6 YAs That Unfold in Real Time

This is Where It Ends, by Marieke Nijkamp
10:00 a.m.: School assembly. 10:02 a.m.: The students get up to leave. 10:03 a.m.: The auditorium doors won’t open. 10:05 a.m.: Someone starts shooting. Nijkamp’s ambitious addition to what has become a literary subgenre—school shooting stories, inspired by Columbine and other real-life attacks—tracks the 54 harrowing minutes Tyler Browne keeps his classmates trapped inside the auditorium while he carries out the act he feels he must commit in order to be “seen” by his peers. Jumping from perspective to perspective, each student flashes back to the circumstances that brought them to this moment, cut off from the outside world and any form of help.

Poison Ivy, by Amy Goldman Koss
Over the course of one high-school government class, a social studies teacher decides to kill two birds with one stone: To teach her indifferent students about the justice system, she stages a mock trial. The defendant? Ivy (otherwise known as “Poison Ivy”), who has been bullied by the same cliquey trio of mean girls since the fourth grade. The thing is, Ivy doesn’t want to have a spotlight shone on her suffering. The teacher chooses Daria, a girl almost handicapped by her shyness, to defend Ivy, while Marcus, the one kid who cares about this simulation actually working, is assigned to be an alternate juror. Worst of all, the faux-legal drama that unfolds in the classroom reveals just how apathetic these high schoolers are about watching one of their peers being mercilessly bullied.

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
At a concert, Nick asks Norah to pretend to be his girlfriend for five minutes so he can show up his ex-girlfriend. Norah agrees only because she needs to find her drunk friend. But, in a delightful demonstration of cause and effect set to the perfect going-out mix, each decision leads to a mini-adventure, five minutes turning into hours of an unforgettable night. It’s clichéd to say that a moment can change your life, but Nick and Norah demonstrate why this is occasionally true—all in real time.

Real Time, by Pnina Moed Kass
While the structure of introducing multiple characters and tying them together through one event isn’t new, Kass’s debut novel chooses a devastating centerpiece: The suicide bombing of a bus in contemporary (as of the date of publication, 2006) Jerusalem. Not all of Real Time lives up to its name, as we meet the main players beforehand: Thomas, who has traveled from Germany to Israel to discover if his grandfather was a Nazi; Baruch, a Holocaust survivor working on a kibbutz; Vera, discovering her Jewish roots for the first time on the same kibbutz; and Sameh, working illegally at a diner. But when it comes down to the attack, Kass renders the horror and bravery of these intertwined characters as if you were there next to them.

The Best Night of Your (Pathetic) Life, by Tara Altebrando
Anyone who has competed in an engrossing scavenger hunt with an expiration date (in this case, 24 hours) knows you can’t lose focus for the duration of the hunt, lest you miss a key item. In the case of Mary and her graduating seniors, they have ten hours to beat the other teams for bragging rights and ownership of the Yeti, the scavenger hunt prize. For Mary, this night is personal—she plans to both stick it to the guy who “stole” her spot at Georgetown, and confess her feelings for her crush (who is totally going to break up with his girlfriend any day now). Altebrando’s crisp writing lines up these emotional and physical puzzles with the ticking clock, so that readers are carried along by the momentum of the hunt.

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock, by Matthew Quick
Leonard Peacock does not sugarcoat how his 17th birthday is going to unfold: He’s heading to school to kill the class bully—who happens to be his ex-best friend—and then himself. But before he pulls the trigger, Leonard must say goodbye to the four people who mean the most to him: his eccentric neighbor, a fellow classmate and violin virtuoso, the girl he has a crush on, and Herr Silverman, his favorite teacher. Leonard opens his mind to us, the readers, taking us through every task and every hour, as the clock counts down to this thing he has to do. Rarely does a book have you on the edge of your seat the way Quick’s spare, emotionally devastating take on school shootings does.