Sabar, Ariel. Heart of the City: Nine Stories of Love and Serendipity on the Streets of New York. 2011.
Nine real-life stories about couples who met in some of New York City’s iconic locations. Postscripts at the end of the book relate how the relationships turned out.
Santiago, Esmeralda. When I Was Puerto Rican. 2006.
The author recalls the hardships and joys of her life with humor and poignancy, from her childhood in Puerto Rico to her move to a very different life in Brooklyn, and, finally, to her admission to the High School of Performing Arts.
Sedgwick, Marcus. She Is Not Invisible. 2014.
A blind London teenager and her younger brother travel to New York to find their missing father, using clues from his notebook.
Serle, Rebecca. The Edge of Falling. 2014.
Caggie’s life of privilege in Manhattan seems perfect, but she blames herself from her younger sister’s death and doesn’t want to be known as a hero when she saves a classmate from suicide. A new friend, though, causes her to reexamine her past.
Sheldon, Dyan. Sophie Pitt-Turnbull Discovers America. 2005.
While spending the summer in Brooklyn with her mother’s former schoolmate, Sophie, a sheltered English teenager, makes new and unlikely friends and finds a new side to her formerly “dull and passive” personality.
Shorto, Russell. Island at the Center of the World. 2005.
This fascinating and very readable history of Manhattan draws on 17th-century Dutch records that were recently translated by scholar Charles Gehring.
Silver, Charlotte. The Summer Invitation. 2014.
When Franny and Valentine are asked to spend a summer with their aunt Theodora in New York City, they unearth secrets about Aunt Theo’s romantic past and have a few romantic adventures of their own.
Slouka, Mark. Brewster. 2013.
Teenagers Jon and Ray dream of escaping from their dysfunctional and even dangerous parents in their rural New York town in this novel set in 1969. Themes of friendship and violence reflect the tensions of the Vietnam War.
2014 Alex Award
2013 School Library Journal Best Books Adult Books for Teens
Smith, Jennifer E. The Geography of You and Me. 2014.
Lucy Patterson and Owen Buckley meet on a stuck elevator during a New York City blackout. As their lives diverge, Lucy and Owen stay in touch and try to find a way to reunite.
Spollen, Anne. Light Beneath Ferns. 2010.
Upon moving to her mother’s upstate New York home after her gambler father leaves, ninth-grader Elizah just wants to be left alone. She then meets Nathaniel in the cemetery where her mother is caretaker and feels instantly drawn to him.
Staub, Wendy Corsi. Lily Dale: Awakening. 2007.
When seventeen-year-old Calla’s mother suddenly dies, she goes to stay with her psychic grandmother in Lily Dale, a spiritualist community in western New York, where she discovers some disconcerting secrets about her practical, down-to-earth mother, and realizes that she herself may also have some psychic abilities.
Swerling, Beverly. City of Dreams: a novel of Nieuw Amsterdam and Early Manhattan. 2002.
In 1661, a brother and sister stagger off a small wooden ship after eleven perilous weeks at sea to seek a new life in the Dutch settlement of Nieuw Amsterdam. Bound to each other by blood and necessity, these gifted healers become deadly enemies as betrayal and murder enter their lives. Their descendents – dedicated physicians and surgeons, pirates and more – will shape the future of medicine and the growing city.