Donna Blackall, Rebecca Caudill
Selection Committee,
Illinois State University
Deborah Will, Abraham Lincoln
Selection Committee,
Zion-Benton Township High School
Escaping from Talibancontrolled Afghanistan in the
summer of 2001, eleven-yearold Fadi and his family
immigrate to the San Francisco
Bay Area, where Fadi schemes
to return to the Pakistani
refugee camp where his little
sister was accidentally left
behind.
 Presents the story of
Marine Jay Kopelman's
efforts to have Lava, a dog
found in Fallujah, sent to
the United States, at the
same time focusing on
Iraqi political corruption,
military bureaucracy, and
the sufferings of ordinary
Iraqis who have become
the innocent victims of the
war.
 Through a series of poems, a
young girl chronicles the
life-changing year of 1975,
when she, her mother, and
her brothers leave Vietnam
and resettle in Alabama.
 In a small South Carolina
town, where it seems little
has changed since the Civil
War, sixteen-year-old
Ethan is powerfully drawn
to Lena, a new classmate
with whom he shares a
psychic connection and
whose family hides a dark
secret that may be revealed
on her sixteenth birthday.
 The fearful events of the
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis are
witnessed by 11-year-old
Franny, who finds her life
and perspectives changing
throughout the course of a
week that is also marked by
difficult family issues.
 Traces the parallel lives
of two youths with the
same name in the same
community, describing
how the author grew up
to be a Rhodes Scholar
and promising business
leader while his
counterpart suffered a
life of violence and
imprisonment.
In the summer of 1968, after
travelling from Brooklyn to
Oakland, California, to spend a
month with the mother they
barely know, eleven-year-old
Delphine and her two younger
sisters arrive to a cold welcome
as they discover that their
mother, a dedicated poet and
printer, is resentful of the
intrusion of their visit and wants
them to attend a nearby Black
Panther summer camp.
 In the days and weeks
following the terrorist
attacks on September 11,
2001, Samar, who is of
Punjabi heritage but has
been raised with no
knowledge of her past by
her single mother, wants to
learn about her family's
history and to get in touch
with the grandparents her
mother shuns.
 In 1935, when her mother
gets a job housekeeping for
a woman who does not like
children, eleven-year-old
Turtle is sent to stay with
relatives she has never met
in far away Key West,
Florida.
 Calla and Ren have been
raised knowing it is their
destiny to mate with one
another and rule over
their shape-shifting wolf
pack, but when a human
boy arrives and vies for
Calla's heart, she is faced
with a decision that
could change her whole
world.
 In New Orleans' Ninth
Ward, twelve-year-old
Lanesha, who can see
spirits, and her adopted
grandmother have no
choice but to stay and
weather the storm as
Hurricane Katrina bears
down upon them.
 High school sophomore
Miles Shaw goes to live
with his father, a jazz
musician, in New
Orleans, and together
they survive the horrors
of Hurricane Katrina in
the Superdome, learning
about each other and
growing closer through
their painful experiences.
When fifteen-year-old Ty, who
has always lived on the ocean
floor, joins Topside girl
Gemma in the frontier's
underworld to seek and stop
outlaws who threaten his
home, they learn that the
government may pose an even
greater threat.
 Cassia has always trusted
the Society to make the
right choices for her, so
when Xander appears
on-screen at her
Matching ceremony,
Cassia knows he is her
ideal mate--until Ky
Markham's face appears
for an instant before the
screen fades to black.
 When thirteen-year-old
David Greenberg's best
friend makes the start of
middle school even worse
than he feared it could be,
David becomes friends
with Penny, who shares his
love of television shows
and posts one of their skits
on YouTube, making them
wildly popular--online, at
least.
 Seventeen-year-old
Jessica, adopted and
raised in Pennsylvania,
learns that she is
descended from a royal
line of Romanian
vampires and that she is
betrothed to a vampire
prince, who poses as a
foreign exchange student
while courting her.
 Considered by many to
be mentally retarded, a
brilliant, impatient fifthgrader with cerebral
palsy discovers a
technological device that
will allow her to speak
for the first time.
