For Ava, being 13 years old in 1987 means surfing with her friends, making mixtapes filled with U2 and Bon Jovi songs and reluctantly becoming a volunteer at the Southern California hospital where her mother is an obstetrician. But Ava often feels caught between two identities: Born in the U.S. after her mother began medical school, Ava fumbles through traditional Persian tea services and sometimes experiences anti-Iranian harassment.
Ava’s mother wants her to become a doctor, while Ava’s relationship with her absent father is strained. Ava also can’t seem to stop compulsively checking on little things throughout the day, like whether she’s pulled the right textbooks before walking away from her locker at school. Thrumming beneath all this is Ava’s love for her best friend and fellow surfer, Phoenix, whose Hodgkin lymphoma has returned after years of remission.
Author Diana Farid, a physician, poet and beach enthusiast, fills this novel in verse with vibrant details of Persian cuisine, surfing culture and the ins and outs of the hospital where Ava and her mother work. YA fiction protagonists have trended increasingly older in recent years, so Farid takes a risk in making Ava a younger teen. Yet Ava is as complex a creation as older YA protagonists, and her feelings toward everything from her first choir solo to her friend’s illness are honest, tangled and profound. When asked if she thinks she can stop a metaphorical wave, Ava replies, “No, but I can stay / with the wave. / I can hold on to it.”
Many of the poems that compose Wave are concrete poems, in which typography and on-page design are inextricable from the poetic lines. In one instance, letters that spell out inhale and exhale are spaced so widely that they span the entire page, conveying the big, intentional breaths Ava takes as she dives into a wave with her surfboard. Farid’s word choices are often as meaningful as their design: Water bubbles “tumble tumble / rumble” onomatopoetically, and careful readers will appreciate the many different appearances and articulations of the titular “wave.”
Intricate dark blue line drawings by Kris Goto and quotations from the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi accompany Farid’s text, which ends with the track lists of Ava’s and Phoenix’s mixtapes for each other. Queue them up on your favorite music platform for the perfect soundtrack to this “whirlucent tide / we get to ride.”
In Wave, Diana Farid crafts an honest and often profound coming-of-age narrative about 13-year-old Ava, a surfer whose best friend’s cancer has returned.
Rebecca Podos’ fourth YA novel, From Dust, a Flame, is a moving story about a girl discovering the heritage and history of a family she never knew she had. On the morning of Hannah’s 17th birthday, she awakens to discover that her eyes are golden serpentine slits, the first of a series of nightly transformations. Soon Hannah and her brother, Gabe, are catapulted into a quest for answers within their family’s hidden past as well as among Jewish myths and legends.
Podos spoke with BookPage about why she’s drawn to tales of self-discovery and how it feels to contribute to a golden age of Jewish fantasy.
How did this book begin for you? A lot of my stories kind of begin with the theme of inheritance—the things passed down to you for better or worse, and how you navigate that as a young person still trying to figure out who you are and who you want to become.
From Dust, a Flame started when I felt ready to tackle that question in relation to Judaism. I grew up in an observant family and community, knowing the history of both. But I wondered what it would feel like to discover all of that just when you thought you had a pretty solid sense of yourself and what it would mean and how it would change you.
Tell us about Hannah, the main character of the book. When we meet her, Hannah has plenty of questions about her mother: why she’s spent the last 17 years moving Hannah and her brother from place to place, where she comes from beyond the few vague hints she’s let slip over the years, and why she never seems to understand—or try to understand—her daughter.
But Hannah thinks she’s got a pretty good handle on herself. A chronic overachiever, she long ago chose the academic path and career path that would help her to become who she thought she wanted to be. She’s completely in control of every aspect of her own life, including the image she presents to other people, even the people who love her.
And speaking of that idea of “how it would change you . . . ”: The same night that Hannah makes a significant discovery about her mother’s past and her own identity, she is literally physically changed by a curse she’ll spend the novel trying to undo. At the same time, she’s unraveling the mystery of herself, including her Jewishness, her queerness and the truth behind the image she’s spent most of her life constructing.
“I wanted the book to feel as though it’s sinking deeper and deeper into the past, only for the past to catch up and collide with the present.”
