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Matriarchal Societies

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I’ve always been fascinated by depictions of matriarchal societies in books. They’re extremely rare in our own world (if they exist at all – please let me know if you know of any), meaning they’re most often explored in science fiction and fantasy, realms where the unusual, the unique, and the impossible are common occurrences.

By matriarchy, I mean a society ruled or governed by women in a simple sense, but also a society where women’s ideas, interests, and desires are valued above those of men. It’s different from a matrilineal society, where descent follows the female line (think of how cultural Judaism is inherited from the mother). It’s quite easy for one’s family name or identity to be derived from one’s mother while still existing in a culture that values men more. A matriarchy is more complex and more comprehensive.

In fiction, a matriarchal society is a deliberate choice. Sometimes the author intends to simply explore the idea, but usually it’s used as a way to critique our own patriarchal culture. Rather than presenting the matriarchy as a utopian ideal, though, most authors choose to present it as replete with its own problems and injustices. It’s not an antidote to patriarchies, but it is a response. And within the fantasy genre, where it seems like most authors like to write not just patriarchies, but patriarchies that strip women of most of the basic rights they now have in the 20th century western world, a book with a matriarchy stands out. It’s different, it’s interesting, and it’s always discussable.

On a pure story level, though, it’s a way for female characters to have the kind of power and influence that would be nearly impossible in a realistic novel, much the same way giving a girl magical abilities does. As a teen, that’s what drove me to these kinds of stories, and I wish there were more out there geared toward the 13-18 age range. I didn’t read many YA books in this vein as a teenager. Instead, I read adult books like Melanie Rawn’s Exiles series, which features a world where women hold power due to their ability to birth children, and Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels series, where powerful magical women rule over men in often terrible ways. Bishop’s series is particularly interesting to me, since it takes the commonly-accepted ideas about the differences between men and women and subverts them completely. (I like Rawn’s series, but I’m weary of books where people revere women because they can get pregnant. It’s too often used as method in our own world to reinforce the patriarchy.) Her characters exist in a necessarily violent world, as such power structures are only established and maintained through violence.

I’ve collected a few YA books featuring matriarchies below. In some of the books, the matriarchy exists as a smaller society within a larger patriarchal culture, though some of them do feature entirely matriarchal cultures. Are there any others you can think of? Even older titles are fine here, since there are so few of them. Descriptions are from Worldcat, and I’ve also provided a bit of my own commentary on some of the titles in italics.

Trial By Fire by Josephine Angelini
In her hometown of Salem, Lily Proctor endures not only life-threatening
allergies but humiliation at her first high school party with her best
friend and longtime crush, Tristan. But in a different Salem — one
overrun with horrifying creatures and ruled by powerful women called
Crucibles, she is Lillian, the strongest and cruelest Crucible …
Lily’s other self in an alternate universe where Lily suddenly finds herself. There she is torn between responsibilities she can’t hope to shoulder alone and a love she never expected. [This will be published September 2, and it should be on your radar. I’m currently reading it. It’s got a really intriguing hybrid science/magic system the likes of which I haven’t read before, and the matriarchy in the parallel world is equally unique.]

Sorrow’s Knot by Erin Bow
Otter is a girl of the Shadowed People, a tribe of women, and she is
born to be a binder, a woman whose power it is to tie the knots that
bind the dead–but she is also destined to remake her world.

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson
In a Brazil of the distant future, June Costa falls in love with Enki, a
fellow artist and rebel against the strict limits of the legendary
pyramid city of Palmares Três’ matriarchal government, knowing that,
like all Summer Kings before him, Enki is destined to die. [The matriarchy here is so detailed and so believable. Like the power dynamic in our own patriarchy, it’s simply taken for granted that the women rule and the boys die to make it so. I read this one for the Cybils (it was our winner) and it’s probably the best example I’ve read of a matriarchy where the purpose isn’t the matriarchy itself – the story still reigns. Bitch Magazine has a really interesting entry in their “Girls of Color in Dystopia” series about this book that explores the society and whether or not it can be considered dystopian.] 

Night Flying by Rita Murphy
As the time for her solo flight on the sixteenth birthday approaches,
Georgia begins to question the course of her life and her relationships
with the other women in her unusual family. [This addition is courtesy of Liz Burns, @LizB.]

