Books published by publisher Lizzie Skurnick Books

Though to Brenda Belle Blossom's mother he is just "that boy . . . tying those beer cans to the Christmas tree," sixteen-year-old Adam is really the son of a famous movie star who hobnobs with royalty while jetting all over the world. Smarty Brenda Belle Blossom, horrified by fuzz on her upper lip, cracks jokes to avoid the bummer of her teeny Vermont hamlet and ladylike mother. When Adam is expelled from his last boarding school, he washes up in Vermont to stay with his irascible, alcoholic grandfather, and meets Belle at the drug store. Soon they are going steady, calling each other "darling," and dedicated to helping other misfits achieve "Nothing Power"—until Brenda realizes there's more to the "ordinary" Adam than it seems.M.E. Kerr is the winner of the 1993 Margaret Edwards Award for her lifetime achievement in writing books for young adults. She has been described by the New York Times Book Review as "one of the grand masters of young adult fiction." She lives in Long Island, New York.

She's fat. She's loud-mouthed. She's pushy. She's opinionated. She's prejudiced. She has a "creative" way with the truth. She is madly in love with your sixteen-year-old brother. All the other kids in seventh-grade hate her and she hates them. Her mother has a petition going to try to force your family out of the neighborhood. . . . And she's your best friend! There's no one like Fat Glenda. In Lila Perl's 1972 comedy, while Sara has to cope with her family's unorthodox ways and the town's prejudice against them, it's her new friend Glenda who Sara has to really watch out for. For Glenda has a secret, and everyone in town knows it . . . but Sara!Lila Perl has published over sixty volumes of fiction and nonfiction for young readers. In addition to the successful Fat Glenda series, Perl has twice received American Library Association Notable awards for nonfiction and is the recipient of the Sidney Taylor Award for Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story.

“What makes ‘Written in the Stars’ striking and quite wonderful is the ease and sagacity with which Ms. Duncan writes about adolescence (at an astonishingly young authorial age) and the emotional resonance she creates with characters we will know only briefly—for such is the nature of short stories.”—Wall Street JournalAn extraordinary look at the genesis of a great writer’s career, Written in the Stars is a collection of Lois Duncan’s earliest stories. composed from the ages of 13 through 22. From family relationships, to the joy and angst of first love, to the struggles of a young soldier returning from war with PTSD, this unique book, whose stories originally appeared in magazines such as Seventeen and American Girl, is a marvelous portrait of the depth and breadth of Duncan’s youthful work. As a special bonus, Lois has followed each story with a brief essay describing her work and life at the time the story was written. Written in the Stars is a must-have addition to the library of work from this spectacular and groundbreaking young adult author.

Set against the backdrop of 1930s New Orleans, Berthe Amoss's 1979 young adult mystery follows twelve-year-old Addie Agnew as she struggles to uncover the secret of her mother's death. Living with her spinster aunts in a house that's practically haunted, Addie was always told her mother was perfect and was swept off to sea with Addie's father in a Honduran tidal wave. But Addie suspects there's something her aunts aren't telling her, and it has something to do with the locked trunk in the attic. What's in the trunk? And what really happened to Addie's parents? In this classic story about family secrets and growing up, Addie will stop at nothing to discover truth about her mother, even if learning the truth will change everything forever.Born and raised in New Orleans, Berthe Amoss has never stopped writing about her home city. She is the author and illustrator of twenty-eight children's and young adult books. Her picture book The Cajun Gingerbread Boy won a Children's Choice Award and The Chalk Cross was a finalist for the Edgar Allen Poe Award.

Set in New Orleans, Louisiana, on the eve of World War II, Mischief and Malice is a brand new work from an iconic figure in young adult literature. Following the death of her Aunt Eveline, fourteen-year old Addie—who we first met in Berthe Amoss's classic Secret Lives—is now living with her Aunt Tooise, Uncle Henry, and her longtime rival cousin, Sandra Lee. A new family has just moved into Addie's former house, including a young girl who is just Addie's age. Meanwhile, Louis, the father of Tom, Addie's lifelong neighbor and best friend, suddenly returns after having disappeared when Tom was a baby. Between school dances, organizing a Christmas play, fretting about her hair, and a blossoming romance with Tom, Addie stumbles upon a mystery buried in the Great Catch All, an ancient giant armoire filled with heirlooms of her family's past, which holds a devastating secret that could destroy Louis and Tom's lives. Once again, Berthe Amoss has created an indelible portrait of a young girl coming of age in prewar New Orleans.Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, Berthe Amoss is the author and illustrator of twenty-eight children's and young adult books. Her picture book The Cajun Gingerbread Boy won a Children's Choice Award, and her YA novel The Chalk Cross was a finalist for the Edgar Allen Poe Award. She lives on the Gulf Coast in Pass Christian, Mississippi.

In a stunning new novel completed just before her death in 2013, award-winning author Lila Perl introduces us to Isabel Brandt, a French-phrase-dropping twelve-year-old New Yorker who's more interested in boys and bobbing her nose than the distant war across the Pacific—the one her parents keep reminding her to care more about. Things change when Helga, the beautiful niece of her parent's best friends, comes to live with Isabel and her family. Helga is everything Isabel's not—cool, blonde, and vaguely aloof. She's also a German war refugee, with a past that gives a growing Isabel something more important to think about than boys and her own looks. Set in the Bronx during World War II, Isabel's War is a beautiful evocation of New York in the 1940s and of a girl's growing awareness of the world around her.

