Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
10 Most Requested Books of 2023
2024 Reading Challenge: A coming of age story
November Book Picks
Top 10 General Fiction Books of 2023
2024 Reading Challenge: A coming of age story
November Book Picks
Top 10 General Fiction Books of 2023
Description
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.7 - AR Pts: 16
Language
English
Description
After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship in the Pacific, one solitary lifeboat remains, carrying a hyena, a zebra, a female orangutan, a Bengal tiger, and a 16-year-old Indian boy named Pi. His story is a dazzling work of imagination that will delight and astound listerners in equal measure. It is a triumph of storytelling and a tale that will as one character puts it, make you believe in God.
Author
Language
English
Description
The inspiration for the film starring Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, this resonant story of a mother’s unsettling quest to understand her teenage son’s deadly violence, her own ambivalence toward motherhood, and the explosive link between them remains terrifyingly prescient.
Eva never really wanted to be a mother. And certainly not the mother of a boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker,...
Eva never really wanted to be a mother. And certainly not the mother of a boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker,...
Author
Pub. Date
2016.
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 15
Language
English
Description
Struggling to come to terms with the worshipped older brother who disappeared seven years earlier, fifteen-year-old Rocky is seduced by a wealthy older girl in the wake of a mysterious double murder that forces the town to confront past misdeeds.
5) Back roads
Author
Language
English
Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE
Funny and heartbreaking, this New York Times bestselling debut perfectly captures the maddening confusion of adolescence and the prickly nature of family with irony and unerring honesty.
Harley Altmyer should be in college having the time of his life. He should be free from the backwards Pennsylvania coal town he calls home, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he’s constantly reminded...
Funny and heartbreaking, this New York Times bestselling debut perfectly captures the maddening confusion of adolescence and the prickly nature of family with irony and unerring honesty.
Harley Altmyer should be in college having the time of his life. He should be free from the backwards Pennsylvania coal town he calls home, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he’s constantly reminded...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.6 - AR Pts: 16
Language
English
Description
When he moves into the garage apartment at his best friend's house, trouble-prone Tim falls unexpectly in love with Alice, his friend's good-girl sister, but unforeseen consequences of Tim's wild days come back to challenge their relationship.
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"How do you stop a murder after it's already happened?"--Page 1 of cover.
"From UK bestselling author Gillian McAllister comes an astonishing, compulsively twisty psychological thriller about a mother who witnesses her teenage son stab a man and then seizes on an unconventional way to try to save him. Can you stop a murder after it's already happened? Late October. After midnight. You're waiting up for your seventeen-year-old son. He's late. As you...
8) Kidnapped
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.6 - AR Pts: 14
Language
English
Description
After being kidnapped by his villainous and miserly uncle, sixteen-year-old David Balfour escapes with the help of Jacobite fugitive Alan Breck and becomes involved in the struggle of Scottish Highlanders against English rule.
Author
Series
Call me by your name novels volume 1
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.1 - AR Pts: 12
Language
English
Description
"...Hammer's voice is brimming with such melody that, if you listen to it long enough, you can probably get drunk off it." — Vulture.com
*Now a major motion picture from director Luca Guadagnino, starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet. Winner of the 2018 Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay*
Celebrate André Aciman's sensational novel with a dynamic audiobook, read by Armie Hammer
A New York Times Notable
10) Keep quiet
Author
Language
English
Description
"Jake Whitmore is enjoying a rare bonding moment with his sixteen-year-old son, Kurt, when disaster strikes. They get in a terrible car accident that threatens to derail not only Kurt's chances at college, but his entire future. Jake makes a split-second decision that saves his son from formal punishment, but plunges them both into a world of guilt, lies, and secrecy. Just when Jake thinks he has everything under control, a malevolent outsider comes...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.8 - AR Pts: 19
Language
English
Description
The #1 New York Times bestseller from Stephen King—a novel about the fascination deadly things have for us and about our insistence on answers when there are none...
