Age Of Innocence Novels

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky



Fifteen-year-old Charlie is coping with the suicide of his friend, Michael. To lessen the fear and anxiety of starting high school alone, Charlie starts writing letters to a stranger, someone he heard was nice but has never met in person.

At school, Charlie finds a friend and mentor in his English teacher, Bill. He also overcomes his chronic shyness and approaches a classmate, Patrick, who, along with his step-sister Sam, becomes two of Charlie's BFFs.

During the course of the school year, Charlie has his first date and his first kiss, he deals with bullies, he experiments with drugs and drinking, and he makes friends, loses them, and gains them back. He creates his own soundtrack through a series of mix tapes full of iconic songs, reads a huge stack of classic books, and gets involved in the Rocky Horror Picture Show audience-participation culture. 

Charlie has a relatively stable home life, though, with supportive, if distant, parents to fall back on. Unfortunately, a disturbing family secret that Charlie has repressed for his entire life surfaces at the end of the school year. Charlie has a severe mental breakdown and ends up hospitalized.

Charlie's final letter closes with feelings of hope: getting released from the hospital, forgiving his aunt Helen for what she did to him, finding new friends during sophomore year, and trying his best not to be a wallflower. Charlie hopes to get out of his head and into the real world, participating in life instead of just watching it fly by.



The Bridge To Terabithia – Katherine Patterson



Jess Aarons lives in a small town called Lark Creek and has a hard family life. He likes to draw and to run, and is kind of lonely; he's out-of-place in his family and the only person he really gets along with is his little sister May Belle. He's about to enter the fifth grade and dreams of being the fastest runner there. This dream is shattered on the first day of school, though, when a new girl named Leslie shows up and runs faster than anyone. At first Jess is crushed, but later he and Leslie end up becoming good friends.

Since they're both outcasts, Jess and Leslie spend a lot of time together. They take over a part of a nearby forest that's only accessible by swinging on a rope over the creek, and name it Terabithia. In this imaginary land, they're royalty. They can escape from the bullies and the boredom of fifth grade, and dream all they like. When the resident bully, Janice Avery, steals May Belle's Twinkies, Jess and Leslie get revenge on her by writing her a fake love letter and embarrassing her.

Most of the school year passes by. For Christmas, Jess gets Leslie a puppy, who becomes part of their kingdom in Terabithia. The two of them help Leslie's dad fix up their new home. When they find out Janice the bully is legitimately unhappy, they work together to comfort her.

By Easter, it's been raining really hard for a month and it's become more difficult to cross the creek to Terabithia. Leslie goes with Jess's family to church for Easter. After the service, Leslie and Jess, along with May Belle, argue about whether people go to hell if they don't believe in the Bible.

One day after Easter, Jess thinks it's too dangerous to go to Terabithia, with all of the rain that's been coming down. But he forgets all about it when the school music teacher, Miss Edmunds, calls and asks him to go with her to a museum. He goes and has one of the best days of his life. But when he comes home, he finds out that Leslie went to Terabithia without him and died when attempting to cross the creek.

At first, Jess can't believe it. Doesn't want to believe it. In meeting with Leslie's parents and spending time with her dog, he slowly begins to understand what he's lost…but also what he gained by having Leslie in his life at all. He goes to Terabithia to try and make sense of it, but his little sister follows him and almost falls into the creek herself. In rescuing her he realizes he's taken on some of Leslie's courage.

Later, Jess goes back to Terabithia and builds a bridge across the creek. When May Belle follows him again, he welcomes her to Terabithia and leads her across the bridge.




Paper Towns – John Green


John Green’s Paper Town, published by Dutton Juvenile in 2008, is a novel that plays off earlier themes in his works Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Catherines.


Quentin Jacobsen is a seventeen-year-old living in an Orlando-area high school. He has been in love with his childhood best friend, Margo, his entire life. Quentin is an intelligent boy and Margo has a reputation for being tough and cool. When they were nine years old, he and Margo shared a discovery that changed their lives forever. While walking through a park, they found a named Robert Joyner who had killed himself. Since that night, he and Margo went separate ways. Fortunately, Quentin’s parents are therapists and other than that tragedy long ago, Quentin has lived a balanced and well-adjusted life with few risks and little drama.

A few weeks before high school graduation, Margo appears at Quentin’s window in the middle of the night. She asks him to accompany her on an all-nighter of pranks. Margo is on a litany of revenge that includes spray paint, blackmail, and breaking into Sea World. Quentin thinks that this night will bring he and Margo together again as friends. However, Margo runs away after their adventures.

Quentin turns to his friends Radar and Ben, and to Margo’s friend, Lacy, for help in an attempt to find her. They eventually skip their high school graduation and go on a cross-country trip to find or “save her.” Margo has left clues in a volume of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in the hopes that he will find her. Along the way, Quentin realizes that Margo is not really the person that he thought he knew.

Reviewers note Green’s deft hand describing the social challenges of the culture in this part of Florida with its heat, overdevelopment, and temptations. Margo’s description of their town as “a paper town” is an apt metaphor: she describes a paper town as one with cul-de-sacs and streets that turn into themselves and houses that are meant to fall apart. Critics admire Green's memorable and unusual characters in this slice of Florida life.



Speak – Laurie Halse Anderson



This novel relates the story of a young girl in Syracuse, New York, who is brutally raped at a party given by one of her friends. She calls the police for help and they arrive to find only a teen party with illegal alcohol. Because none of her friends know about the rape, they believe she called the cops to bust them. As a result, they make her an Outcast. She spends her entire ninth-grade year coming to terms with happened to her and finding the voice she lost as a result of her trauma to tell the truth.




The Book Thief – Markus Zusak



Narrated by Death, The Book Thief is the story of Liesel Meminger, a nine-year-old German girl who given up by her mother to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann in the small town of Molching in 1939, shortly before World War II. On their way to Molching, Liesel's younger brother Werner dies, and she is traumatized, experiencing nightmares about him for months. Hans is a gentle man who brings her comfort and helps her learn to read, starting with a book Liesel took from the cemetery where her brother was buried. Liesel befriends a neighborhood boy, Rudy Steiner, who falls in love with her. At a book burning, Liesel realizes that her father was persecuted for being a Communist, and that her mother was likely killed by the Nazis for the same crime. She is seen stealing a book from the burning by the mayor's wife Ilsa Hermann, who later invites Liesel to read in her library.



Keeping a promise he made to the man who saved his life, Hans agrees to hide a Jew named Max Vandenberg in his basement. Liesel and Max become close friends, and Max writes Liesel two stories about their friendship, both of which are reproduced in the novel. When Hans publicly gives bread to an old Jew being sent to a concentration camp, Max must leave, and Hans is drafted into the military at a time when air raids over major German cities were escalating in terms of frequency and fatality. Liesel next sees Max being marched towards the concentration camp at Dachau. Liesel loses hope and begins to disdain the written word, having learnt that Hitler's propaganda is to blame for the war and the Holocaust and the death of her biological family, but Ilsa encourages her to write. Liesel writes the story of her life in the Hubermanns' basement, where she miraculously survives an air raid that kills Hans, Rosa, Rudy, and everyone else on her block. Liesel survives the war, as does Max. She goes on to live a long life and dies at an old age.