Germany on the cusp of World War II. Hitler has risen to power, and the Jews are being taken away from their homes in the middle of the night, forced to wear yellow stars, their businesses smashed, their lives in ruins. In the middle of all this is Lilli Frankfurter, a half-Jewish girl on the cusp of adolescence, her life and family thrust into the midst of a danger she has only begun to understand.In the stunning sequel to Isabel's War, Lila Perl, who completed this book just months before her death, brings wartime Germany, England, and America to life through Lilli's eyes. From Kristallnacht to hiding in her grandparents' attic to the Kindertransports that take her to an isolated farm in the English countryside, separated from her family, Lilli must repeatedly hide her identity in order to stay alive. In her final novel, Perl brilliantly evokes Lilli's desperate journey to America—as well as her brave quest back to Europe to find out if anything is left of her family.Lila Perl published over sixty volumes of fiction and nonfiction for young readers during her long and distinguished career. In addition to the beloved Fat Glenda series, Perl twice received American Library Association Notable awards for nonfiction and was a recipient of the Sidney Taylor Award for Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story. Her penultimate novel, Isabel's War, was named a 2015 Sydney Taylor Honor Award winner in the Teen Readers Category, and was well reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Kirkus, among other places. She died in 2013 at the age of ninety-two.

Sabra St. Amour, reluctant teenage soap opera star, is spending the summer in the Hamptons with her domineering mother, recuperating from an ulcer and a nervous breakdown. Walking on the beach one day, Sabra meets Wally Witherspoon, son of the local undertaker, and his best friend Charlie. Wally has problems of his own, including being engaged to a girl he doesn't love while still pining for his ex, and his father's insistence that he follow him into the family business, which Wally detests. Charlie has just come out of the closet, which earned him a broken nose, care of his father. As the lives of these three teenagers collide over the course of one memorable summer, they are forced to choose between the future their parents want for them, and the life they want for themselves.

From the master of thrillers and the supernatural comes a collection of thirteen short stories that have never been published before in book form. Written in the Stars contains Lois Duncan's earliest stories--one published at the age of thirteen--from the tale of a young soldier suffering from PTSD, to a group of children (humorously) tormenting their temporary guardian. This unique collection--far from the suspense novels Duncan later became noted for--contains stories that originally appeared in magazines such as Seventeen and American Girl. They are a marvelous portrait of the depth and breadth of Duncan's work, covering topics such as the war in Korea, sibling relationships, and the joy and pain of first love. As a special bonus, Lois has followed each story with a brief essay describing her work and life at the time the story was written. Written in the Stars is a must-have addition to the library of work from this spectacular and groundbreaking young adult author.Lois Duncan is the author of over fifty books, ranging from children's picture books to poetry to adult nonfiction, but is best known for her young adult suspense novels, such as Stranger With My Face and I Know What You Did Last Summer. She has been awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award, presented by the School Library Journal and the ALA Young Adult Library Services Association for "a distinguished body of adolescent literature." In 2009 she received the Katharine Drexel Award, awarded by the Catholic Library Association "to recognize an outstanding contribution by an individual to the growth of high school and young adult librarianship and literature."

Germany on the cusp of World War II. Hitler has risen to power, and the Jews are being taken away from their homes in the middle of the night, forced to wear yellow stars, their businesses smashed, their lives in ruins. In the middle of all this is Lilli Frankfurter, a half-Jewish girl on the cusp of adolescence, her life and family thrust into the midst of a danger she has only begun to understand.In the stunning sequel to Isabel's War, Lila Perl, who completed this book just months before her death, brings wartime Germany, England, and America to life through Lilli's eyes. From Kristallnacht to hiding in her grandparents' attic to the Kindertransports that take her to an isolated farm in the English countryside, separated from her family, Lilli must repeatedly hide her identity in order to stay alive. In her final novel, Perl brilliantly evokes Lilli's desperate journey to America—as well as her brave quest back to Europe to find out if anything is left of her family.Lila Perl published over sixty volumes of fiction and nonfiction for young readers during her long and distinguished career. In addition to the beloved Fat Glenda series, Perl twice received American Library Association Notable awards for nonfiction and was a recipient of the Sidney Taylor Award for Four Perfect Pebbles: A Holocaust Story. Her penultimate novel, Isabel's War, was named a 2015 Sydney Taylor Honor Award winner in the Teen Readers Category, and was well reviewed in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Kirkus, among other places. She died in 2013 at the age of ninety-two.

Set in New Orleans, Louisiana, on the eve of World War II, Mischief and Malice is a brand new work from an iconic figure in young adult literature. Following the death of her Aunt Eveline, fourteen-year old Addie—who we first met in Berthe Amoss's classic Secret Lives—is now living with her Aunt Tooise, Uncle Henry, and her longtime rival cousin, Sandra Lee. A new family has just moved into Addie's former house, including a young girl who is just Addie's age. Meanwhile, Louis, the father of Tom, Addie's lifelong neighbor and best friend, suddenly returns after having disappeared when Tom was a baby. Between school dances, organizing a Christmas play, fretting about her hair, and a blossoming romance with Tom, Addie stumbles upon a mystery buried in the Great Catch All, an ancient giant armoire filled with heirlooms of her family's past, which holds a devastating secret that could destroy Louis and Tom's lives. Once again, Berthe Amoss has created an indelible portrait of a young girl coming of age in prewar New Orleans.Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, Berthe Amoss is the author and illustrator of twenty-eight children's and young adult books. Her picture book The Cajun Gingerbread Boy won a Children's Choice Award, and her YA novel The Chalk Cross was a finalist for the Edgar Allen Poe Award. She lives on the Gulf Coast in Pass Christian, Mississippi.