Guard Your Heart, Sue Diven ( paperback April 2021)
£7.99
Boy meets girl on the Northern Irish border in Guard Your Heart, by Sue Divin, Derry. Summer 2016. Aidan and Iona, now eighteen, were both born on the day of the Northern Ireland peace deal.Aidan is Catholic, Irish, and Republican. With his ex-political prisoner father gone and his mother dead, Aidan's hope is pinned on exam results earning him a one-way ticket out of Derry. To anywhere.
Iona, Protestant and British, has a brother and father in the police. She's got university ambitions, a strong faith and a fervent belief that boys without one track minds are a myth. At a post-exam party, Aidan wanders alone across the Peace Bridge and becomes the victim of a brutal sectarian attack.
Iona witnessed the attack; picked up Aidan's phone and filmed what happened, and gets in touch with him to return the phone. When the two meet, alone and on neutral territory, the differences between them seem insurmountable. Both their fathers held guns, but safer to keep that secret for now.
Despite their differences and the secrets they have to keep from each other, there is mutual intrigue, and their friendship grows. And so what? It's not the Troubles. But for both Iona and Aidan it seems like everything is keeping them apart , when all they want is to be together .
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The Unknowns, by Shirley-Anne McMillan ( paperback 2017)
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A teenage story of friendship, and boundaries, and preconceptions. Likeable main characters of Tilly and Brew, it’s edgy but realistic. My 15yo enjoyed this a lot.
Shirley Anne is from Lisburn and this is her second novel.
Tilly is perched at the top of Belfast's largest crane. She likes to climb up high at night in order to feel free from a city which, despite the best PR, is still full of trouble and conflict. Eventually, she comes back down to discover her bike is missing and in its place is a boy named Brew.
Wearing eyeliner and high-heeled boots, he offers her a drink from his flask of coffee before disappearing into the night. The next morning, Tilly's bike is returned, but tucked into the spoke of the wheel is a card with Brew's number on it. As Tilly learns to trust Brew, he leads her into a world she never knew existed - a world of parties in abandoned houses, completing missions that involve break-ins, and risking everything just to help strangers in need; the world of The Unknowns.
What Tilly doesn't anticipate is that they will also make her question everything she was brought up to believe in, and force her to make a choice that will stay with her for the rest of her life. The Unknowns is a story about hope in a city where increasing numbers of young people are struggling to get by, a place where there is no trust in the political system, and where some people still dare to dream.
I Capture The Castle, by Dodie Smith
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An absolute classic YA novel from the same Dodie Smith of ‘101 Dalmatians’ fame. The diary of Cassandra Mortmain, her extraordinary family and her crumbling castle home. Loved by teenagers and adults everywhere.
Skellig, by David Almond
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Skellig won The Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award when it was first published almost 20 years ago.
It’s powerful and moving, one of those books that you can’t put down.
Everyone should read it, not just teenagers.
The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas (paperback)
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Winner of the Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2018 Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighbourhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a police officer. Now what Starr says could destroy her community.It could also get her killed. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a powerful and gripping YA novel about one girl's struggle for justice.
