Amateau, Gigi – Claiming Georgia Tate  (196 pages) Twelve-year-old Georgia Tate feels loved and safe living with Nana and Granddaddy, until her sexually abusive father tries to win her custody.  (N)  Set in the 1970s.

Blacklaws, Troy - -Karoo Boy  (196 pages) His family shattered by a freak accident that ended the life of his twin brother, Douglas moves with his mother to a tiny backwater town in the semi-desert Karoo region, where he befriends an adventurous girl and an elderly garage worker. A first novel. Original.  (N)  Set in South Africa in the 1970s.

Delaney, Mark – Pepperland  (184 pages) Struggling to come to terms with the death of her mother in the late 1970s, sixteen-year-old Beatles fan Star Cochran hopes to find closure by delivering to John Lennon a letter her mother wrote to him in 1964 but never sent.  (N)

Easton, Kelly – The Life History of a Star  (200 pages) For more than a year, fourteen-year-old Kristin uses her diary to record her confused thoughts about the physical changes brought on by adolescence and the emotional strain on her family of living with the ghost of her beloved older brother who was physically and mentally destroyed while serving in Vietnam.  (N)  Set in the 1970’s.

Hartnett, Sonya – What the Birds See  (196 pages) While the residents of his town concern themselves with the disappearance of three children, a lonely, rejected nine-year-old boy worries that he may inherit his mother's insanity.  (N)  Set in 1977.

Holubitsky, Katherine – The Hippie House  (233 pages) In the summer of 1970, fourteen-year-old Emma Jenkins realizes that life in her small town will never be the same after the brutal rape and murder of one of her classmates.  (N)

Jacobsen, Jennifer – Stained   (200 pages) In Weaver Falls, New Hampshire, in 1975, seventeen-year-old Jocelyn looks for answers when her lifelong neighbor and friend, Gabe, turns up missing and she learns that, while her boyfriend has been telling everything to a priest, Gabe has been keeping terrible secrets.  (N)

Johnston, Tim – Never So Green   (227 pages) In Iowa in the 1970s, twelve-year-old Tex overcomes his self-consciousness about his deformed right hand to take baseball lessons from his stepfather and his tomboy stepsister, who harbors a dark secret.  (N)

Kwasney, Michelle D. – Baby Blue  (202 pages) In western Massachusetts in 1976, still grieving and guilt-ridden over her father's drowning, twelve-year-old Blue is dealt another blow when her older sister, Star, runs away to escape their stepfather's violence against their mother.  (N)

Newman, Leslea – Jailbait  (239 pages) In 1971, unpopular and lonely tenth-grader Andi--teased at her Long Island high school for her large breasts and ignored at home by her distant parents--builds a fantasy romantic life around her clandestine, sexual relationship with a man in his thirties.  (N)

Yanksy,  Brian – My Road Trip to the Pretty Girl Capital of the World  (177 pages) In 1979 when his life in Mansfield, Iowa, seems to fall apart, seventeen-year-old Simon takes his father's car and sets out for Texas, looking for his birth parents and picking up a man claiming to be Elvis, two bums, and an abused young wife along the way.  (N)

Back to Historical Fiction

Key:

N=Synopsis from NoveList
K=Synopsis by librarian
A=Synopsis from Amazon.com