Prized by Caragh O’Brien
Sixteen-year-old midwife Gaia Stone is in the wasteland with nothing but
her baby sister, a handful of supplies, and a rumor to guide her when
she is captured by the people of Sylum, a dystopian society where she
must follow a strict social code or never see her sister again. [I only have vague memories of reading this, but I do remember that Sylum is very matriarchal, not the world at large.]

Epitaph Road by David Patneaude
In 2097, men are a small and controlled minority in a utopian world
ruled by women, and fourteen-year-old Kellen must fight to save his
father from an outbreak of the virus that killed ninety-seven percent of
the male population thirty years earlier. [I haven’t read this one, but I’d be really interested to know just how utopian the world really is. I’m super wary of this kind of setup – has anyone read it who can weigh in?]

Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen
Tells of the coming of the White Queen –of deception, and war, and the changing face of history. [This is clearly quite vague. I got this title from kind Twitter respondent Stephanie Appell, @noseinabookgirl. I haven’t read it, so I don’t know the specifics of the culture represented.]

I’ve also read that the House of Night series by P. C. and Kristin Cast feature matriarchal societies, but I’m not sure how. If you’ve read them, perhaps you can weigh in. I also feel like there might be some historical fantasy – or perhaps simply historical fiction – out there that’s Pagan-centric and features matriarchal societies, even if they’re small ones. No YA titles come to mind, though.

Audio Review: The Tyrant’s Daughter by J. C. Carleson

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Fifteen year old Laila has always been told that her father is the king of their middle Eastern country. When he’s killed in a coup by his own brother, Laila’s uncle, she escapes with her family – her mother and younger brother – to America. There, Laila’s mother keeps up the pretense that Laila’s father was a king, even calling her younger brother a prince. Laila slowly begins to learn the truth: her father was a dictator, a tyrant, a man who kept his power by force.

While Laila struggles to adapt to her new life in America, she also struggles to understand her old life in this new context. Written by a former CIA officer, the book has a strong ring of authenticity. Carleson wisely chose to create a fictional country for her book, but the story is based on an amalgamation of real people and events. Nothing is played for gasps or used to deliberately alarm the reader. Instead, we’re given a chance to see the world from Laila’s point of view. Her voice is authentically teen, but she provides a very different perspective from most other YA books. It’s fascinating and makes for riveting reading.

Carleson’s book tackles multiple topics and themes, juggling them all successfully. Laila’s story begins as an exploration of her experience as an immigrant, including her assimilation into American culture. A white student fascinated with international students quickly “adopts” her as a friend and initiates her into the school’s culture, including how many American girls relate to boys. This portion of the novel is particularly well-done. We see Laila’s judgment of her new American acquaintances quite starkly. At one point she tells the listener that the first word that sprang to her mind when she saw her new friend was “whore.” There’s the flip side to this, too, as Laila experiences the myriad ways in which the other teens judge her.

While Laila is an immigrant, her story is not typical of most immigrants. Her life in her home country was extraordinarily privileged, but it was also sheltered. Laila knew nothing of her father’s actions, not even whispers or rumors, really. Her American friends speak openly about it, though, and for the first time Laila has access to the internet where she can look up whatever she likes. And she does. Watching her grapple with her new knowledge adds another layer to the story, complicating it further.

Added to the mix is some international intrigue. An American man stops by their home frequently, and Laila eventually guesses that he’s an agent for the CIA. He indicates to Laila that their family is in America due to his kindness, and that her mother must hold up her end of the bargain – namely by giving him intelligence. But Laila’s mother has her own motivations, and she only feeds bits and pieces of what’s really going on to Laila. This part of the story could easily have become unrealistic, turning a thoughtful, complex novel into a Tom Clancy book for teens. But Carleson doesn’t fall into this trap. What she has crafted instead is a multi-layered novel with a realistic role for her teen to play. Laila isn’t an action-adventure hero. Instead, she overhears phone calls, draws conclusions, and tries to puzzle out the hidden meaning behind her mother’s words.

There are many more aspects of the book I could discuss, such as how Laila interacts with refugees from her own country, or how the novel’s women have their own kind of power, or how it’s impossible to determine what is right and what is wrong, even after it ends. This is a complex, meaty book. It’s got so many parts, all the parts of a complicated life, and it’s executed nearly perfectly. 

The book is narrated quite well by Meera Simhan, who voices Laila with a light accent, just enough to give her a realistic voice without turning her into a caricature. You can listen to an excerpt here.

