Recommended for Gifted Readers - Contemporary Teen Fiction
(Originally Presented at Spring 2004 Beyond IQ conference for gifted students)

• Catherine Atkins: ALT. ED. - High school misfits are forced to attend an after-school session that is not exactly group therapy in order to keep being expelled for bad acts. They slowly learn each other's secrets and prejudices while they try to straighten out their own lives and decide what they think about friendship and misbehavior.
• Brent Hartinger: THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO - is about teenagers in a last-chance-before-juvenile-prison group home, where not all of the kids are happy about their fate, and other kids come to see that not everyone in the juvenile system is cruel or uncaring. Hartinger understands foster kids and the people who look after them.
• Carl Hiaasen: HOOT - Roy, a newcomer, notices a runaway who is trying to save a nest of endangered burrowing owls whose home is about to get bulldozed. He gets caught up, both with the owls and with the runaway's tough half-sister as they try to keep the owls safe from people who would rather get rid of them so they can complete their construction
• Will Hobbs: DOWNRIVER - A group of kids who are supposed to get an attitude readjustment are sent to a camp that puts them through extreme physical exercises, like long hikes and white-water rafting. Some of the boys and girls get angry, decide they know enough to do it themselves, and take their raft down one of the most dangerous series of rapids in the country, on the Colorado River.
• Will Hobbs: THE MAZE - Rick, a runaway from juvenile jail, finds shelter with an ex-foster kid scientist who works with reintroducing endangered condors into canyon country. Rick learns about the birds, about hang gliding in the tangle of canyons, and to stand up both for the birds and his past misdeeds.
• James Howe: THE MISFITS (also available in audio form from Full Cast Audio) - Skeezy, JoeDan, Addie, and narrator Bobby--who start out protesting the school's two party election system, end up making a very strong point about bullying while they learn about romance, and as Bobby discovers that adults are human, too.
• Jeanette Ingold: MOUNTAIN SOLO - Tess, a child violin star, freezes in her first big concert and returns to her dad's Montana home to figure out what she wants to do with her life. She considered her childhood, her career, and her future while hiking through the woods in search of a turn-of-the-century homestead, one that was built by another violin player.
• Kathe Koja: BUDDHA BOY - When Justin, who loves art, discovers weird new kid Jinsen is also good at it, he gets caught up in Jinsen's refusal to fight popular boys who make his life miserable. Jinsen explains about Buddhism, but he also lives it and makes Justin think.
• Amy Goldman Koss: THE GIRLS - A book that makes us look at why groups of friends suddenly break apart, turning one or several of the friends into enemies with apparently no reason at all.
• Joyce Carol Oates: BIG MOUTH AND UGLY GIRL - A boy's life is turned upside down when he makes Columbine-like jokes and he is reported as having made real threats. Independent Ursula is the only one who stands up for him in the face of bad treatment, fearful adults, and harassment.
• Joyce Carol Oates: FREAKY GREEN EYES - Good girl Franky, who never questions her abusive, sports hero father, creates Freaky Green Eyes as a personality to help her to stand up to him for herself and her sister, and to find out what truly happened to her vanished mother.
• Rodman Philbrick: FREAK THE MIGHTY - Big, strong Max thinks he is stupid and knows he is friendless until he meets the small, feisty, sick Freak. Together, Freak riding on Max's shoulders, they become Freak and Max the Mighty, Freak the Mighty for short. Freak teaches Max that maybe he's not as stupid as he believes in a story about true friendship.
• Sherri L. Smith: LUCY THE GIANT - Lucy is as big as an adult and treated badly by the world. Her father is a drunk; her only friend is a stray dog. It is when she pretends to be an adult and goes to work on a fishing boat, working hard, risking her life in storms and befriending her landlord, that she realizes what actual power she has over the way she lives and that she can make a good family of her own.
• Jerry Spinelli: THERE'S A GIRL IN MY HAMMERLOCK - Funny story of girl who gets on all-boys wrestling team to be close to her crush, then finds she needs to make wrestling work for herself, to show people it can be done.