Reviews and Blog Posts: Realistic Fiction

Class 6C has a lot to learn this year: all about their new teacher, Mr. Carey, who has long hair and likes to quote Bob Dylan (who's he?), all about the ins and outs of young love, but mostly all about their innate talents. They're putting on a school concert,...

Indigo Skye is just finishing her senior year of high school and is getting lots of pressure to make plans for college. But she doesn't want to - Indigo loves her waitressing job and can't imagine anything she'd rather do more. She is genuinely interested in the people who come...

Frankie is calculating–she never makes a move until she considers all the consequences and implications, not just the immediate ones, but into the future. Will acting strong or seeming helpless get Matthew to like her? How can she use her attendance at the exclusive Alabaster Prep School to ensure that...

Lily doesn't speak and she doesn't look people in the eye. People in town whisper "brain damage" but that isn't it. Lily doesn't want to talk or have people pay attention to her. She has made herself invisible because of something bad that happened. One day a mysterious girl named...

TC, Augie, and Ale are the best of friends now, but it wasn't always that way. In a series of diary entries, instant messages, and e-mails from their freshman year of high school, they each look back at how they were brought together by a deaf kid with an obsession...

Eleven-year-old Brendan Buckley is a lot of things: an aspiring scientist, a tae kwon do warrior, and the child of a biracial marriage. He had a great relationship with his father's dad, but he's never even met his mother's father, and he's not sure why. When they accidentally meet up...

Ann Ahern has a crush on her French teacher. It doesn't disturb her that Mademoiselle Eugenie is a woman, but it does disturb her that she's Black. It's 1974, and Boston is still struggling with the Civil Rights movement, instituting busing between neighborhoods to desegregate the schools. Ann's Catholic Irish-American...

Laura thinks her life is over when she gets thrown out of Catholic school, and then her mother's house, after being found out as a "tortillera"–Cuban slang for lesbian–but these things are only the beginning for her. Over the course of the next year, Laura leaves school entirely, works full...

Just one week before she turns 15, Frannie's father dies. Frannie and her dad had a special connection–they were both artists. Her mother and stepfather don't understand that part of her, and now Frannie feels that no one ever will. Going through her dad's things, Frannie finds a carved wooden...

Alice has just moved from Boston to the suburbs. She has lots to be excited about: a big house with a yard, and she'll be starting middle school this year. Zen, one of the first kids she meets, seems kind of weird. He has a room full of craft projects...