The end of the book is devastating. It pulls no punches and provides no easy answers. With this kind of book, there really aren’t answers at all, much less easy ones. Because the ending is open-ended, it also makes Laila’s story seem a bit more real. An author’s note and a some commentary by Dr. Cheryl Benard, a RAND researcher, are must-reads. They provide more context for Laila’s story and also give real-world examples of young people in similar situations and what their ultimate fates were. Fascinating, timely, discussable, and highly recommended.

Audiobook provided by the publisher. The Tyrant’s Daughter is available now.

Hacking, Gaming & Virtual Reality

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I’ve noticed a bit of an uptick in YA books featuring virtual reality recently. The concept is certainly not new; ever since the idea of virtual reality has existed, writers have been speculating upon how it could go terribly, horribly wrong. In 1991, a year which pre-dates my own teenage years (also a time before most Americans had internet), Monica Hughes wrote Invitation to the Game, a dystopia about a group of teens who are coerced by the government into playing a supposedly innocuous virtual reality “game” that’s revealed to have nefarious purposes. Hughes’ book is certainly not the first to tackle this topic, nor are books the only medium. I remember an episode of Who’s Afraid of the Dark about a group of kids who got caught in a sort of virtual reality game, playing the same level over and over again, never able to escape. It also seems like most long-running science fiction tv shows will have a token virtual reality episode (I’m thinking specifically of a Stargate SG-1 episode called Gamekeeper, but I know I’ve seen similar episodes in other shows).

Virtual reality is tied up very closely with gaming in general. Both gaming and virtual reality deliberately blur the line between reality and fantasy, and books that focus on these topics force us to see how one can bleed into the other. Are we different people when we’re plugged in? How much control can we cede to a game – to a computer – before we cease to be ourselves? In some cases, can the game be preferable to our real lives – can the game be our real lives?

As technology becomes even more integrated into our daily tasks, this is a topic we return to over and over again. M. T. Anderson wrote his modern classic Feed in 2002, before smartphones had conquered teen communication. Recently, Lauren Miller’s Free to Fall explored how an app can consume our lives, dictating all of our decisions if we let it – and even when we try not to let it. These kinds of stories exist both as entertainment and as cautionary tales, a bit of irony in itself.

This booklist features titles that involve gaming or virtual reality in some way. I’ve also thrown in a few books about hacking, since there seems to be a lot of crossover, particularly in theme (think The Matrix movies, which depict a world where our brains are hacked by the machines we created, keeping us in a permanent virtual reality). All descriptions are from Worldcat (aside from the last one, which is Goodreads). Which recent titles have I missed?

Eye of Minds by James Dashner
Michael is a skilled internet gamer in a world of advanced technology.
When a cyber-terrorist begins to threaten players, Michael is called
upon to seek him and his secrets out. (The Worldcat synopsis doesn’t mention it, but the advanced technology referred to is a large-scale virtual reality world called the VirtNet that consumes most people’s lives.)

For the Win by Cory Doctorow
A group of teens from around the world find themselves drawn into an
online revolution arranged by a mysterious young woman known as Big
Sister Nor, who hopes to challenge the status quo and change the world
using her virtual connections.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
After being interrogated for days by the Department of Homeland Security
in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco,
California, seventeen-year-old Marcus, released into what is now a
police state, decides to use his expertise in computer hacking to set
things right. | Sequel: Homeland

Brain Jack by Brian Falkner
In a near-future New York City, fourteen-year-old computer genius Sam
Wilson manages to hack into the AT&T network and sets off a chain of
events that have a profound effect on human activity throughout the
world.

Elusion by Claudia Gabel & Cheryl Klam
Teens uncover the dangerous secrets of a virtual reality program that’s taking the country by storm. | Sequel: Etherworld

Don’t Turn Around by Michelle Gagnon
After waking up on an operating table with no memory of how she got
there, Noa must team up with computer hacker Peter to stop a corrupt
corporation with a deadly secret. | Sequels: Don’t Look Now, Don’t Let Go | Kimberly’s review

Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks
Child prodigy Cadel Piggot, an antisocial computer hacker, discovers his
true identity when he enrolls as a first-year student at an advanced
crime academy. (This also fits in well with the teenage criminals booklist.) | Sequels: Genius Squad, The Genius Wars

