Alex McKenna
1) Sweetbitter
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English
Description
"A lush, thrilling debut--a publishing event already the subject of an article in The New York Times--about a year in the life of a uniquely beguiling young woman, set in the wild, alluring world of a famous downtown New York restaurant. "Let's say I was born when I came over the George Washington Bridge ..." This is how we meet unforgettable Tess, the 22-year-old at the heart of this stunning debut. Shot like a bullet from a mundane past, she's come...
3) Tradition
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English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
At Fullbrook Academy, where tradition reigns supreme, James Baxter and Jules Devereux take on privilege, sexism, and the importance of consent.
4) City on fire
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Language
English
Description
The all-too-human individuals who live within this extraordinary first novel are: Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's biggest fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Sam, two Long Island teenagers seduced by downtown's nascent punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter; his spunky, West Coast-transplant neighbor; and the detective trying to figure out what they all have...
Author
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English
Description
"Four freshmen arrive at college from completely different worlds: Lainey, a California party girl with a flair for drama; Tyson, a brilliant scholar and law school hopeful from D.C.; Summer, a recruited athlete and perfectionist from the Midwest; and Hannah, a mild-mannered southerner who is content to quietly round out the circle of big personalities. Soon after moving into their shared dorm, they strike up a conversation in a study lounge, and...
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English
Description
A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one is small and treacherous: Turtle has grown up isolated...
7) Every day
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Nashville Pride Recommends 2024: Favorite Queer Books
YA Books to Screen 2022-2024
YA Romance: Classics
YA Books to Screen 2022-2024
YA Romance: Classics
Description
Every morning A wakes in a different person's body, in a different person's life, learning over the years to never get too attached, until he wakes up in the body of Justin and falls in love with Justin's girlfriend, Rhiannon.
8) Great circle
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Language
English
Description
"After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There -- after encountering a pair of pilots passing through town in a beat up Cessna -- Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fifteen, she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy rancher who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement...
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English
Description
"From the author of the best-selling Sweetbitter comes an intimate, searingly honest memoir of growing up the child of addicts, of how that turbulent, often harrowing experience has affected her at every stage of her life, and of how she has struggled to transcend this unwanted legacy. When Sweetbitter was published to great success, the author knew she should be happy, but she felt incapable of it, emotionally shut down. She knew too that the roots...
10) Spontaneous
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Language
English
Description
Everything about Mara Carlyle's senior year proceeds normally, until a classmate, Katelyn Ogden, literally explodes in third period pre-calc. The FBI gets involved, and soon Mara's last high school year is filled with romance, quarantine, hallucinogenic mushrooms, friendship promising to be lifelong, bloggers, Bon Jovi, an ice-cream truck, and some filthy language from the president of the United States.
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English
Description
It was 1970 when thirteen-year-old runaway Kit Walker was abducted by Manny Romero, a smooth-talking, low-level criminal, who first coddled her and then groomed her into his partner-in-crime. Before long, Kit and Manny were infamous for their string of gas station robberies throughout Texas, making a name for themselves as the Texaco Twosome. Fourteen years later, Kit has scraped together a life for herself and her daughter amongst the pecan trees...
13) Wild bird
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English
Description
When her behavior escalates out of control, fourteen-year-old Wren is taken away to a wilderness therapy camp where she is forced to develop new skills, including the courage to ask for help.
14) Groupies
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English
Description
"It's 1977, and Faun Novak is in love with rock 'n' roll. After her mother's death, Faun, a naïve college dropout, grabs her Polaroid and hops a Greyhound to Los Angeles. In the City of Angels, she reconnects with her charismatic childhood friend Josie, now an up-and-coming model and muse. To make their reunion even sweeter, Josie is now dating Cal Holiday, the frontman of the superstar rock band Holiday Sun, and Faun is positively mesmerized....
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English
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"In their first year of college, two young women, one from a Florida swamp, the other from a Kentucky holler, both outsiders at their prestigious east coast college, meet in "Introduction to Sketch" and become instant best friends. A decade later, Mel and Sharon's lives remain intertwined, but so much else has changed. Now a semi-famous New York filmmaking duo, they draw upon their own pasts to make intimate animated movies, a process that has left...
16) A good idea
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English
Description
"A girl returns to her small hometown in Maine seeking revenge for the death of her childhood best friend"--
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English
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"Odessa is one of Karthia's master necromancers, catering to the kingdom's ruling Dead. Whenever a noble dies, it's Odessa's job to raise them by retrieving their souls from a dreamy and dangerous shadow world called the Deadlands. But there is a cost to being raised: the Dead must remain shrouded. If even a hint of flesh is exposed, the grotesque transformation begins, turning the Dead into terrifying, blood thirsty Shades. A dramatic uptick in Shade...
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English
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"From Mary Wollstonecraft--who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman--to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, [this book] dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against...
19) Hench: a novel
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English
Description
"Anna does boring things for terrible people because even criminals need office help and she needs a job. As a temp, she's just a cog in the machine. But when she finally gets a promising assignment, everything goes very wrong, and an encounter with the so-called 'hero' leaves her badly injured. So, of course, then she gets laid off. With no money and no mobility, with only her anger and internet research acumen, she discovers her suffering at the...
20) Unearthed
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English
Description
Scholar Jules Addison and scavenger Amelia Radcliffe join forces to unravel secrets of a long-extinct civilization, only to discover something that could spell the end of the human race.