
Poetry Month: YA Novels in Verse
April is Poetry Month, and what better way to celebrate than with a novel in verse! These stories are told through poetic prose, are usually quick reads, and are completely engaging. The verse novels listed below represent a variety of genres and topical themes, so hopefully there’s something ...

Authors Unlimited!!
Authors UnlimitedSaturday, April 5 at St. Joseph’s Patchogue Campus9:30am-2:30pm Get the chance to meet dynamic authors Jen Calonita, Mike Cavallaro, and Sarah Beth Durst at Authors Unlimited on April 5th at St. Joseph's University in Patchogue. Attendees will hear all about the creative proces...

Coming Soon – March / April 2025: Community Service at the Library
The following community service opportunities are available to SHPL cardholders currently in grades 6-12. Participants must sign up with their own SHPL card in order to receive community service.Community service letters are emailed within 2 weeks after the program.Space may be limited.Additio...
Recommended Books
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Unseelie
Iselia "Seelie" Graygrove looks just like her twin, Isolde...but as an autistic changeling left in the human world by the fae as an infant, she has always known she is different. Seelie's unpredictable magic makes it hard for her to fit in--and draws her and Isolde into the hunt for a fabled treasure. In a heist gone wrong, the sisters make some unexpected allies and find themselves unraveling a mystery that has its roots in the history of humans and fae alike.
Both sisters soon discover that the secrets of the faeries may be more valuable than any pile of gold and jewels. But can Seelie harness her magic in time to protect her sister and herself?
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Stranger Skies
Opening locked doors has a price—even for those who hold a key.
After going through the door that called to them both in dreams, Emory and Romie find themselves in the Wychwood: the same verdant world written of in Song of the Drowned Gods, albeit a twisted, rotting version of it. A sinister force has awoken with their arrival, intent on destruction as it spills across realms, and now Emory and Romie must stop it before it reaches their own shores.
Meanwhile, Baz and Kai are desperate to follow their friends through the door to other worlds, but a mishap pulls them back in time instead—where they come face to face with Cornus Clover himself, famed author of Song of the Drowned Gods. Stuck together in the past, they must navigate a very different Aldryn as they unravel the school’s darkest secrets.
Across time and worlds, Emory, Romie, Baz, and Kai find their fates eerily interwoven with the heroes from Clover’s book. But when stories can’t be trusted, friendships are put to the test, and deadly enemies are not always as they seem, they must decide who gets to be a hero—and who is desperate enough to see themselves become a villain. -
Shut Up, This Is Serious
Belén Dolores Itzel del Toro wants the normal stuff: to experience love or maybe have a boyfriend or at least just lose her virginity. But nothing is normal in East Oakland. Her father left her family. She's at risk of not graduating. And Leti, her super-Catholic, nerdy-ass best friend, is pregnant--by the boyfriend she hasn't told her parents about, because he's Black, and her parents are racist.
Things are hella complicated.
Weighed by a depression she can't seem to shake, Belén helps Leti, hangs out with an older guy, and cuts a lot of class. She soon realizes, though, that distractions are only temporary. Leti is becoming a mother. Classmates are getting ready for college. But what about Belén? What future is there for girls like her?
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Night Owls
Clara loves rules. Rules are what have kept her and her sister, Molly, alive--or, rather, undead--for over a century. Work their historic movie theater by day. Shift into an owl under the cover of night. Feed on men in secret. And never fall in love.
Molly is in love. And she's tired of keeping her girlfriend, Anat, a secret. If Clara won't agree to bend their rules a little, then she will bend them herself.
Boaz is cursed. He can't walk two city blocks without being cornered by something undead. At least at work at the theater, he gets to flirt with Clara, wishing she would like him back.
When Anat vanishes and New York's monstrous underworld emerges from the shadows, Clara suspects Boaz, their annoyingly cute box office attendant, might be behind it all.
But if they are to find Anat, they will need to work together to face demons and the hungers they would sooner bury. Clara will have to break all her rules--of love, of life, and of death itself--before her rules break everyone she loves.
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Louder Than Hunger
But another voice inside me says,
We need help.
We're going to die.