Insignia by S. J. Kincaid
Tom, a fourteen-year-old genius at virtual reality games, is recruited
by the United States Military to begin training at the Pentagon Spire as
a Combatant in World War III, controlling the mechanized drones that do
the actual fighting off-planet. | Sequels: Vortex, Catalyst | Kimberly’s review

Epic by Conor Kostick
On New Earth, a world based on a video role-playing game,
fourteen-year-old Erik persuades his friends to aid him in some unusual
gambits in order to save Erik’s father from exile and safeguard the
futures of each of their families. | Sequels: Saga, Edda

Rush by Eve Silver
Rochester, New York, high schooler Miki Jones is pulled into a sort of a
game in which she and other teens battle real-life aliens and the
consequences of each battle could be deadly. | Sequels: Push, Crash

Heir Apparent by Vivian Vande Velde (2002)
While playing a total immersion virtual reality game of kings and
intrigue, fourteen-year-old Giannine learns that demonstrators have
damaged the equipment to which she is connected, and she must win the
game quickly or be damaged herself.

Honorable Mention Adult Crossover: Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
It’s the year 2044, and the real world is an ugly place. Like
most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending
his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that
lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play
and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

Censorship, Challenges, and Other Forms of Protest: A Reading List

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If you haven’t kept tabs on recent book challenges popping up around America, one that’s drawn a lot of discussion recently comes out of the Cape Henlopen School District in Delaware. In early July, the school board made the decision to remove Emily Danforth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post from a reading list for incoming freshmen. The board cited language as the issue, stating it was inappropriate for the age group for which the list was intended. 

Of course, this drew a lot of criticism not only because of the attempt to pull a book but also because it happened to be a book featuring a lesbian main character. It would be hard not to see that there was more to this story than meets the eye. A couple of worthwhile reads come from Jill Guccini, one over at Book Riot and one over at After Ellen.  

Last week, the board went to make a final decision on the book, and after choosing to put the book back on the reading list, the list was then pulled all together. The board chose to reinstate an old summer reading system, in an exercise of power that undermined the hard work of librarian who created the book list and the educators who know how to work with students reading from it. Of course, the real losers here are the students.

There’s a lot more going on than meets the eye, though, and close readers of the article will note that the ACLU became involved in this situation. It’s hard not to wonder if the board’s decision wasn’t exactly what they said. Instead, their decision was a way around a potentially bigger, messier situation. If the board really cared about the profanity issue, as they claim to, then some of the classics that are being taught to students this same age would certainly raise the same sorts of “concerns” that Cameron Post and any of the other YA titles on the list do. So, no, it’s not about the language concerns. In this instance, it isn’t ignorant to see the potential lawsuits that could have spun from this and by removing the entire list, the board absolves itself a bit from looking like the close-minded, fearful body they’ve shown themselves to be at this point. 

Every year around this time, book challenges seem to dominate the book news world. Leila’s done a great job rounding up recent ones and highlighting where they’re at at this point in time. I talked a little bit about why the summer and beginning of the school year tend to be favorite times for challenges last fall over at Book Riot, too. This isn’t surprising and that might be why it’s so disheartening and aggravating as a reader, as a librarian, and as someone who cares about teens. 

I applaud those who can keep writing about this topic — it’s something I tackled before but I don’t think I can keep talking about. My feelings are exactly the same, and every time a board makes a decision to take books away from kids, I can’t help but get upset about how little faith those adults have not just in the teens, but in the educators and librarians who are trained, competent, and eager to talk about these stories with those students. It’s a vote made out of fear. 

I kept a particularly close eye on the outcome of the vote on Looking for Alaska in Waukesha, Wisconsin last week because it’s not far from where I live. The book will remain in the curriculum, but it got me thinking about how issues like this impact the children of parents who are bringing them up. What must it be like to be the teenager who has a mother trying to get a book pulled from the classroom? What are they thinking? What will their experiences be like in the classroom now? How will their peers treat them? There are a million questions there that I think are far more interesting and insightful than the ones about why adults choose to pursue these challenges.  

So rather than continue to talk about the issues, I thought it could be interesting to create a book list of YA books that talk about censorship in education or that explore what happens when parents or a school make an effort to keep information and experiences out of the hands of students. In some of these titles, it’s the central issue. In others, it’s a secondary thread in the story. Not all of these center around book challenges, and many of the titles are older. 