I want to dig into the way you’ve structured this book. “The past has teeth,” says a character at one point. “It may catch you if you turn your back on it.” From Dust, a Flame jumps between multiple time periods, follows objects through generations and draws on folktales, letters and dreams—almost as though the novel itself would seem to agree. Can you talk about how you went about figuring out how to tell this story? Trial and error, for sure! I’ve never written a book from multiple perspectives or in which a significant part of the story takes place in another time period. I knew that I wanted the book to feel as though it’s sinking deeper and deeper into the past, only for the past to catch up and collide with the present. I tried to pace it out so that Hannah’s timeline—most of which takes place in just one week—doesn’t lose its urgency. I also didn’t want the chapters spent in her mother’s timeline, and briefly in her grandmother’s, to feel less important or interesting just because those events happened long ago. For Hannah and for her family, the threat posed by the past is greatest when they don’t believe it can touch them.
One of the most complex themes you explore in this book is the idea of family—what it means to be part of a family, and the stories, histories and (sometimes) secrets that families hold. What drew you to exploring these ideas? I really like stories where for the most part, there are no clear villains, just people trying and sometimes failing to do their best when faced with the toughest of choices. Don’t get me wrong, I love the villains, too, and there is a literal demon in the mix, but Hannah’s grandmother was shaped in part by the terrible things that happened to her, as was Hannah’s mother, as is Hannah.
A lot of what goes wrong between the generations in this book comes down to the secrets they keep out of fear, and because it seems too painful to share them, and because they want to protect the people they love. Families are complicated. Trauma is complicated. I wanted every character to have a moment in the story to share their perspective and to shed a light on their own demons.
There’s a lot of self-discovery happening in From Dust, a Flame, not only for Hannah but also for many other characters. When you began working on the book, did you know the discoveries that each character would make? That’s a really interesting question! I did my heaviest outlining yet for this book. I’ve been a pantser in the past, but since I was juggling timelines and points of view and trying to build a magical system, it seemed pretty necessary to know where I was going. Also, I got halfway through without adequately planning out one of the bigger plot twists and basically had to go back to the beginning to fix it. But I still learned about the characters as I went and figured them out a little better with every draft. It took me a while to figure out not just what Hannah wanted, but what she needed. And that’s what I like to give characters in the end.
“I really like stories where for the most part, there are no clear villains, just people trying and sometimes failing to do their best when faced with the toughest of choices.”
From Dust, a Flame contains so much cultural, historical and mythological detail. In your author’s note, you write that in spite of your religiously conservative upbringing, it’s common for a Jewish writer to feel that they’re not “Jewish enough to translate their identity into fiction.” How did you work through those feelings? I think I just had to release myself from the expectation of perfectly representing “the Jewish experience” or “the queer experience” or any of my identities and accept that it’s OK simply to write one single experience out of infinite possibilities. Nobody is qualified to write “the experience” of anything, but I’m qualified to tell a story about a Jewish girl struggling to understand herself. So that’s what I tried to do.
What was the most enjoyable part of the book to research? The most enjoyable part of research—of which there was so much—was the lore. One Jewish folktale in particular plays a very important part in the world building of this book, and it was one I’d never heard before! I also found the podcast “Throwing Sheyd: Better Living Through Jewish Demonology,” which brilliantly sifts through the Jewish texts to explore mentions of shedim, both well known and obscure, and I wasn’t really familiar with any of it. It was all fascinating to explore and engage with these stories that are artifacts of culture and history and religion combined.
Your author’s note also mentions a revelation you had while drafting the novel, when you realized that you needed an answer to a question Hannah asks: What does it mean to be Jewish? If someone were to ask you this question today, would your answer be different than if someone had asked you before writing this book? If so, how? I think it would! Like I said earlier, I didn’t really grow up wondering what it meant to be Jewish, because I just was. It was a fact. If it had been a question, I probably would’ve answered that Judaism is a shared history as much as a set of present-day beliefs and practices (a pretty wide range in modern Judaism). And it absolutely can be that.
“When it comes to where and who we come from, we don’t really get to pick out the good and ignore the bad or separate the burdens we inherit from the blessings.”
But in writing Gabe, Hannah’s brother who was adopted at birth and who wrestles with what his mother’s history means for him, I wanted to be more purposeful. We don’t always make enough space for Jewish converts or patrilineal Jews or anybody who falls outside of what we think a Jewish person should look like. Like the character who answers Hannah’s question on the page, I’d say that Judaism is also very much a story that you can choose to write yourself into, with knowledge and curiosity and respect.
