Rash by Pete Hautman

"Back when Gramps was in high school, kids ran faster. Gramps claimed to have run 100 meters in 11 seconds, and the mile in 4:37. That was before the Child Safety Act of 2033. Now every high school runner has to wear a full set of protective gear--AtherSafe shoes with lateral ankle support and four layers of memory gel in the thick soles, knee pads, elbow pads, neck brace, tooth guard, wrist monitor, and an FDHHSS-cerified sports helmet. We raced on an Adzorbium track with its five centimeters of compacted gel-foam topped by a thick sheet of artificial latex. It's like running on a sponge."

In a not too distant future when the USA has become the USSA--the United Safer States of America, when obesity is a felony, and when 24% of the American population is imprisoned for acts of unsafe behavior, Bo is just a teenage boy struggling to obey the rules. After unintentionally spreading a psychosomatic rash through his school, Bo is sent to prison. For a young man raised in a highly supervised safer society, the anonymity of life in his prison camp is only slightly less tolerable than the intentional danger the warden is about to expose him to. His only way out might be an artificial intelligence homework assignment gone wrong. Pete Hautman challenges us to take a look at our current society of safety and wonder where it will take us in just a few short years.

SLJ recommends grades 8 and up.

Learn more at HCL, Amazon, and here.

Dead Connections by Charlie Price

"They are not graveyards. I hate it when people say that. They are cemeteries. The one I know best is Forest Grove. I spend most of my time there. That's where most of my friends are. I don't spend much time with the older people. I figure they deserved it. Not deserved it, really, but what could they expect? After forty, you're going to die. The ones my age and the children, they almost all need someone to talk to. I comfort them the best I can. They weren't ready. They'll tell you that. They're not jealous or mean or scary like you might think. Just really lonely. Everybody needs a friend."

Murray spends most of his free time in the local cemetery. It's probably because all of his friends are there. Murray speaks to the dead. Now he's hearing a new voice and doesn't know how to help. Told in many voices from many points of view, this unusual page-turner follows the lives small town residents and their connections to one dead girl.

SLJ recommends grades 8 and up.

Learn more at HCL, Amazon, and here.