If you can think of other YA books where censorship — in schools or in the community — or where parents (or students!) are challenging some aspect of curriculum, I’d love to know. Most of these titles were suggested to me via Twitter, so thanks to everyone who threw an idea at me. 

All descriptions are from WorldCat. 

The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff: Students and faculty at a high school become embroiled in a censorship case over “Huckleberry Finn.”

Smile Like a Plastic Daisy by Sonia Levitin: A high school senior, concerned about the fight for women’s rights, finds herself suspended from school and the focus of community debate following a confrontation at a swim meet during which she removed her shirt.

Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith: Austin Szerba narrates the end of humanity as he and his best friend Robby accidentally unleash an army of giant, unstoppable bugs and uncover the secrets of a decades-old experiment gone terribly wrong. 
* In this one, The Chocolate War is brought up as a book that’s causing problems in the school.

Small Town Sinners by Melissa Walker: High school junior Lacey finds herself questioning the evangelical Christian values she has been raised with when a new boy arrives in her small town.

Evolution, Me, & Other Freaks of Nature by Robin Brande: Following her conscience leads high school freshman Mena to clash with her parents and former friends from their conservative Christian church, but might result in better things when she stands up for a teacher who refuses to include “Intelligent Design” in lessons on evolution.

Save Halloween! by Stephanie Tolan: Is Halloween really the devil’s holiday? Joanna’s family never celebrated Halloween – her father’s minister who doesn’t like kids dressing up as witches and devils. But nobody worries about Joanna’s deep involvement in a class Halloween pageant until Uncle T.T. comes to town with his fiery crusade to abolish Satan’s own holiday.

 
Americus by MK Reed and Jonathan Hill: Oklahoma teen Neal Barton stands up for his favorite fantasy series, The Chronicles of Apathea Ravenchilde, when conservative Christians try to bully the town of Americus into banning it from the public library.

Rapture Practice by Aaron Hartzler: Aaron Hartzler grew up in a home where he was taught that at any moment the Rapture could happen — that Jesus might come down in the twinkling of an eye and scoop Aaron and his whole family up to Heaven. As a kid, he was thrilled by the idea that every moment of every day might be his last one on Earth. But as Aaron turns sixteen, he finds himself more attached to his earthly life and curious about all the things his family forsakes for the Lord. He begins to realize he doesn’t want the Rapture to happen just yet — not before he sees his first movie, stars in the school play, or has his first kiss. Eventually Aaron makes the plunge from conflicted do-gooder to full-fledged teen rebel. Whether he’s sneaking out, making out, or playing hymns with a hangover, Aaron learns a few lessons that can’t be found in the Bible. He discovers that the best friends aren’t always the ones your mom and dad approve of, the girl of your dreams can just as easily be the boy of your dreams, and the tricky part about believing is that no one can do it for you. In this coming-of-age memoir, Hartzler recalls his teenage journey to become the person he wanted to be, without hurting the family that loved him. 

 
The Sledding Hill by Chris Crutcher: Billy, recently deceased, keeps an eye on his best friend, fourteen-year-old Eddie, who has added to his home and school problems by becoming mute, and helps him stand up to a conservative minister and English teacher who is orchestrating a censorship challenge.
Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You by Dorian Cirrone: Sixteen-year-old Kayla, a ballet dancer with very large breasts, and her sister Paterson, an artist, are both helped and hindered by classmates as they confront sexism, conformity, and censorship at their high school for the arts while still managing to maintain their sense of humor.

The Trouble With Mothers by Margery Facklam: What is a boy to do when his teacher-mother’s historical novel is given as an example of the kind of “pornography” that should be banned from schools and libraries?

Teenage Criminals

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Interested in reading stories about teens who routinely break the law and get away with it? There’s something really compelling about these kinds of books. The teens have to be pretty smart to keep up the criminal lifestyle; often the teens are a lot smarter than the adults in the book. What teen doesn’t love reading about stupid adults who get their comeuppance served to them from someone under 20? Not only that, the teens beat the system (usually an unjust one) with their shenanigans, which is even more major. I still find it pretty sweet to read about, even though I’m now on the adult end of it.

Today I have a list of books for you featuring teens who are criminals in some way or another (assassins, spies, mobsters, thieves, and the like). Some of the teens are coerced into the criminal lifestyle and would rather just be normal kids; others relish the opportunity and embrace the fact that they can do what a lot of others can’t. Descriptions are from Worldcat. Have any others to add? Please let me know in the comments.

