The 100 Years of Lenni and Margot, Marianne Cronin

A beautiful friendship develops between a 17 year old terminal young lady and an 83 year old woman who has experienced a lot in her lifetime.

The Girl From Everywhere, Heidi Heilig

Time Travel, Ships, Adventure, Hawaiian History, main characters are of a variety of cultures & people groups, coming of age, light romance with girl/boy dilemmas, and addresses the negatives of drug addiction without going on & on about it. This book has a sequel called The Ship Beyond Time. What I like most is the Title - I think of myself as a girl from everywhere. Also, I love adventure stories about old sailing ships & I love time travel.

WarCross, Marie Lu

Marie Lu is an incredibly good author for teens. I have read everything she's written. Her books are action-packed! This particular book & its sequel Wild Card are fast-paced gamer adventure stories where the kids end up in the games fighting for their lives. This book has plenty of real-life crossovers making it hard to decide which parts of the story are solely digital & which parts are happening in real-time. If you like Ready Player One you will love this book! It is available in our high school library.

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, Nicholas Carr

This book examines the history of how advances in technology have had effects on the world & the human race. He describes how human thought has been shaped through time by different “tools of the mind” (from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer). He also adds recent discoveries in neuroscience by scientists Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel and what they have discovered about changes the human brain has experienced in the "computer age." An absolute must read for anyone who educates youth in the 21st century.