My One Hundred Adventures

An Occasionally Happy Family

Is Everyone Moonburned but Me?

Bad Best Friend

It Was September When We Ran Away the First Time

In Daddy's Arms I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers

Rent a Boyfriend

Love Like Sky

She was looking for a place to land.

Anna is a fifteen-year-old girl slouching toward adulthood, and she's had it with her life at home. So Anna "borrows" her stepmom's credit card and runs away to Los Angeles, where her half-sister takes her in. But LA isn't quite the glamorous escape Anna had imagined.

As Anna spends her days on TV and movie sets, she engrosses herself in a project researching the murderous Manson girls—and although the violence in her own life isn't the kind that leaves physical scars, she begins to notice the parallels between herself and the lost girls of LA, and of America, past and present.

In Anna's singular voice, we glimpse not only a picture of life on the B-list in LA, but also a clear-eyed reflection on being young, vulnerable, lost, and female in America—in short, on the B-list of life. Alison Umminger writes about girls, sex, violence, and which people society deems worthy of caring about, which ones it doesn't, in a way not often seen in YA fiction.

Discover Your Child's Next Read

My One Hundred Adventures

Polly Horvath, 2008

An Occasionally Happy Family

Cliff Burke, 2021

Is Everyone Moonburned but Me?

Stella Pevsner, 2000

Bad Best Friend

Rachel Vail, 2020

It Was September When We Ran Away the First Time

D. James Smith, 2008

In Daddy's Arms I Am Tall: African Americans Celebrating Fathers

Folami Abiade, Carole Boston Weatherford, Dinah Johnson, Various Poets, 1997

Rent a Boyfriend

Gloria Chao, 2020

Love Like Sky

Leslie C. Youngblood, 2018