Elliot McHugh is a young woman just starting out in college. This novel is about her freshman year, and the struggles she has, both academically and with her personal relationships. This book is fast paced, often funny, written in colloquial and informal language. Elliot is a bisexual girl, living with a diagnosis of ADHD, and her college life is rather chaotic and eventful.
Rukhsana is a 17-year-old Muslim teenager, of Bangladeshi parents, living in Seattle. She is also a lesbian, a fact she keeps secret from her parents and extended family. Rukhsana has plans to go to college in California, dreaming of eventually working in NASA.
School for Nobodies is a book about not belonging and finding out who you are. Claudia is adopted. She lives with Claude and Sonia – hence her name, which is a mixture of the two. Claudia isn’t happy and feels unloved and sidelined. One day, on her 10th birthday, Claudia finds out a secret, and this secret will change her life.
It is refreshing to read historical fiction for children; offering the reader a chance to experience different realities. The book is set in 1939 where two brothers, Ronnie and Jimmy, are being evacuated from London to Wales. Jimmy is twelve years old, and he struggles to come to terms with having to leave London and move to a small rural town, living with strangers. Until, one day, Jimmy finds a human skull.
This is a wonderful book – haunting and sad yet hopeful. It is the story of Boy, who lives alone in a caravan at the edge of the woods. His mother is no longer living with him and his father is in prison. Bad Men (as they are referred to within the story) come visiting and Boy learns to evade them and tell them what they need to know.
Paper Avalanche is about hoarding – a topic that can be seen sensationalised on television but is not often discussed in everyday life. Written by Lisa Williamson, author of The Art of Being Normal, this young adult book is about a fourteen-year-old girl called Ro who lives with her hoarder mother, Bonnie. Ro struggles with her mother’s issues, torn between the need to care for her whilst resenting the difficulties that Bonnie’s hoarding brings to Ro’s life.