From Dust, a Flame is one of a growing number of recent YA books that explores Jewish identity and mythology. How does it feel to be adding a volume of your own to that group? It’s wonderful. There are such amazing Jewish fantasies and folktales out recently and coming up next year—Katherine Locke’s This Rebel Heart, Aden Polydoros’ The City Beautiful, Allison Saft’s A Far Wilder Magic, Phoebe North’s Strange Creatures, Kalyn Josephson’s This Dark Descent. . . . It’s a little bit of a golden age at the moment, and I’m excited to be a little part of it.
This book has a lot of moments in which characters speak—or Hannah thinks—some really stunning words of truth. One of the most meaningful moments for me involved a word written in some spilled sugar. Is there a truth in the book that’s particularly meaningful for you? Oh, I’m glad you like that scene! It was actually the source of the book’s original title, which didn’t make it (luckily, I like this one better). I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are some big moments where Hannah has to reckon with the idea that, when it comes to where and who we come from, we don’t really get to pick out the good and ignore the bad or separate the burdens we inherit from the blessings. We have to find a way to live with it all, and being honest with ourselves and the people we love can be the key to moving forward.
The nightly transformations begin on Hannah’s 17th birthday. First, she awakens in the bedroom of her family’s Boston apartment with the eyes of a snake. The next morning, she has a wolf’s teeth. Six weeks after Hannah’s mother leaves in search of a cure, an envelope arrives in the mail. It contains an obituary for Jitka Eggers, the maternal grandmother Hannah has never met.
Hannah and her brother, Gabe, are desperate to find their mother and get some answers to what’s happening to Hannah. They travel to Jitka’s village in upstate New York, where the large Jewish family they never knew they had welcomes them into shiva, a Jewish period of mourning.
As Hannah, Gabe and their new friend Ari keep digging, they stumble onto family secrets; meet a folk healer called an opshprekherke; discover a golem and a vengeful, demonic sheyd; and find that, like the present and the past, the real and the fantastical aren’t as far apart as they might seem.
Author Rebecca Podos packs a lot into From Dust, a Flame, including lovingly detailed descriptions of traditional Jewish practices, tales of creatures from Jewish mysticism and depictions of life in Prague during the Nazi invasion. Its narrative encompasses two time periods plus assorted letters, dreams and folktales—and references to everything from the legends of King Solomon to Disney’s The Little Mermaid.
Throughout the novel, Podos explores themes typical of YA literature, including self-image and self-discovery, as well as more mature questions, such as when to protect children and when to let them go. A mystery component encourages readers to question their initial assumptions, and a first romance found when least expected adds queer sexuality to the range of experiences represented.
From Dust, a Flame sits comfortably beside other works of Jewish American YA literature, both classical and recent. As in Jane Yolen’s 1988 novel, The Devil’s Arithmetic, Holocaust-era visions inform a present-day teen’s circumstances, and as in Gavriel Savit’s The Way Back, published in 2020, a host of magical creatures from Jewish mythology intervene in our world and influence the destinies of young adults.
At its core, From Dust, a Flame is a moving story about the enduring power of telling stories.
In an isolated house in the American Midwest in 1860, 12-year-old Silas lives a quiet life spent learning about the new art and science of photography with his father and his ghostly companion, Mittenwool. That all changes one night when, just before dawn, three riders come to their door bearing a long-forgotten name, a bald-faced pony and a demand that Pa accompany them on a mysterious errand. When the pony returns the next morning, riderless, Silas sets off on him to find Pa and bring him home. Along the way, Silas encounters a haunted forest, a grumpy federal marshal, a notorious ring of criminals and answers to questions he never thought to ask about his family, his friendship with Mittenwool and his own unusual abilities.
Author R.J. Palacio is best known for her bestselling contemporary-set middle grade novel Wonder. Palacio ventured into historical fiction with the 2019 Sydney Taylor Award-winning graphic novel White Bird, set during World War II, and she continues this foray into the past with Pony, which offers plenty of Wild West-style action, including a hidden hideout, a small-town sheriff and some tied-up villains.
