Books to Read When Your Brain Has Melted

In a sleepy suburban neighborhood in Baton Rouge, local golden girl Lindy Simpson is raped on the way home from track practice. One of the leading suspects? A bumbling, lovesick teenage boy. Though never named, this boy narrates the vivid, addictive story, shifting through his parents' breakup, his sister's death and the histories of the families up and down the street, while trying to identify the real predator. Both a tantalizing mystery and a tender coming-of-age story, My Sunshine Away is equally capable of making a reader cry (say, when our narrator realizes that a fishing trip with his Dad is just a pretext for Dad to hang out with his 19-year-old girlfriend) and scream (say, when our narrator breaks into the locked room of a disturbed middle-aged man). And yet...you're never exhausted trying to piece together clues to solve the crime. The power of the book lies in its spot-on characters, such as so-called Artsy Julie, who wears green, plastic butterfly earrings and plays Dungeons & Dragons at lunch where "she pumped her fist when she rolled a certain number on the ten-sided die...pretended to sprinkle magic potion all over her mashed potatoes...seemed to be having some genuine fun...and, this, of course, was social suicide." Soon, both the number of mysteries and suspects multiplies—all of which ultimately reveal more about the pain and danger of being invisible as a kid than it does about the search for "bad guys." Unputdownable.