Since 1979, the state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in the shed out behind the barracks. Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox had answered a strange call just down the road and came back with an abandoned 1953 Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox...
Since 1979, the state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in the shed out behind the barracks. Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox had answered a strange call just down the road and came back with an abandoned 1953 Buick Roadmaster. Curt Wilcox...
12) Punching the air
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.7 - AR Pts: 5
Language
English
Description
From award-winning, bestselling author Ibi Zoboi and prison reform activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five comes a powerful YA novel in verse about a boy who is wrongfully incarcerated. The story that I thought was my life didn't start on the day I was born. Amal Shahid has always been an artist and a poet. But even in a diverse art school, he's seen as disruptive and unmotivated by a biased system. Then one fateful night, an altercation in a...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Description
"From the author of the "lyrical and compelling" (USA Today) novel A Good American comes a powerful story of two friends and the unintended consequences of friendship, loss, and hope. For Robert Carter, life in his coastal Maine hometown is comfortably predictable. But in 1976, on his first day of eighth grade, he meets Nathan Tilly, who changes everything. Nathan is confident, fearless, impetuous--and fascinated by kites and flying. Robert and Nathan's...
Author
Series
Miss Peregrine volume 1
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.7 - AR Pts: 13
Language
English
Description
A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of peculiar photographs. A horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off teh coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its decaying bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that Miss Peregrine's children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They...
15) The shadows
Author
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"The haunting new thriller from Alex North, author of the New York Times bestseller The Whisper Man You knew a teenager like Charlie Crabtree. A dark imagination, a sinister smile--always on the outside of the group. Some part of you suspected he might be capable of doing something awful. Twenty-five years ago, Crabtree did just that, committing a murder so shocking that it's attracted that strange kind of infamy that only exists on the darkest corners...
16) Game changer
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 5.3 - AR Pts: 15
Language
English
Description
"All it takes is one hit on the football field, and suddenly Ash's life doesn't look quite the way he remembers it. Impossible though it seems, he's been hit into another dimension--and keeps on bouncing through worlds that are almost-but-not-really his own. The changes start small, but they quickly spiral out of control as Ash slides into universes where he has everything he's ever wanted, universes where society is stuck in the past...universes...
17) Academ's fury
Author
Series
Codex Alera volume 2
Language
English
Description
Tavi is ostensibly serving as a page but secretly training to become a spy. When the First Lord falls to a sorcerous attack, Tavi and his closest friends and teachers must conceal the lord's condition lest the realm fall into civil war. In the Calderon Valley, a long-forgotten horror awakens and heads for the heart of Alera, while Tavi's relative, the newly appointed Steadholder Isana, faces at least two sets of assassins.
Author
Language
English
Description
"A brilliantly inventive new novel about loss, growing up, and our relationship with things, by the Booker Prize-finalist author of A Tale for the Time Being After the tragic death his beloved musician father, fourteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house-a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their...
19) Rez ball
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 4.4 - AR Pts: 11
Language
English
Description
"These days, Tre Brun is happiest when he is playing basketball on the Red Lake Reservation high school team--even though he can't help but be constantly gut-punched with memories of his big brother, Jaxon, who died in an accident. When Jaxon's former teammates on the varsity team offer to take Tre under their wing, he sees this as his shot to represent his Ojibwe rez all the way to their first state championship. This is the first step toward his...
Author
Language
English
Description
A family is shaken to its core after the mysterious disappearance of a teenage boy in this eerie tale, a blend of literary fiction, psychological suspense, and supernatural horror from the author of A Head Full of Ghosts. "A Head Full of Ghosts scared the living hell out of me, and I'm pretty hard to scare," raved Stephen King about Paul Tremblay's previous novel. Now, Tremblay returns with another disturbing tale sure to unsettle readers. Late one...
Interlibrary Loan Request
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Des Moines Public Library can be requested from other libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? If the item was published recently, submit a purchase suggestion. Submit Request