Staff Picks for Young Adults

Five teenagers report to detention, but only four leave in this high school thriller about murder and blackmail. Simon, the notorious gossip, planned to post juicy secrets about his fellow students on Tuesday, but on Monday he is murdered. His fellow classmates in detention instantly become suspects. As the murder investigation unfolds, Brownyn the brain, Addy the beauty, Nate the criminal and Cooper the athlete struggle with retaining their secrets and navigating the high school hallways. With no one to trust and suspicions running high, these four students are thrust together as they desperately seek the truth. A juicy blend of ethos of The Breakfast Club and the murder mystery of Pretty Little Liars, One of Us is Lying is an engaging suspense thriller for young adults and adults.

Orphaned as a child, raised in a monastery and working as a low level librarian, Lazlo Strange has been maltreated and dismissed for his elaborate dreams his entire life. An avid if amateur scholar of the mythical city of Weep, Lazlo dreams of one day undertaking the epic journey to find this lost city. Then, that one day becomes today as an unexpected envoy from Weep arrives, seeking scholars. Lacking traditional qualifications, Lazlo takes a risk and soon finds himself on his way to Weep with scholars of all disciplines to solve a mysterious blight on the city. The strength of this novel rests in the author's rich and detailed world and character building. The reader feels utterly transported to this magical world, but also captivated by its inhabitants, a rare find in recent young adult series.

In Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dimitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, M.T. Anderson intertwines the history of the siege of Leningrad (modern St. Petersburg) during World War II with the music of the great modern composer Dimitri Shostakovich. Leningrad—besieged by the Nazi Germany’s Wehrmacht from without and terrorized by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin from within—held out for two and a half years, though more than one million citizens perished of hunger and disease. Although Shostakovich had been evacuated along with other prominent citizens, he was anguished over the plight of his mother, sister and nephew who remained behind in his beloved native city. To boost morale, he composed the majestic Seventh Symphony, which was smuggled into the city and performed by the trapped musicians, many of whom passed out from hunger during rehearsals. Anderson also vividly describes the internal plight facing Russia’s avant‑garde artists and musicians, including Shostakovich, who lived and worked in constant jeopardy from Stalin’s brutal regime.