The last time Jess saw her father, she was a boy. Now she’s a high school graduate, soon to be on her way to art school. But first she has some unfinished business with her dad. So she’s driving halfway across the country to his wedding. He happens to be marrying her mom’s ex-best friend. It’s not like Jess wasn’t invited; she was. She just never told anyone she was coming. Surprise! Luckily, Jess isn’t making this trip alone. Her best friend, Christophe—nicknamed Chunk—is joining her. Along the way, Jess and Chunk learn a few things about themselves—and each other—which call their feelings about their relationship into question.
A male-to-female trans teen, Jess, and her male best friend, Chunk, take a road trip across country to attend Jess's father's wedding to her mother's former best friend. Hilarity, self-discovery, and some romance ensue.
When I made the wish, I just wanted a do-over. Another chance to make things right. I never, in a million years, thought it might actually come true... Sixteen-year-old Ellison Sparks is having a serious case of the Mondays. She gets a ticket for running a red light, she manages to take the world’s worst school picture, she bombs softball try-outs and her class election speech (note to self: never trust a cheerleader when she swears there are no nuts in her bake-sale banana bread), and to top it all off, Tristan, her gorgeous rocker boyfriend suddenly dumps her. For no good reason! As far as Mondays go, it doesn’t get much worse than this. And Ellie is positive that if she could just do it all over again, she would get it right. So when she wakes up the next morning to find she’s reliving the exact same day, she knows what she has to do: stop her boyfriend from breaking up with her. But it seems no matter how many do-overs she gets or how hard Ellie tries to repair her relationship, Tristan always seems bent set on ending it. Will Ellie ever figure out how to fix this broken day? Or will she be stuck in this nightmare of a Monday forever? From the author of 52 Reasons to Hate My Father and The Unremembered trilogy comes a hilarious and heartwarming story about second (and third and fourth and fifth) chances. Because sometimes it takes a whole week of Mondays to figure out what you really want.
The first book-length work of its kind, In Transition: Young Adult Literature and Transgender Representation examines the shift in the young adult book market towards increased representation of transgender characters and authors. Through a comprehensive exploration of historical conventions, genres, character diversity, and ideologies of trans representation, Emily Corbett traces the roots of trans literature from its beginnings in a cisgender-dominated publishing world to the recent rise in trans creators, characters, and implied readers. Corbett describes how trans-ness was initially perceived as an issue to be overcome by cisgender authors and highlights the ways in which the market has changed. Through careful analysis of texts that have until now received little scholarly attention, Corbett weaves together different theoretical approaches and fields of study to provide a map of the textual and cultural histories of this twenty-first-century publishing phenomenon. Focusing on trans authorship, authentic storytelling, and intersectional diversity, this book charts changing public attitudes, the YA book market, and the unique sociocultural moment in which these books are published. In Transition contributes new perspectives on the intersections of adolescence and trans-ness and sheds light on a dynamic subset of YA literature that has yet to receive sustained analysis.
Contributions by Megan Brown, Jill Coste, Sara K. Day, Rachel Dean-Ruzicka, Rebekah Fitzsimmons, Amber Gray, Roxanne Harde, Tom Jesse, Heidi Jones, Kaylee Jangula Mootz, Leah Phillips, Rachel L. Rickard Rebellino, S. R. Toliver, Jason Vanfosson, Sarah E. Whitney, and Casey Alane Wilson While critical and popular attention afforded to twenty-first-century young adult literature has exponentially increased in recent years, classroom materials and scholarship have remained static in focus and slight in scope. Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Hate U Give overwhelm conversations among scholars and critics—but these are far from the only texts in need of analysis. Beyond the Blockbusters: Themes and Trends in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction offers a necessary remedy to this limiting perspective, bringing together essays about the many subgenres, themes, and character types that have until now been overlooked. The collection tackles a diverse range of topics—modern updates to the marriage plot; fairy tale retellings in dystopian settings; stories of extrajudicial police killings and racial justice. The approaches are united, though, by a commitment to exploring the large-scale generic and theoretical structures at work in each set of texts. As a collection, Beyond the Blockbusters is an exciting entryway into a field that continues to grow and change even as its works captivate massive audiences. It will prove a crucial addition to the library of any scholar or instructor of young adult literature.
For fans of Julie Halpern and Morgan Matson comes a summer road trip story about adventure, sisters, and finding out who you truly want to be. Anna's always idolized her older sister, Storm. So when Storm dies in a tragic car accident on the night of her high school graduation, Anna is completely lost and her family is torn apart. That is, until she finds Storm's summer bucket list and decides to honor her sister by having the best summer ever -- which includes taking an epic road trip to the coast from her sleepy Iowa town. Setting out to do everything on Storm's list along with her sisters best friend Cameron -- the boy next door -- who knew that Storm's dream summer would eventually lead to Anna's own self-discovery?
