Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Bella, high school junior, moves to Forks, WA from Phoenix, AZ to live with her father. Although she hates Forks and has been vocal about it in the past, she makes the move so that her mother may go on the road with her new husband, a baseball player. Bella soon finds that she doesn't hate Forks nearly as much when she crosses paths with Edward Cullen, a mysterious, unhumanly beautiful fellow student.

At first, Bella is wary of Edward as he often seems to be giving her hateful looks and disappeared for quite awhile when they are paired up as lab partners in Biology. Then, Edward's mystery is explained: he's a vampire. Edward is a "good" vampire in that he hunts animals for blood and not humans, but he does crave Bella's blood as much as her company. This fact doesn't scare Bella away and before long the two are inseparable. They behave as a normal teen couple despite Edward's immortality: they go out to dinner, they meet each other's families, they attend Prom, but they also square off against an evil vampire thirsty for Bella's blood.


Teens will love this book and while the book is fairly long the pages just fly by. Highly recommended.

Genre: Fantasy

Meyer, S. (2005). Twilight. New York: Little Brown and Co.

Spanking Shakespeare by Jake Wizner

Shakespeare Shapiro is a high school senior trying to sum up his crazy life in a memoir. All the graduating seniors are writing memoirs and a panel of finalists will be chosen to compete for publication! He's your normal teen worried about his perceived coolness, getting a girlfriend, and getting into college. His writing is hip and edgy and he has many fans among his classmates because they can always count on his writing to be over the top in terms of sexual content and raw humor at his and his family's expense.

His best friends drink too much, swear too much, and among their favorite conversation topics is bowel movements. Charlotte is different though. She's usually late, if she makes it to school at all, and she's hesitant to even share the first sentence of her memoir with Shakespeare.

A hilariously funny novel with heart. Teens will bust a gut as they journey through Shakespeare's senior year in high school and won't be able to put this page-turner down until they see him through Prom and graduation.

Genre: Realistic Fiction

Wizner, J. (2007). Spanking Shakespeare. New York: Random House.