Welcome Back!!

We, at Knowles Library, would like to welcome all of you back to school! We had Sophomore orientation and the library is filling up with classes each period. There are new, exciting titles for you to browse during your lunch period. Come by, get a book from the Tayshas list and read for rewards! If you need more information, just ask Mrs. Miller or one of the library clerks. Again, welcome back and we hope to see you in the library!!!!

24 Girls in 7 Days by Alex Bradley

Jack Grammar, average American senior, has no date to the prom. Or so he thinks. Percy and Natalie, Jack's so-called best friends, posted an ad in the classified section of the online version of the school newspaper. They figured it couldn't hurt-after all, there's not much in this world sadder than Jack's love life. Soon Percy and Natalie have assembled a list of girls eager to go to the prom with Jack, including one mysterious girl known only as FancyPants. He has just seven days to meet and date them before he will ask one special girl to the prom.

Prom by Laurie Halse Anderson

Ashley thinks of herself as a normal kid: best friend next door, hot, but unreliable dropout boyfriend, parents a bit spacey, and a household barely hanging in there. She's not into the prom the way her best friend Natalia is, so when it nearly gets cancelled because a teacher has absconded with all the money, Ashley is not prepared for Nat's approach. Nat figures they can still have a prom, if they beg for stuff and get teachers to help and bribe the custodial staff and so on. Rather against her will, Ashley gets sucked into the lists in Nat's pink notebook. It delights her very pregnant mom; it makes dealing with all those detentions and uncompleted assignments even more of a chore; it focuses Nat's slightly addled Russian grandmother on dressmaking; and calls Ashley's hilarious aunts to the fore. Modern teen life just outside Philadelphia is vividly drawn in Ashley's first-person tale, and it's both screamingly funny and surprisingly tender.

Runner by Carl Deuker

When Chance Taylor is offered a suspicious job -- retrieving packages hidden on his daily running route and stashing them away for later pickup -- the high school senior doesn't ask many questions. Chance views the two-hundred-dollar-a-week salary as a means to pay mooring fees for the sailboat where he and his alcoholic, chronically unemployed father live, as well as buy groceries and get an occasional muffin at the coffee shop where he spends time with his wealthy yet sympathetic classmate Melissa. Although he suspects he's working for a Puget Sound drug-smuggling ring, Chance doesn't get too worried until the nature of the packages begins to change and the man who hired him dies under mysterious circumstances.

Dark Angel by David Klass

Seventeen-year-old Jeff thought he would never again have to deal with his older brother, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence. But after six years, Troy’s sentence has been overturned on a technicality and he is released from prison. He returns to a family deeply divided about having him back home. Jeff can’t forget how his life was disrupted by his brother, how his family had to move to another state and start over. Still, his parents believe things will be different now. But Troy’s return makes a mess of Jeff ’s life – at home, at school, and with his girlfriend. When Jeff ’s rival on the soccer field turns up missing, Jeff suspects Troy is involved, and he sets out to prove it. But nothing could prepare Jeff for what happens as he gets closer to the truth.

Broken China by Lori Aurelia Williams

China, 14, has learned to be a devoted mother after an episode of "messing around" with her best friend, Trip, resulted in her pregnancy two years earlier. Growing up in the same African-American Houston neighborhood as the characters who peopled Williams's earlier novels, China has never had an easy life, but when her daughter unexpectedly dies, she refuses to rely on any counsel except her own in coping with her heartbreak. Since her mother died years earlier, China has lived with Uncle Simon, who is wheelchair bound. When she insists upon taking a job at a strip club to pay off the baby's funeral bill, he chooses to keep their home life peaceful rather than attempting to control her actions and risk alienating her. Trip stands by her even when she denigrates his mother, refusing to accept her efforts to push him away.

Juice by Eric Walters

When long-time coach, Coach Reeves, retires, his replacement, Coach Barnes, moves the team into Division One, makes Michael a captain, and introduces daily summer training. Tony, the summer weight trainer, provides individual training and diet plans for each player. When the two ask Michael to take steroids to enhance his performance, he reluctantly agrees because they explain it will be good for the team, good for his own future, and (assuming a full scholarship) it will save his mother the expense of college tuition.

Black and White by Paul Volponi

Kids who are different colors don't get to be all that tight in my neighborhood. But we get past all that racial crap," says Marcus, an African American senior whose best friend, Eddie, is white. Together, the boys are known at school as Black and White. Both are basketball stars entertaining scholarship offers from local New York City colleges, but they risk everything for more spending money. Considering fast-food jobs too demeaning, they turn to armed stickups, and during their third robbery, they shoot and wound their victim. In alternating chapters, Marcus and Eddie recount the terrifying days after the event as they wait for the police to find and arrest them.

The Boy From The Basement by Susan Shaw

For Charlie, the basement is home. He's being punished. He doesn't mean to leave--Father wouldn't allow it--but when Charlie is accidentally thrust outside, he awakens to the alien surroundings of a world to which he's never been exposed. Though haunted by fear of the basement and his father's rage, Charlie embarks on a journey toward healing and blossoms when he becomes an unconditionally loved and loving member of the right foster family.

Stained by Jennifer R. Jacobson

During the summer of 1975 in small-town New Hampshire, love, sex, religion, and family shape a charged and confusing environment in which to come of age. Jocelyn's boyfriend is pulling away from her, and her lifelong friend and neighbor suddenly goes missing. Jacobson deftly builds suspense and traces complex issues (homosexuality, sexual abuse by a priest) with appropriate subtlety.