Palacio underpins these hallmarks of typical Westerns with more historically accurate representations of the period’s deeper social injustices, such as colonialism, slavery and classism, while also exploring how a family’s past can affect future generations. Pony’s frequent references to Greek and Roman mythology are sure to have readers looking up the tales of Telemachus, Argos and more. Descriptions of photographic technology add historical detail, and connections between early photography and spiritualism mesh naturally with Silas’ sometimes frightening, sometimes comforting ability to see and interact with ghosts. Each chapter opens with a spooky 19th-century photographic portrait, and the subject’s gazes seem to bore into the reader’s soul.
Readers in search of fast-paced historical fiction with speculative elements should look no further than Pony. The twists and turns of Silas’ odyssey are both stunning and satisfying.
One hot summer day, Syd storms into work at the Proud Muffin—the best queer-owned bakery in Austin, Texas—full of breakup woe and ready to channel it into baking delicious treats, including a spur-of-the-moment special, Syd’s Unexpected Brownies. To Syd’s horror, everyone who eats the sorrow-laden sweets soon finds their love lives in disarray. So Syd and Harley, the bakery’s bicycle delivery worker, embark on a mission to serve everyone who ate the brownies an antidote, like a piece of Very Sorry Cake or a slice of Honest Pie. Getting the right treats into the right mouths turns out to be more complicated than Syd thought, and then Harley begins to look awfully cute in their (or sometimes his; pins on Harley’s messenger bag signal Harley’s pronouns that day) bike shorts and Western boots.
In The Heartbreak Bakery, author A.R. Capetta describes both baking and the excitement of first love in luscious, sensuous detail. The book’s sumptuous recipes combine real directions with Syd’s colorful commentary; the first ingredient in Breakup Brownies is “4 oz unsweetened chocolate, broken up (I mean, it’s right there, how did I not see this coming?).” Plus, Capetta folds in food metaphors throughout: An awkward situation feels like a crumbling sheet of pastry dough, and at one point Syd’s heart “wobbles like an underbaked custard.”
Syd, who is agender, is an expertly constructed protagonist and a notable step forward in representing the full spectrum of gender identities in YA fiction. Syd’s earnest musings about gender, bodies, performance and identity are likely to resonate deeply with teens who’ve shared those thoughts and experiences, while offering cisgender teens an approachable lens through which to begin to understand their peers. The Proud Muffin’s welcoming atmosphere provides Syd a home away from home. Among its customers, a range of identities and relationships are modeled and celebrated. Capetta offers a multitude of ways to use and share one’s pronouns, as well as techniques for avoiding pronouns altogether.
Like the contrasting flavors in a peach strawberry basil pie, Syd’s journey of self-discovery melds perfectly with the quest to find and repair the brownies’ damage. Suspend your disbelief in everyday magic and enjoy this frothy, fulfilling confection with a lemon ginger scone and a tall, chilled glass of iced green tea
Like the contrasting flavors in a peach strawberry basil pie, this frothy confection melds a journey of self-discovery with a quest to repair broken hearts.
Whether you light a menorah every year or are new to the Jewish Festival of Lights, you’ll find something to appreciate among this year’s Hanukkah picture book offerings. All three involve combinations of rhyming verse and fine art, as well as new takes on old traditions.
OLD LADY’S AT IT AGAIN
As the title suggests, Caryn Yacowitz’s I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Dreidel is a Hanukkah-themed version of the traditional cumulative rhyme about that notorious woman who swallows a series of rather unusual objects. Starting with a dreidel (she mistakes it for a bagel), the old lady of the title eats her way through various items associated with Hanukkah, including a pitcher of oil (“’bout ready to boil”), a pile of gelt (money) and—of course—eight candles. Readers may look forward to learning the old lady’s ultimate fate, but the highlight of the book comes in the 14 classics of Western painting and sculpture spoofed in David Slonim’s illustrations. From an unusual “Mona Lisa” to “The Starry Night” featuring a giant menorah, this fun offering inspires young readers to explore both Hanukkah traditions and the world of art history.
SING-A-LONG HANUKKAH
There might be no catchier Hanukkah song than folk music icon Woody Guthrie’s “Honeyky Hanukah.” Honeyky Hanukah combines Guthrie’s festive, sometimes-nonsensical words with bold, silly illustrations by Dave Horowitz, showing a family as they dance, play music and enjoying “latkes and goody things all over town.” Once again readers should keep an eye on the paintings on the wall, which allude to classic works by Marc Chagall and other well-known images. While the song works perfectly as rhyming text, an enclosed CD by the band The Klezmatics lets readers add music to the words and pictures. A note at the back of the book explains how Guthrie’s mother-in-law Aliza Greenblatt inspired him to learn about Judaism and explore Jewish themes in his music.
