Saved by the Music by Selene Castrovilla is about this chick who gets shipped off to live on a boat with her aunt for the summer, and a hot guy happens to live just a few boats down, and they eventually talk over classical music while getting drunk and bond, then support each other through nervous breakdowns.
ANYTHING by Ellen Hopkins (trigger warnings, her books deal with serious topics)
Perfect is about four kids and what they lose in their quest to become what they consider 'perfect'. (companion to Impulse)
Impulse is about a group of kids in a psych ward for suicidal behaviour, and what brought them there.
Tricks is about different kids selling their body (prostitution) and how they got to that point.
Crank,
Glass, and
Fallout are about a girl struggling with a meth addiction, based on Ellen Hopkins' own daughter.
Burned is about a girl growing up and protecting her little sisters in a hyper-religious, abusive family.
Identical is about a pair of identical twin sisters dealing with their sexually abusive father playing favorites.
World War Z by Max Brooks is 'An oral history of the zombie war' that's so well written that, while reading it, I forgot it wasn't real.
The
Fingerprints series is out of print, but is about a girl who touches stuff and hears what people were thinking when they touched it, and she flips out and goes to a mental hospital, gets out, someone tries to kill her... It starts with Gifted Touch, it's pretty cheap at online used book places.
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is about this hacker kid at the wrong place at the wrong time, gets picked up by the Dept. of Homeland Security for being a terrorist, tortured, his town turned into 1984, so he fights back.
Free legal download:
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/(
1984 by George Orwell is about this entire world where the government is in control of literally everything, they can read your breathing and heartrate with cameras that are everywhere, and the entire populace hypnotizes themselves into liking it.)
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is about a kid who the government commissioned his parents to have, he gets sent to space school where he learns how to be a leader, predict all sorts of fighting styles in all sorts of situations, and at about 12 leads an army to kill the alien planet. (Now a movie coming out soon)
Ender's Shadow by Orson Scott Card is the same story, told by a different kid. This kid is born in the gutters, kills a 14 year old at about 7 so he could get food, and tries to hack the space school when he goes there.
(Please get Orson Scott Card books secondhand because the dude is a homophobic douchenozzle who doesn't need any more money. His writing is really good, I just don't agree with him personally.)
Feed by M. T. Anderson is a future where 70% of people have an internet hookup in their brains. One girl's starts to go haywire and mess with her nervous system and muscles.
Dust of 100 Dogs by A. S. King is about a pirate girl who was cursed to live the lives of 100 dogs before becoming human again, but something went wrong when she was supposed to get a human life and now she's stuck in the head of a regular girl, over 100 years in the future of when she was last human, and the regular girl doesn't like having an actual pirate in her head.
Looking for Alaska by John Green is about a guy who goes to boarding high-school and gets into ALL sorts of hijinks and meets a Manic Pixie Dream Girl and falls in love with her. (This book was banned in some highschools because it contains a scene of oral sex.)
An Abundance of Katherines by John Green is about a former child prodigy who's only ever dated girls named Katherine (it just turned out that way) who is depressed because everyone has caught up to him in knowledge, so he goes on a road trip.
Paper Towns by John Green is about a guy who lives next to a girl he considers a miracle, she's wild and crazy and then she goes missing and he feels it's his job to find her.
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is about a girl living with cancer, her mom sends her to cancer kid support group where she makes friends with Isaac and falls in love with Isaac's hot friend Augustus. All 3 support each other through the shitty parts of having cancer and life in general.
A free legal short story about zombies by John Green:
http://www.mediafire.com/?5fz00hs1jjbym90Witch and Wizard by James Patterson is about a brother and sister whose world is turned upside-down when their parents are arrested for being magical, and they find out they themselves are magical and the entire family is to be executed.
Also in comic form, illustrated by Svetlana Chmakova.
Sandman by Neil Gaiman is a comic about the lord of dreams, Dream, and his interactions with mortals, gods, Lucifer, and his own family (Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Destruction, and Delirium). Has funny points (like perky goth older sister Death saying 'supercalifragilisticexpialidocious', or hitting Dream with a piece of bread), but is dark at many points (Dream banished a woman to hell for thousands of years because she wouldn't marry him).
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