Normal Public Library provides many enriching events and resources for teens. Find items from our teen collections and helpful online resources.
Activities
We have lots of activities going on every month for teens to enjoy. Whether you are into technology, poetry, crafts, anime, or more, there is something for you at NPL!
Learn more about current activities here.
NPL Teens Discord
If you are a teen and would like an invite to join our NPL Teens Discord, just fill out this form.
We use the Discord for a variety of our teen activities, including Dungeons & Dragons, Writers' Workshop, and game nights.
Teen Spaces
The library is a great place to meet up with friends or spend some time studying.
We hope you will check out our Teen Department next time you are at the library.
Teen Mobile Maker Space
Our Teen Mobile Makerspace is an area that encourages participation in hands-on collaborative learning, sharing, and creating through the use of technology and do-it-yourself materials. Teens, take a look at the makerspace during your next visit.
Thanks to our Giving Tuesday campaign in 2015, we are pleased to offer our Teen Mobile Makerspace.
Collection
The library has a fantastic collection of the latest books for teens and we work hard to maintain a great selection of graphic novels.
You will also find tons of music and movies to check out and a huge selection of media to download & stream.
New Books for Teens
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Mirror Girls
Reunited with her twin sister, who passes for white in the racially divided town of Eureka, Georgia, Charlie needs her help to put the hauntings of the past to rest and break their family's dangerous curse.
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All the Days Past, All the Days to Come
A long-awaited conclusion to the story that began in the Newbery Medal-winning Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry finds young adult Cassie Logan searching for a sense of belonging before joining the civil rights movement in 1960s Mississippi.
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March
A first-hand account of the author's lifelong struggle for civil and human rights spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movement.
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Unequal
The true story of racial inequality--and resistance to it--is the prologue to our present. You can see it in where we live, where we go to school, where we work, in our laws, and in our leadership. Unequal presents a gripping account of the struggles that shaped America and the insidiousness of racism, and demonstrates how inequality persists. As readers meet some of the many African American people who dared to fight for a more equal future, they will also discover a framework for addressing racial injustice in their own lives.
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Café Con Lychee
Theo Mori and Gabriel Moreno have always been at odds. Their parents own rival businesses--an Asian American café and a Puerto Rican bakery--and Gabi's lack of coordination has cost their soccer team too many games to count.
Stuck in the closet and scared to pursue his own dreams, Gabi sees his family's shop as his future. Stuck under the weight of his parents' expectations, Theo's best shot at leaving Vermont means first ensuring his parents' livelihood is secure.
So when a new fusion café threatens both shops, Theo and Gabi realize an unfortunate truth--they can only achieve their goals by working together to cook up an underground snack operation and win back their customers. But can they put aside their differences long enough to save their parents' shops, or will the new feelings between them boil over?
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A Year to the Day
IT'S BEEN A YEAR--A YEAR OF MISSING NINA
Leo can't remember what happened the night of the accident. All she knows is that she left the party with her older sister, Nina, and Nina's boyfriend, East. And now Nina is dead, killed by a drunk driver and leaving Leo with a hole inside her that's impossible to fill.
East, who loved Nina almost as much as Leo did, is the person who seems to most understand how she feels, and the two form a friendship based on their shared grief. But as she struggles to remember what happened, Leo discovers that East remembers every detail of the accident--and he won't tell her anything about it. In fact, he refuses to talk about that night at all.
As the days tumble one into the next, Leo's story comes together while her world falls apart. How can she move on if she never knows what really happened that night? And is happiness even possible in a world without Nina?
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Blade Breaker
The fate of the world rests on a blade's edge. Fighting beside her band of unlikely companions, Corayne is learning to embrace her ancient lineage and wield her father's powerful sword. But while she successfully closed one of the Spindles, her journey is far from over. Queen Erida's army marches across Allward with her consort, Taristan, right beside them, opening more portals into nightmarish worlds, razing kingdoms to the ground. Corayne has no choice but to assemble an army of her own if she's to save the realm as she knows it. But perilous lands await her and the companions, and they face assassins, otherworldly beasts, and tempestuous seas all as they rally a divided Ward to fight behind them. But Taristan has unleashed an evil far more wicked than his corpse armies. Something deadly waits in the shadows; something that might consume the world before there's any hope for victory.
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Before Takeoff
James and Michelle find themselves in the Atlanta airport on a layover. They couldn't be more different, but seemingly interminable delays draw them both to a mysterious flashing green light--and each other.
Where James is passive, Michelle is anything but. And she quickly discovers that the flashing green light is actually... a button. Which she presses. Which may or may not unwittingly break the rules of the universe--at least as those rules apply to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta.