CELEBRATE ALL YEAR
The final book in this year’s roundup is great for Hanukkah or throughout the year. In Here Is the World: A Year of Jewish Holidays, author Lesléa Newman and illustrator Susan Gal take readers through an interracial Jewish family’s year from autumnal Rosh Hashanah to springtime Passover, including a baby naming and the weekly celebration of Shabbat. Each spread includes a rhyming couplet and a detailed charcoal-and-collage drawing in a seasonally appropriate color palette. The words and images evoke the spirit of each important day and show the various objects and settings associated with it. In the back of the book you’ll find longer explanations of each holiday, recipes, craft instructions and ideas for putting Judaism’s commitment to social justice into action. For example, the project for Purim is a noisemaker made from a box of macaroni, for donation to a food pantry after the holiday.
Jill Ratzan reviews for School Library Journal and works as a school librarian at a small independent school in New Jersey.
Whether you light a menorah every year or are new to the Jewish Festival of Lights, you’ll find something to appreciate among this year’s Hanukkah picture book offerings. All three involve combinations of rhyming verse and fine art, as well as new takes on old traditions.
Some years I approach the new crop of Hanukkah picture books with trepidation: What new stories could possibly be told about the Jewish Festival of Lights, an ancient holiday that’s become a staple of December festivities? Happily, though, this year’s Hanukkah books include three titles that reimagine the genre in ways that are rich, fresh and delicious.
KINDNESS IN NYC
Holocaust-inspired Hanukkah books can be tough creative territory, but authors Richard Simon and Tanya Simon, with Sibert Honor-winning illustrator Mark Siegel (To Dance), stake their claim admirably in Oskar and the Eight Blessings. Told in a style halfway between a picture book and a graphic novel, this story follows Oskar through a day in New York City, where he’s been sent to live with his aunt after the 1938 anti-Jewish Kristallnacht riots. Wandering the streets hoping to find Aunt Esther before the last Hanukkah candle is lit—on a night that also happens to be Christmas Eve—he meets a variety of kind people, including a generous newsstand man, a whistling jazz musician and even a thoughtful celebrity. A Holocaust story focused on small kindnesses is a pleasantly subversive way to approach this difficult part of history, and Seigel’s illustrations use bright accents against muted backgrounds to achieve an effect that’s perfect for winter . . . and uniquely New York.
SHARING AND CARING
When Sara notices an old man eating—and juggling—an apple that the local market has decided has too many bad spots to sell, she (literally) cooks up a plan to bring him good things to eat . . . along with homemade holiday cheer. It’s hard to choose the best part of Hanukkah Cookies with Sprinkles by David Adler, illustrated by Jeffrey Ebbeler. Maybe it’s the portrayal of Sara’s wise and loving grandmother (when Sara speaks of the apple’s bad spots, her grandmother answers, “It has lots of good spots too.”). Maybe it’s the gentle moral about dignified ways to help the poor, or the illustrations that play with perspective and point of view while showing the ethnic diversity of Sara’s urban school and synagogue. Or maybe it’s the intriguing idea that participation in religious life can be as much about connecting with other people as connecting with the divine.
A YUMMY TIME OF YEAR
A generation of children have grown up learning about Judaism with Sammy Spider, a curious arachnid who always wants to join in his human family’s holiday celebrations. Now readers can interact with Sammy even more through cooking and crafts in Sammy Spider's First Taste of Hanukkah: A Cookbook by Sylvia A. Rouss and Genene Levy Turndorf, illustrated by Katherine Janus Kahn. Easy-to-follow Hanukkah-inspired recipes, each marked with its kosher category, combine with craft projects, cooking tips and instructions for lighting a menorah in this bright, welcoming addition to the Sammy canon. (I’m a fan of the Fruity De-lights myself, although the Candle-Glow Biscuits sound quite tempting too.) The colorful collage-style illustrations are fun to look at outside the kitchen as well.
Happy Hanukkah!