 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.
 Jason, a twelve-year-old
autistic boy who wants to
become a writer, relates
what his life is like as he
tries to make sense of his
world.
 When seventeen-year-
old Lucy discovers her
family is under an
ancient curse by an evil
Elfin Knight, she realizes
to break the curse she
must perform three
impossible tasks before
her daughter is born in
order to save them both.
 Sixth-grader Tommy and
his friends describe their
interactions with a paper
finger puppet of Yoda,
worn by their weird
classmate Dwight, as
they try to figure out
whether or not the
puppet can really predict
the future. Includes
instructions for making
Origami Yoda.
 When two teens, one gay
and one straight, meet
accidentally and discover
that they share the same
name, their lives become
intertwined as one
begins dating the other's
best friend, who
produces a play revealing
his relationship with
them both.
 An autobiography in
graphic novel format
describes how the author
lost two of her front
teeth in an accident
when she was twelve,
and her subsequent
struggles with various
corrective dental
techniques throughout
adolescence.
 When high school
sophomore Jessie's longterm best friend
transforms herself into a
punk and goes after
Jessie's would-be
boyfriend, Jessie decides
to visit "the wild nerd
yonder" and seek true
friends among
classmates who play
Dungeons and Dragons.
 In India, in 1941, when her
father becomes braindamaged in a non-violent
protest march, fifteenyear-old Vidya and her
family are forced to move
in with her father's
extended family and
become accustomed to a
totally different way of
life.
 In the not-too-distant
future, when
biotechnological advances
have made synthetic bodies
and brains possible but
illegal, a seventeen-yearold girl, recovering from a
serious accident and
suffering from memory
lapses, learns a startling
secret about her existence.
 Fifteen-year-old Miss
Penelope Lumley, a recent
graduate of the Swanburne
Academy for Poor Bright
Females, is hired as
governess to three young
children who have been
raised by wolves and must
teach them to behave in a
civilized manner quickly, in
preparation for a Christmas
ball.
 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.
 On the night of the blue
moon when mermaids are
said to gather on a sandbar
in the Gulf of Mexico, tenyear-old Keeper sets out in
a small boat, with her dog
BD and a seagull named
Captain, determined to
find her mother, a
mermaid, as Keeper has
always believed, who left
long ago to return to the
sea.
 When Auden impulsively
goes to stay with her father,
stepmother, and new baby
sister the summer before
she starts college, all the
trauma of her parents'
divorce is revived, even as
she is making new friends
and having new
experiences such as
learning toride a bike and
dating.
 When Anna's romance-
novelist father sends her
to an elite American
boarding school in Paris
for her senior year of
high school, she
reluctantly goes, and
meets an amazing boy
who becomes her best
friend, in spite of the fact
that they both want
something more.
 In a small town on the
coast of California,
everyone over the age of
fourteen suddenly
disappears, setting up a
battle between the
remaining town residents
and the students from a
local private school, as well
as those who have "The
Power" and are able to
perform supernatural feats
and those who do not.
 As she reads the journal
left by her best friend,
who committed suicide,
Caitlin struggles with
powerful feelings of loss,
sadness, and guilt, but
friends and a first love
help her to cope with her
negative emotions.
 The lives of Leticia,
Dominique, and Trina
are irrevocably
intertwined through the
course of one day in an
urban high school after
Leticia overhears
Dominique's plans to
beat up Trina and must
decide whether or not to
get involved.
 After being interrogated
for days by the Department
of Homeland Security in
the aftermath of a major
terrorist attack on San
Francisco, California,
seventeen-year-old
Marcus, released into what
is now a police state,
decides to use his expertise
in computer hacking to set
things right.
 In a futuristic world,
teenaged Nailer
scavenges copper wiring
from grounded oil
tankers for a living, but
when he finds a beached
clipper ship with a girl in
the wreckage, he has to
decide if he should strip
the ship for its wealth or
rescue the girl.
 Eighteen-year-old Lia
comes to terms with her
best friend's death from
anorexia as she struggles
with the same disorder.