The Fever -- Megan Abbott

If you're looking for a light-hearted coming-of-age story, The Fever isn't the book for you.  It's a dark and twisted tale that gets into the cruelty and downright brutality that lies just under the surface of what it's like for a high-school girl to grow up these days.  

Maybe it was always like this, but I can identify more easily with the two male characters in the book, Tom Nash, the father of Deenie, who's more central to the story, and Eli, Deenie's brother.  Both Tom and Eli are puzzled outsiders in Deenie's world, and neither one is truly aware of what's going on in Deenie's life, though they have an inkling.

One of Deenie's two best friends has a terrible seizure in class.  Then the other one does.  Before long, other girls are suffering.  The parents are frantic.  They want to know what's happening, and they seize on any number of explanations (all of them wrong).  What's really going on is both more ordinary and more frightening than anything they've thought of.  Sex (far more casual than it was in my day), rivalries, love, body image, friendships, secrets, and all the other concerns that teens have had through the years are in play here in a scary and elegantly written novel that will keep you reading (and guessing) well into the evening.

While the main characters are teens, there are plenty of adults around, and this isn't a YA novel in the sense that you might usually think of the term.  But it's a novel that teens will probably understand all too well.