First up are a group of books featuring law-breaking teens with superpowers. Let’s look at this realistically: if you had superpowers, would you only use them to save lives and other boring things like that? Or would you actually use them to rob banks? Be honest.

Illusive by Emily Lloyd-Jones
After a vaccine accidentally creates superpowers in a small percentage
of the population, seventeen-year-old Ciere, an illusionist, teams up
with a group of fellow high-class, super-powered thieves to steal the
vaccine’s formula while staying one step ahead of mobsters and deadly
government agents. Kimberly’s review

White Cat by Holly Black
When Cassel Sharpe discovers that his older brothers have used him to
carry out their criminal schemes and then stolen his memories, he
figures out a way to turn their evil machinations against them. Kimberly’s review | Sequels: Red Glove, Black Heart

Sekret by Lindsay Smith
Follows a group of psychic teenagers in 1960s Soviet Russia who are forced to use their powers to spy for the KGB. Kimberly’s review

Mind Games by Kiersten White
Seventeen-year-old Fia and her sister, Annie, are trapped in a school
that uses young female psychics and mind readers as tools for corporate
espionage–and if Fia doesn’t play by the rules of their deadly game,
Annie will be killed. Kimberly’s review

Grave Mercy by Robin LaFevers
In the fifteenth-century kingdom of Brittany, seventeen-year-old Ismae
escapes from the brutality of an arranged marriage into the sanctuary of
the convent of St. Mortain, where she learns that the god of Death has
blessed her with dangerous gifts–and a violent destiny. Kimberly’s review | Sequels: Dark Triumph, Mortal Heart

Graceling by Kristin Cashore
In a world where some people are born with extreme and often-feared
skills called Graces, Katsa struggles for redemption from her own
horrifying Grace, the Grace of killing, and teams up with another young
fighter to save their land from a corrupt king.

Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi
Ostracized or incarcerated her whole life, seventeen-year-old Juliette
is freed on the condition that she use her horrific abilities in support
of The Reestablishment, a postapocalyptic dictatorship, but Adam, the
only person ever to show her affection, offers hope of a better future. Sequels: Unravel Me, Ignite Me

Burn Mark by Laura Powell
In an alternate London, England, the lives of a fifteen-year-old girl
eagerly awaiting the development of her “fae,” or witch abilities, and
the son of a man who sentences witches to death by burning, intersect
when the son makes a startling discovery. Sequel: Witch Fire

If books about people with regular abilities (smart, but not super-smart; intuitive, but not mind-readers) are more your speed, check these out.

All These Things I’ve Done by Gabrielle Zevin
In a future where chocolate and caffeine are contraband, teenage
cellphone use is illegal, and water and paper are carefully rationed,
sixteen-year-old Anya Balanchine finds herself thrust unwillingly into
the spotlight as heir apparent to an important New York City crime
family. Kimberly’s review | Sequels: Because it is My Blood, In the Age of Love and Chocolate

Heist Society by Ally Carter
A group of teenagers uses their combined talents to re-steal several
priceless paintings and save fifteen-year-old Kat Bishop’s father,
himself an international art thief, from a vengeful collector. Sequels: Uncommon Criminals, Perfect Scoundrels

Don’t Turn Around by Michelle Gagnon
After waking up on an operating table with no memory of how she got
there, Noa must team up with computer hacker Peter to stop a corrupt
corporation with a deadly secret.

Tokyo Heist by Diana Renn
After a high-profile art heist of three van Gogh drawings in her home
town of Seattle, sixteen-year-old Violet Rossi finds herself in Japan
with her artist father, searching for the related van Gogh painting.

Money Run by Jack Heath
Fifteen-year-olds Ashley and Benjamin are planning the heist of a
lifetime, but they are not counting on a hit man who has plans of his
own.

Pretty Crooked by Elisa Ludwig
High school sophomore Willa and her artist mother move to Arizona where
Willa starts attending an elite prep school after her mother finally
sells some paintings, and Willa attempts to even things out by stealing
from the rich students and giving to the poor ones. Sequels: Pretty Sly, Pretty Wanted

I Am the Weapon (previously Boy Nobody) by Allen Zadoff
Sixteen-year-old Boy Nobody, an assassin controlled by a shadowy
government organization, The Program, considers sabotaging his latest
mission because his target reminds him of the normal life he craves. Sequel: I Am the Mission