Before they can figure up from down, strange, impossible things start happening: snowstorms form inside the B terminal; jungles sprout up in the C terminal; and earthquakes split the ground apart in between. And no matter how hard they try, it seems no one can find a way in or out of the airport. James and Michelle team up to find their families and either escape the airport, or put an end to its chaos--before it's too late. -
Always Never Yours
Between rehearsals for the school play and managing her divided family, seventeen-year-old Megan meets aspiring playwright Owen Okita, who agrees to help her attract the attention of a cute stagehand in exchange for help writing his new script.
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Will Grayson, Will Grayson
When two teens, one gay and one straight, meet accidentally and discover that they share the same name, their lives become intertwined as one begins dating the other's best friend, who produces a play revealing his relationship with them both.
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Kate in Waiting
Best friends Kate Garfield and Anderson Walker share a love of theater and crushes on the same guys, but when one of their long-distance crushes shows up at their school, real feelings might end their friendship.
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Not Now, Not Ever
Elliot Gabaroche is very clear on what she isn't going to do this summer.
1. She isn't going to stay home in Sacramento, where she'd have to sit through her stepmother's sixth community theater production of The Importance of Being Earnest.
2. She isn't going to mock trial camp at UCLA.
3. And she certainly isn't going to the Air Force summer program on her mom's base in Colorado Springs. As cool as it would be to live-action-role-play Ender's Game, Ellie's seen three generations of her family go through USAF boot camp up close, and she knows that it's much less Luke/Yoda/"feel the force," and much more one hundred push-ups on three days of no sleep. And that just isn't appealing, no matter how many Xenomorphs from Alien she'd be able to defeat afterwards.
What she is going to do is pack up her determination, her favorite Octavia Butler novels, and her Jordans, and run away to summer camp. Specifically, a cutthroat academic-decathlon-like competition for a full scholarship to Rayevich College—the only college with a Science Fiction Literature program, and her dream school. She’s also going to start over as Ever Lawrence: a new name for her new beginning. She’s even excited spend her summer with the other nerds and weirdos in the completion, like her socially-awkward roommate with neon-yellow hair, and a boy who seriously writes on a typewriter and is way cuter than is comfortable or acceptable.
The only problem with her excellent plan to secretly win the scholarship and a ticket to her future: her golden-child, super-genius cousin Isaiah has had the same idea, and has shown up at Rayevich smugly ready to steal her dreams and expose her fraud in the process.
This summer’s going to be great. -
Flamer
It's the summer between middle school and high school, and Aiden Navarro is away at camp. Everyone's going through changes—but for Aiden, the stakes feel higher. As he navigates friendships, deals with bullies, and spends time with Elias (a boy he can't stop thinking about), he finds himself on a path of self-discovery and acceptance.
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Honor Girl
All-girl camp. First love. First heartbreak. At once romantic and devastating, brutally honest and full of humor, this graphic-novel memoir is a debut of the rarest sort.
Maggie Thrash has spent basically every summer of her fifteen-year-old life at the one-hundred-year-old Camp Bellflower for Girls, set deep in the heart of Appalachia. She's from Atlanta, she's never kissed a guy, she's into Backstreet Boys in a really deep way, and her long summer days are full of a pleasant, peaceful nothing . . . until one confounding moment. A split-second of innocent physical contact pulls Maggie into a gut-twisting love for an older, wiser, and most surprising of all (at least to Maggie), female counselor named Erin. But Camp Bellflower is an impossible place for a girl to fall in love with another girl, and Maggie's savant-like proficiency at the camp's rifle range is the only thing keeping her heart from exploding. When it seems as if Erin maybe feels the same way about Maggie, it's too much for both Maggie and Camp Bellflower to handle, let alone to understand. -
Be Prepared
In Be Prepared, all Vera wants to do is fit in—but that’s not easy for a Russian girl in the suburbs. Her friends live in fancy houses and their parents can afford to send them to the best summer camps. Vera’s single mother can’t afford that sort of luxury, but there's one summer camp in her price range—Russian summer camp.
Vera is sure she's found the one place she can fit in, but camp is far from what she imagined. And nothing could prepare her for all the "cool girl" drama, endless Russian history lessons, and outhouses straight out of nightmares!
Outreach
Our Teen Librarian regularly visits McLean County's Juvenile Detention Center to introduce teens there to books that they might enjoy. She also visits schools in Normal during the students' lunch breaks to introduce them to great books through our Books & Bites program.
Explore & Learn
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Creativebug

Creativebug.com offers award-winning art & craft video classes taught by recognized design experts and artists.