Jake volunteers at a nursing home because he likes helping people. He likes skating and singing, playing Bingo and Name That Tune, and reading mysteries and comics aloud to his teachers. He also likes avoiding people his own age . . . and the cruelty of mirrors . . . and food. Jake has read about kids like him in books--the weird one, the outsider--and would do anything not to be that kid, including shrink himself down to nothing. But the less he eats, the bigger he feels. How long can Jake punish himself before he truly disappears? A fictionalized account of the author's experiences and emotions living in residential treatment facilities as a young teen with an eating disorder, Louder than Hunger is a triumph of raw honesty. With a deeply personal afterword for context, this much-anticipated verse novel is a powerful model for muffling the destructive voices inside, managing and articulating pain, and embracing self-acceptance, support, and love. -
A Language of Dragons
Dragons soar through the skies and protests erupt on the streets, but Vivien Featherswallow isn't worried. She's going to follow the rules, get a summer internship studying dragon languages, be smart, be sweet, and make sure her little sister never, ever has to risk growing up Third Class. She just has to free one dragon.
By midnight, Viv has started a civil war.
With her parents and cousin arrested and her sister missing, Viv is brought to Bletchley Park as a codebreaker--if she succeeds, she and her family can all go home again. If she doesn't, they'll all die.
As Viv begins to discover the secrets of a hidden dragon language, she realizes that the fragile peace treaty that holds human and dragon societies together is corrupt, and the dangerous work Viv is doing could be the thread that unravels it.
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In Want of a Suspect
It is a truth universally acknowledged that London's first female solicitor in possession of the details of a deadly crime must be in want of a suspect.
The tenacious Lizzie Bennet has earned her place at Longbourn, her father's law firm. Her work keeps her busy, but luckily it gives her plenty of reasons to consult (and steal occasional kisses) with Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, a stern but secretly softhearted solicitor at Pemberley.
Lizzie is hired to investigate a deadly warehouse fire and to find the mysterious woman who was spotted at the scene moments before the flames took hold. But when the case leads to the sitting room of a woman Darcy once proposed marriage to, the delicate balance between personal and professional in their relationship is threatened.
Questions of the future are cast aside when the prime suspect is murdered and Lizzie's own life is threatened. As the body count rises and their suspicions about what was really going on in the warehouse grow, the pressure is on for Lizzie and Darcy to uncover the truth.
Classic characters with an enthralling twist--Lizzie and Darcy, as introduced in the hit novel Pride and Premeditation, are back for more suspense, danger, and romance!
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I Am Not Jessica Chen
Jenna Chen has spent her life in the shadow of her flawless cousin. Jessica Chen is so smart she gets the top score on every test. Jessica Chen is so beautiful people stop in the hallway to stare at her. Jessica Chen is so perfect she got into Harvard.
And Jenna Chen will only ever be a disappointment.So when Jenna makes a desperate wish to become her cousin, the last thing she expects is for it to come true--literally. All of a sudden she gets to live the life she's always dreamed of . . . but being the model student at cutthroat Havenwood Private Academy isn't quite what she'd imagined. Worse, people seem to be forgetting that someone named Jenna Chen ever existed. But isn't it worth trading it all away--her artistic talent, her childhood home, even the hope of golden boy Aaron Cai loving her back--to be Jessica Chen?
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Even If We Break
A shocking thriller about a group of friends who go to a cabin to play a murder mystery game...only to have the game turned against them, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of This Is Where It Ends.
FIVE friends go to a cabin.
FOUR of them are hiding secrets.
THREE years of history bind them.
TWO are doomed from the start.
ONE person wants to end this.
NO ONE IS SAFE.
Five friends take a trip to a cabin. It's supposed to be one last getaway before going their separate ways--a chance to say goodbye to each other, and to the game they've been playing for the past three years. But they're all dealing with their own demons, and they're all hiding secrets.
And as they start to play the murder mystery game that brought them together in the first place, the lines between the game and reality blend, with deadly consequences. Someone knows their secrets. Someone wants to make them pay. Soon, it's a race against time before it's game over--forever.
Are you ready to play?
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Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear
High school is hard enough to survive without an apocalypse to navigate.
