good Hope, and was cheered across the twenty-mile Cook Strait of New Zealand by dolphins. She even swam a mile in the Antarctic.

Davis, Amanda (F)
Wonder When You'll Miss Me **
Losing a considerable amount of weight in her attempt to commit suicide, sixteen-year-old Faith Duckle returns to the school where she had been tormented, haunted by painful memories and working to exact retribution from those who hurt her.

Gaiman, Neil (F & S)
Anansi Boys **
Exciting, scary, and deeply funny, ANANSI BOYS is a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth, a wild adventure, and a fierce and unstoppable farce, as Neil Gaiman shows us where gods come from, and how to survive your family.

Grealy, Lucy (B)
Autobiography Of A Face
At age nine, Lucy Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit.

Halpin, Brendan (YAPB)
Donorboy **
Told entirely through e-mail, instant messaging, journal entries, and other random communications, Donorboy is the comic, compellingly readable novel of how these two people learn to converse, cook, write heavy-metal songs, and nail windows shut on their way to becoming a family.

Haddon, Mark (F)
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time **
Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically-gifted, autistic fifteen-year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbor's dog and uncovers secret information about his mother.

Hosseini, Khaled (F)
The Kite Runner **
Traces the unlikely friendship of a wealthy Afghan youth and a servant's son, in a tale that spans the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the atrocities of the present day.

Ishiguro, Kazuo (F)
Never Let Me Go **
All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny.

Kurson, Robert (94.54 Kurson)
Shadow Divers: The True Adventure Of Two Americans Who Risked Everything To Solve One Of The Last Mysteries Of World War II **
In the fall of 1991, two deep wreck divers discovered a World War II German U-boat sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey. No identifying marks were visible on the submarine or the few artifacts that John Chatterton and Richie Kohler brought to the surface. No historian, expert, or government had a clue as to which U-boat the men had found. In fact, the official records all agreed that there simply could be a sunken U-boat and crew at that location. Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked a quest to solve the mystery .

Martinez , A. Lee (F)
Gil's All Fright Diner **
Welcome to Gil's All Night Diner, where zombie attacks are a regular occurrence and you never know what might be lurking in the freezer . . .

Meyers, Kent
The Work Of Wolves **
In this unforgettable story of horses, love, and life, Carson and the entire ensemble of characters learn, in very different ways, about the strong bonds that connect people to each other and to the land on which they live.

Niffenegger, Audrey (S)
The Time Traveler's Wife **
Passionately in love, Clare and Henry vow to hold onto each other and their marriage as they struggle with the effects of Chrono-Displacement Disorder, a condition that casts Henry involuntarily into the world of time travel.

Packer, ZZ (F)
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere
Presents a collection of eight short stories, that touch on the subject of race and race relations.

Palwick, Susan (S)
The Necessary Beggar **
Grieving for the life they have left behind, Darroti and his family find themselves in a hostile land--an all-too-familiar American future, a country under attack in a world torn by hatred and war.

Patchett, Ann (B)
Truth & Beauty: A Friendship **
The author describes her twenty-year friendship with Lucy Grealy, tracing their introduction at a writer's workshop, the integral part their friendship played in their writing careers, and her witness to Grealy's medical deterioration.

Picoult, Jodi (F)
My Sister's Keeper **
My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person. Is it morally correct to do whatever it takes to save a child's life, even if that means infringing upon the rights of another? Is it worth trying to discover who you really are, if that quest makes you like yourself less? Should you follow your own heart, or let others lead you?

Rawles, Nancy (YA)
My Jim **
Although Mark Twain never mentioned Jim's wife by name in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, award-winning playwright and novelist Rawles gives Sadie a tale "as heart-wrenching a personal history as any recorded in American literature" (New York Times). Here, the subtext of slavery that lingers behind Twain's classic is given full due, and it is appalling in its near unspeakable details about slave life.

Reed, Kit (S)
Thinner Than Thou **
In the too-near future (watch out, Dr. Phil!), the Reverend Earl, a godlike "guru of the good life," broadcasts from his Glass Cathedral, promoting the nirvana of the "Afterfat," which can only be achieved by following his bible's formula of relentless exercise, cosmetic interventions and use of his special dietary supplement.

Roach, Mary (611 Roach)
Stiff: The Curious Lives Of Human Cadavers **
In case you were wondering, some human cadavers do lead active lives after death. For centuries, many have served medicine, magicians, and cannibals in various noble and grossly ignoble ways. Whether we're attending a gruesome autopsy or wandering down a memory lane of corpses, we find ghastly factoids and the people responsible for them around every corner.

Salzman, Mark (808 Salzman)
True Notebooks **
The author shares his experiences working with kids in Central Juvenile Hall, a jail for kids located near Los Angeles, assisting them with their writing.

Scheeres, Julia (373.7293 Scheeres)
Jesus Land: A Memoir **
Sinners go to: HELL. Rightchuss go to: HEAVEN. The end is neer: REPENT. This here is: JESUS LAND. Julia Scheeres stumbles across these signs along the side of a cornfield while out biking with her adopted brother, David. It's the mid-1980s, they're sixteen years old and have just moved to rural Indiana, a landscape of cottonwood trees and trailer parks-and a racism neither of them is prepared for. While Julia is white, her close relationship with David, who is black, makes them both outcasts.

Shepard, Jim (YA)
Project X **
What would possess two boys to kill their classmates? Shepard doesn't provide any straightforward answers, but he expertly imagines the mindset of one miserable and wounded adolescent. It's an eye-opening portrait. The narrator is in turns funny, sympathetic, and rude, but he's not obsessed with video games or music by Marilyn Manson. And he still feels homicidal.

Satrapi, Marjane (741.5 Satrapi)
Persepolis **
The great-granddaughter of Iran's last emperor and the daughter of ardent Marxists describes growing up in Tehran in a country plagued by political upheaval and vast contraditions between public and private life.

Sullivan, Robert (599.35 Sullivan)
Rats: Observations On The History And Habitat Of The City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants **
Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled little alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants-by observing the rat.

Walls, Jeannette (B)
The Glass Castle: A Memoir **
In her extraordinary memoir, Walls recalls her nomadic life with surprising affection - though she would not want to relive it. Yet Walls sheds no tears nor succumbs to self-pity - she probably learned early on they would get her nowhere. Instead of condemning her parents' foibles, she unblinkingly examines how they transformed hardship into family romance and adventure.

Winspear, Jacqueline (M)
Maisie Dobbs **
Private detective Maisie Dobbs must investigate the reappearance of a dead man who turns up at a cooperative farm called the Retreat that caters to men who are recovering their health after World War I.

**An Alex Award Winner: Every year YALSA selects adult books that will appeal to teen readers.