Jennifer Gilmore’s young adult tale of adoption and the complex difficulties it wreaks upon generations of a family, If Only, is careful to ground itself in the stories of its characters – the imperfect teenagers who haunt its narrative. In 2000, Bridget, a young pregnant teen, will be putting up her child for adoption as…
Revamped classics and fairy tales are still big, especially in the YA world, and apparently the world needed another Jane Eyre retelling. What drew me to this one, however, was the setting – Jane Eyre in space! In Brightly Burning, we follow Stella Ainsley as she moves from her ship and job as engineer to…
Few things appeal to me more than a book centering around a boarding school, so Elizabeth Klehfoth’s All These Beautiful Strangers appealed to me from the moment I read its synopsis. It’s a YA thriller about a young woman struggling to come to terms with the dark secrets of her past while simultaneously sorting out…
Megan Bannen’s début novel The Bird and the Blade is a surprising mix of fantasy and historical fiction that takes place in a fantastical version of 13th century Mongolia. It also happens to be a retelling of Puccini’s opera Turandot. Fortunately, you don’t have to be familiar with that in order to enjoy this book,…
I’m not normally into contemporary romances. They’re not bad by any means, but they usually don’t appeal to me. However, every once in a while, a really special book will come along and make me glad I don’t overlook this particular sub-genre of romance altogether. Jamie McGuire’s All the Little Lights is just such a…
Stephanie Garber’s début novel, Caraval, was one of the most highly-praised young adult fantasy novels of 2017. Its richly-imagined world and lush prose took the book world by storm, and fans were elated to learn the author was planning a sequel. I didn’t fall in love with Caraval the way so many of my fellow…
Kelley Armstrong’s Aftermath takes us into the dark world of school shootings, shattered friendships and redemption. It’s an emotional tale that will keep you thinking about it long after you put the book down. There was nothing ordinary about that day; it had been both the most glorious and most horrific of her young life….
In From Twinkle, with Love, the follow up to the charming When Dimple Met Rishi, Sandhya Menon crafts another winning protagonist and another compelling story for young readers, who will surely find a little bit of themselves mirrored in the delightful Twinkle. Lively aspiring director Twinkle Mehra spends her free time writing admiring letters to…
In Katie Sise’s latest Young Adult novel, The Academy, we meet Frankie Brooks, a budding fashionista with a successful blog, an amazing family, and great friends. But when she makes a few too many mistakes, her parents decide that the best way to teach her how to be a responsible, mature adult is a stint…
If you read only one YA novel this year, make it Dread Nation. Part Zombie Land, part Django Unchained, channeling a bit of The Hunger Games and also something wholly original, this is a tale of what happens when the undead rise while America’s race war rages. The Civil War is over. But not because…
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