Sid Spencer has always been the most normal girl in her abnormal hometown, a tourist trap built over one of the fault lines that seal magic away from the world. Meanwhile, all Sid has to deal with is hair-ruining humidity, painful awkwardness, being one of four Asians in town, and her friends dumping her when they start dating each other—just days after one of the most humiliating romantic rejections faced by anyone, ever, in all of history.
Then someone kills one of the Guardians who protect the seal. The earth rips open and unleashes the magic trapped inside. Monsters crawl from the ground, no one can enter or leave, and the man behind it all is roaming the streets with a gang of violent vigilantes. Suddenly, Sid’s life becomes a lot less ordinary. When she finds out her missing brother is involved, she joins the remaining Guardians, desperate to find him and close the fault line for good.
Fighting through hordes of living corpses and uncontrollable growths of forest, Sid and a ragtag crew of would-be heroes are the only thing standing between their town and the end of the world as they know it. Between magic, murderers, and burgeoning crushes, Sid must survive being a perfectly normal girl caught in a perfectly abnormal apocalypse.
Only—how can someone so ordinary make it in such an extraordinary world? -
Compound Fracture
On the night Miles Abernathy—sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian—comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove the county’s Sheriff Davies was responsible for the so-called “accident” that injured his dad, killed others, and crushed their grassroots efforts to unseat him.
The feud began a hundred years ago when Miles’s great-great-grandfather, Saint Abernathy, incited a miners’ rebellion that ended with a public execution at the hands of law enforcement. Now, Miles becomes the feud’s latest victim as the sheriff’s son and his friends sniff out the evidence, follow him through the woods, and beat him nearly to death.
In the hospital, the ghost of a soot-covered man hovers over Miles’s bedside while Sheriff Davies threatens Miles into silence. But when Miles accidently kills one of the boys who hurt him, he learns of other folks in Twist Creek who want out from under the sheriff’s heel. To free their families from this cycle of cruelty, they’re willing to put everything on the line—is Miles? -
Bright Red Fruit
Bad girl. No matter how hard Samira tries, she can’t shake her reputation. She’s never gotten the benefit of the doubt—not from her mother or the aunties who watch her like a hawk.
Samira is determined to have a perfect summer filled with fun parties, exploring DC, and growing as a poet—until a scandalous rumor has her grounded and unable to leave her house. When Samira turns to a poetry forum for solace, she catches the eye of an older, charismatic poet named Horus. For the first time, Samira feels wanted. But soon she’s keeping a bigger secret than ever before—one that that could prove her reputation and jeopardize her place in her community. -
Aisle Nine
It's Black Friday--and the apocalypse is on sale!
Ever since the world filled with portals to hell and bloodthirsty demons started popping out on the reg, Jasper's life has gotten worse and worse. A teenage nobody with no friends or family, he is plagued by the life he can't remember and the person he's sure he's supposed to be.
Jasper spends his days working as a checkout clerk at the Here for You discount mart, where a hell portal in aisle nine means danger every shift. But at least here he can be near the girl he's crushing on--Kyle Kuan, a junior member of the monster-fighting Vanguard--who seems to hate Jasper for reasons he can't remember or understand.
But when Jasper and Kyle learn they both share a frightening vision of the impending apocalypse, they're forced to team up and uncover the uncomfortable truth about the hell portals and the demons that haunt the world. Because the true monsters are not always what they seem, the past is not always what we wish, and, like it or not, on Black Friday all hell will break loose, starting in aisle nine.
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After Life
One spring afternoon after school, Amber arrives home on her bike. It's just another perfectly normal day. But when Amber's mom sees her, she screams.
Because Amber died seven years ago, hit by a car while on the very same bicycle she's inexplicably riding now.
This return doesn't only impact Amber. Her sister, Melissa, now seven years older, must be a new kind of sibling to Amber. Amber's estranged parents are battling over her. And the changes ripple farther and farther out: Amber's friends, boyfriend, and even people she met only once have been deeply affected by her life and death. In the midst of everyone's turmoil, Amber is struggling with herself. What kind of person was she? How and why was she given this second chance?
This magnificent tour de force by acclaimed author Gayle Forman brilliantly explores the porous veil between life and death, examines the impact that one person can have on the world, and celebrates life in all its beautiful complexity.