Jill Ratzan matches readers with books in a small library in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Some years I approach the new crop of Hanukkah picture books with trepidation: What new stories could possibly be told about the Jewish Festival of Lights, an ancient holiday that’s become a staple of December festivities? Happily, though, this year’s Hanukkah books include three titles that reimagine the genre in ways that are rich, fresh and delicious.
From inspirational feminist essays to illustrated fairy tales and an interactive journal, three new books provide material for teen readers to savor during winter’s long nights.
Thirty-eight women and girls, from high school students to bankers to professional authors, write about the opportunities and struggles of being female in Because I Was a Girl: True Stories for Girls of All Ages, edited by bestselling author Melissa de la Cruz. Some contributors were discouraged from their chosen careers. Others have dealt with being the only woman in their offices, labs or studios. Some pieces rile the reader’s anger while others are laugh-out-loud funny. But all of the women featured have gone on to carve their own niches and find their own voices. Timelines of major events in the women’s rights movement are interspersed among short biographical sections, making Because I Was a Girl a great choice for either reading in batches or appreciating as an entire work.
TALES TO TREASURE
Everyone thinks they know the stories: the Minotaur in the labyrinth, the gingerbread cookie come to life and the sea princess with the beautiful voice who exchanges her mermaid’s tail for a pair of legs. We also know that an illustrated book pairs images with words to tell a story—but what if these ideas were inverted, turned inside out and presented in new and unexpected ways? In The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic, author Leigh Bardugo and illustrator Sara Kipin collaborate to do just that. Five short stories and a novella, all set in the world of the author’s Grisha trilogy, subvert readers’ expectations of what, exactly, constitutes a happily-ever-after. The story forms through both words and pictures, as each page adds one more element to the mostly monochromatic, illustrated borders. Bring tissues: Some of these tales are total tearjerkers!
GET CREATIVE
Keri Smith, bestselling author of Wreck This Journal, is back with a new book made for creative scribbling. As readers pencil in the titular shape in The Line, they’re invited to explore patterns, navigate obstacles and participate in everything from revelation (“The answers are contained in the line itself. The line may reveal them to you, but only if you are ready to hear them.”) to destruction (invitations to cut, fold and otherwise mutilate the pages). The reader’s line meanders across shapes, words, blank spaces and black-and-white photographs as its adventures build to a crescendo. Like Smith’s previous books, The Line can be devoured in a single sitting, or each page’s activity can be completed one at a time. This is a great gift (especially when accompanied by an exquisite pencil) for teens who love art, journaling and introspection.
This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
From inspirational feminist essays to illustrated fairy tales and an interactive journal, three new books provide material for teen readers to savor during winter’s long nights.
Books are easy to use (no charging or downloading required) and will always be in vogue. For the age group that’s the most difficult to buy for, we’ve got reads for musical lovers, Hunger Games fans and DIY crafters.
The Tony Award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen, which follows the eponymous teen’s struggle with social anxiety, has taken Broadway by storm. Now, the creators of the show offer another way for fans and newcomers alike to experience Evan’s story through Dear Evan Hansen: The Novel. Written in a light, breezy narration, the novel tells the story of how Evan, a teenage loner, takes his therapist’s advice and begins writing letters to himself each day in order to deal with his anxieties and insecurities. But when one of his private notes lands in the wrong hands, Evan accidentally becomes a social media sensation after the note resurfaces at the scene of a classmate’s suicide. Like the musical upon which it’s based, Dear Evan Hansen tackles serious themes—like isolation, mental health, friendship, love, community and the difficulty of telling the truth, even to yourself—in a sometimes serious, sometimes hilarious way that is sure to connect with today’s teens.
A WORTHY TRIBUTE
Suzanne Collins’ acclaimed Hunger Games series—perhaps one of the most popular and well-loved YA series of all time—is now available in a gift-ready new package. The Hunger Games: Special Edition Box Set celebrates the 10th anniversary of this action-packed series with new paperbacks that feature luxe foil covers and lots of great bonus material. Fans will relish the longest published interview with Collins to date, a conversation between Collins and the late author Walter Dean Myers, a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the series and a timeline of Hunger Games-related events from 2008 to the present.
GET STICHIN’
For crafty teens, there’s Australian embroidery expert Irem Yazici’s Tiny Stitches: Buttons, Badges, Patches, and Pins to Embroider. This guide lays out necessary materials and sewing techniques for needlework newbies, and there are plenty of illustrated examples and step-by-step instructions for projects like pins, patches and buttons. From outdoorsy scenes to cutesy snack items, young readers will be sure to find a pattern to love. Traceable templates allow the budding crafter to immediately deck out their best denim.