Discussions of gender and sexuality have become part of mainstream conversations and are being reflected in the work of more and more writers of fiction, particularly in literature aimed at young adult audiences. But young readers, regardless of their sexual orientation, don’t always know what books offer well-rounded portrayals of queer characters and situations. Fortunately, finding positive role models in fiction that features LGBTQ+ themes has become less problematic, though not without its challenges. In Representing the Rainbow in Young Adult Literature: LGBTQ+ Content since 1969, Christine Jenkins and Michael Cart provide an overview of the literary landscape. An expanded version of The Heart Has Its Reasons, this volume charts the evolution of YA literature that features characters and themes which resonate not only with LGBTQ+ readers but with their allies as well. In this resource, Jenkins and Cart identify titles that are notable either for their excellence—accurate, thoughtful, and tactful depictions—or deficiencies—books that are wrongheaded, stereotypical, or outdated. Each chapter has been significantly updated, and this edition also includes new chapters on bisexual, transgender, and intersex issues and characters, as well as chapters on comics, graphic novels, and works of nonfiction. This book also features an annotated bibliography and a number of author-title lists of books discussed in the text that will aid teachers, librarians, parents, and teen readers. Encompassing a wider array of sexual identities, Representing the Rainbow in Young Adult Literature is an invaluable resource for young people eager to read about books relevant to them and their lives.
After hitting the #1 spot on the New York Times list with her first novel, L.A. Candy, TV star Lauren Conrad continues the deliciously entertaining series about an ordinary girl leading an extraordinary life. Full of dishy details about young Hollywood that only an insider can reveal, this entertaining novel shows that lies are only as sweet as the people telling them. Jane Roberts was the average girl next door until she and her best friend, Scarlett Harp, landed their own reality show, L.A. Candy. Now the girls have an all-access pass to Hollywood's hottest everything. But there's more to life on camera than just parties and shopping.... When racy photos of Jane are leaked to the press, she finds herself at the center of a tabloid scandal. She turns to her co-star Madison Parker for help, unaware that Madison is scheming behind the scenes. She might be Jane's shoulder to cry on, but does Madison really have Jane's back? Scarlett's working on a scandal of her own. She's fallen for someone who's strictly off-limits—which means Scarlett has a big secret to keep...from the L.A. Candy cameras, the paparazzi staking out her apartment, even from her best friend. Of course, nothing stays secret for long for the stars of the newest hit TV series, and all this drama couldn't be better for ratings. But can Jane survive another season in the spotlight?
Statistical Computation for Programmers, Scientists, Quants, Excel Users, and Other Professionals Using the open source R language, you can build powerful statistical models to answer many of your most challenging questions. R has traditionally been difficult for non-statisticians to learn, and most R books assume far too much knowledge to be of help. R for Everyone, Second Edition, is the solution. Drawing on his unsurpassed experience teaching new users, professional data scientist Jared P. Lander has written the perfect tutorial for anyone new to statistical programming and modeling. Organized to make learning easy and intuitive, this guide focuses on the 20 percent of R functionality you’ll need to accomplish 80 percent of modern data tasks. Lander’s self-contained chapters start with the absolute basics, offering extensive hands-on practice and sample code. You’ll download and install R; navigate and use the R environment; master basic program control, data import, manipulation, and visualization; and walk through several essential tests. Then, building on this foundation, you’ll construct several complete models, both linear and nonlinear, and use some data mining techniques. After all this you’ll make your code reproducible with LaTeX, RMarkdown, and Shiny. By the time you’re done, you won’t just know how to write R programs, you’ll be ready to tackle the statistical problems you care about most. Coverage includes Explore R, RStudio, and R packages Use R for math: variable types, vectors, calling functions, and more Exploit data structures, including data.frames, matrices, and lists Read many different types of data Create attractive, intuitive statistical graphics Write user-defined functions Control program flow with if, ifelse, and complex checks Improve program efficiency with group manipulations Combine and reshape multiple datasets Manipulate strings using R’s facilities and regular expressions Create normal, binomial, and Poisson probability distributions Build linear, generalized linear, and nonlinear models Program basic statistics: mean, standard deviation, and t-tests Train machine learning models Assess the quality of models and variable selection Prevent overfitting and perform variable selection, using the Elastic Net and Bayesian methods Analyze univariate and multivariate time series data Group data via K-means and hierarchical clustering Prepare reports, slideshows, and web pages with knitr Display interactive data with RMarkdown and htmlwidgets Implement dashboards with Shiny Build reusable R packages with devtools and Rcpp Register your product at informit.com/register for convenient access to downloads, updates, and corrections as they become available.
