Best Teen & Young Adult Theater Fiction

Inspired by the original Hogwart’s textbook by Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original screenplay marks the screenwriting debut of J.K. Rowling, author of the beloved and internationally bestselling Harry Potter books. J.K. Rowling is the author of the bestselling Harry Potter series of seven books, published between 1997 and 2007, which have sold over 450 million copies worldwide, are distributed in more than 200 territories and translated into 79 languages, and have been turned into eight blockbuster films by Warner Bros. She has written three companion volumes to the series in aid of charity: Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in aid of Comic Relief; and The Tales of Beedle the Bard in aid of her children's charity Lumos.

Thrown together against their will in the class production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with the goofiest, cutest boy Claudia has ever known, Iris and Claudia are in for an eye-opening senior year. "Mills ( This Adventure Ends ) thoughtfully explores the nuances of all kinds of relationships, both friendly and romantic. Through these friendship struggles and romances old and new, Mills evokes the high stakes and vast rewards of trust, intimacy, and honesty." The course of true love never did run smooth, but in the case of these two lovers, the journey is worth your while." With taut, realistic dialogue, she expertly crafts blossoming friendships and nascent romances." “With sporadic references to Jane Austen's famous characters and wickedly inventive language, Mills closely observes the social milieu of an American high school.

National Book Award Finalist. "[A] stealthily powerful, unexpectedly affirming story of discovering and rescuing one’s best self. Then, late in high school, I wanted to be a vet—mostly because of the James Herriot books and the PBS show, I suppose. Then, in college, I decided to become a lawyer—until my senior year, when I switched to an English major to become a teacher, which I did become. A: In my school, we were tracked—meaning that we were put into classes depending on how well we had done in testing. We were the poorest readers, and so since I was told I wasn’t any good at this, I didn’t read much. The Freddy the Pig books, the Doctor Dolittle books, any Greek mythology I could get my hands on, and the Norse mythology that I liked better, the biographies in the Childhood of Famous Americans series, the tales of the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen, the Herbert series and the Henry Reed series, Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, Howard Pyle’s The Adventures of Robin Hood and His Merry Men, Bambi (which is a lot better than most people think it is), anything by Jack London or Jules Verne or H. G. Wells, the Horatio Hornblower books, Treasure Island , and of course the Hardy Boys series and the Tom Swift series, which I collected whenever I could. Most American writers—Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Jack London—all wrote about five hundred words a day. There are some children’s book writers—like Enid Blyton—who supposedly wrote ten thousand words a day. On my desk are a dictionary and a thesaurus, books by Emerson and Whittier and Longfellow and Darwin, Henry David Thoreau’s journals, a collection of Churchill’s war speeches, two volumes of Shaker hymns, some Tolkien, some Avi, some Katherine Paterson, some Elie Wiesel, The Giver , and a statue of a greyhound that has been in my family for four generations. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his first great book, called life "a veil of gloom and brightness." Geez, read Where the Wild Things Are , or Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel , or just about any Grimm folktale, or Crow Boy , or Bridge to Terabithia , or Nothing but the Truth , or No, David , or Octavian Nothing , or The Tale of Despereaux , or Stitches , or The Storm in the Barn , and then try to tell me that writers for kids should try not to be too serious. If I give one title, then all the other books get sort of cranky and jealous, and they start to rearrange themselves loudly at night to push each other off the shelves. Then I have to pick them all up in the morning instead of walking the dogs and then the dogs get irritated and they take their sweet time on the walk so I get back home late and miss most of breakfast and the kids get to school after the bell has rung and the day just goes downhill from there. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

A delightful adveture full of humor and heart set in Elizabethan England! Widge is an orphan with a rare talent for shorthand. Widge mentions square city blocks, describes his dinner kept warm on the back of the stove and notes that a man wounded in a duel had recovered in a hospitalAthis in an age of unplanned cities, meals cooked over open fires and hospitals that were for terminally ill paupers. Lonely outcast Widge is a sympathetic character, but his frequent shifts in voice from Yorkshire dialect to 20th-century American slang may be disconcerting to readers, and the villainy of Widge's nemesis seems all too familiar. Each voice is tailored to fit the subtleties of the character, as in the wicked Falconer.

Inspired by the original Hogwart’s textbook by Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original screenplay marks the screenwriting debut of J.K. Rowling, author of the beloved and internationally bestselling Harry Potter books. J.K. Rowling is the author of the bestselling Harry Potter series of seven books, published between 1997 and 2007, which have sold over 450 million copies worldwide, are distributed in more than 200 territories and translated into 79 languages, and have been turned into eight blockbuster films by Warner Bros. She has written three companion volumes to the series in aid of charity: Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in aid of Comic Relief; and The Tales of Beedle the Bard in aid of her children's charity Lumos.

Inspired by the original Hogwart’s textbook by Newt Scamander, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original screenplay marks the screenwriting debut of J.K. Rowling, author of the beloved and internationally bestselling Harry Potter books. J.K. Rowling is the author of the bestselling Harry Potter series of seven books, published between 1997 and 2007, which have sold over 450 million copies worldwide, are distributed in more than 200 territories and translated into 79 languages, and have been turned into eight blockbuster films by Warner Bros. She has written three companion volumes to the series in aid of charity: Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them in aid of Comic Relief; and The Tales of Beedle the Bard in aid of her children's charity Lumos.

Richly imagined and masterfully crafted, Echo pushes the boundaries of genre, form, and storytelling innovation to create a wholly original novel that will resound in your heart long after the last note has been struck. *“The story of Otto and the cursed sisters honor timeless and traditional folktales [and] Ryan has created three contemporary characters who, through faith and perseverance, write their own happy endings, inspiring readers to believe they can do the same.” -- School Library Journal , starred review.

The hysterical #1 New York Times bestseller from Newbery honoree Carl Hiaasen featuring gators, snakes, bats that bite, and reality show hosts gone wild! But the job keeps getting more complicated: Derek Badger insists on using wild animals for his stunts; and Wahoo's acquired a shadow named Tuna—a girl who's sporting a shiner courtesy of her father and needs a place to hide out. “Only in Florida—and in the fiction of its native son Carl Hiaasen—does a dead iguana fall from a palm tree and kill somebody.” — New York Post “ Chomp is a delightful laugh-out-loud sendup of the surreality of TV that will be enjoyed by readers of all ages.” — Los Angeles Times “ Chomp shines in its humorous, subtle tweaks on pop culture. Grown-ups might stop you in an airport and tell you they like the novels, but kids will sit down and write a three-page letter, complete with illustrations. They're sharp and perceptive, and they really love the irreverent point of view in the books. Reality television taps into the same human impulse that makes you slow down on the highway to gawk at a six-car pile-up. Beside Jon Stewart, the best comedy on television is Finding Bigfoot and some of these other reality shows. Poisonous snakes, gators, crocs, iguanas, black widow spiders, all that stuff. In Chomp, both Mickey and Wahoo are fearless when it comes to snakes and other wild beasts (and nutty people, for that matter)--do you have any animal phobias? A. I just thought it would be cool to name a boy after Wahoo McDaniel, who played for the Dolphins when I was a kid. And the reality, sadly, is that some kids go home every night wondering if their mother or father is going to hurt them. In Scat I had a character whose dad comes back very badly injured from Iraq. You clearly have the single word title thing going for your kids’ books, is that just something you started with and stuck to, or is there more to the story? I have a son in middle school (and also grandchildren), and none of them are ready to read the Big Person novels yet. A. I was at a book-signing in Boulder, Colorado, when a very nice woman told me she'd named her cancerous tumor after a character in one of my novels.