This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Books are easy to use (no charging or downloading required) and will always be in vogue. For the age group that’s the most difficult to buy for, we’ve got reads for musical lovers, Hunger Games fans and DIY crafters.
In decades past, the world of queer YA literature comprised cautionary tales and sob stories. Thankfully, these two novels stand out for their uplifting and romantic perspectives.
Sometimes there’s nothing better than a funny, sweet romantic comedy, and How (Not) to Ask a Boy to Prom by S.J. Goslee delivers.
Sixteen-year-old Nolan Grant would be content to secretly crush on the handsome Si while making art, working at the gardening store and hanging with his adoptive family during their board game tournaments and pancake marathons. But his older sister, Daphne, has other plans.
When Nolan is pressured into a very public promposal orchestrated by Daphne, things go horribly wrong. Instead of asking Si, Nolan accidentally asks Ira “Bern” Bernstein, a bad boy everyone (including Bern himself) thinks is straight, as he recently split with his girlfriend. When Bern accepts, Nolan finds himself in a pickle. To keep up appearances, he has to pretend to date Bern until prom night. Meanwhile, the Gay-Straight Alliance—which Nolan reluctantly joins in his ongoing effort to impress Si—taps Nolan’s art talents for the prom after-party, and the situation between Nolan and Bern might be on its way to becoming real.
As the prom approaches, art projects go awry, siblings squabble and a budding romance overturns everyone’s expectations. Will prom night be everything Daphne has in mind for Nolan, or will nothing go as planned? And when everything starts to go wrong, does that mean that everything’s actually going right? Comedy, romance and feel-good family dynamics combine in what’s sure to be one of this summer’s most fun YA reads.
Things take a turn toward the fabulous in Tanya Boteju’s Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens. Biracial teen Nima Kumara-Clark anticipates another boring summer of working, hanging out with her best friend and hoping to win the affections of her crush, Ginny. But when Nima takes a chance and sees an unusual act featuring drag queens at her town’s annual festival, she meets the mesmerizing Winnow and is instantly smitten.
Hoping to see Winnow again, Nima follows her to a drag show, where she connects with Deidre, a drag queen who takes Nima under her wing. What follows is a summer that’s anything but what Nima expected. Attending drag shows awakens her, and soon she’s ready to do more than just watch.
As Nima learns the art of being a drag king—a woman who dresses and performs as a man—she also gains new knowledge about long-hidden family secrets, her friends and even herself. Why did her mother leave her family, with only the briefest of notes, a year and a half ago? Why has Gordon, once a friend, become so bitter and distant? And why, if Nima’s confident that she likes girls, does being labeled a lesbian feel so awkward?
Boteju uses her own life experience in the world of drag to tell a story filled with glitter, feather boas, lip-syncing and dancing, where gender identity is flexible and performance is the embodiment of joy.
In decades past, the world of queer YA literature comprised cautionary tales and sob stories. Thankfully, these two new novels stand out for their uplifting and romantic perspectives.
Teens and technology are natural companions, in part because both are drawn to challenging limits and pushing boundaries. Two new YA thrillers set in the not-so-distant future explore the complex relationships between humans and their digital creations.
At a theme park called the Kingdom, dreams come true, ugliness is against the rules and everything ends happily ever after. Teenage Ana, a cyborg princess known as a Fantasist, lives with her sisters in the Kingdom, where she spends her days entertaining guests with her beautiful appearance, delightful manners and unfading smile. Surely a creation like Ana, designed to be flawless in every way, couldn’t be capable of murder. But when a park employee is found dead, Ana is the most likely suspect.
Starting an hour after the murder and then jumping back and forth in time, The Kingdom by Jess Rothenberg alternates between Ana’s voice and a series of interview transcripts, court documents and news clippings. Theme park aficionados might smile in recognition—or wince in pain—as their favorite attractions become instruments of dystopian horror. Could faulty settings at the Princess Palace have caused Ana to snap? Did she encounter someone on the monorail connecting Magic Land with Winter Land? Or maybe the blame lies with a quickly covered-up incident at the Mermaid Lagoon? As the Kingdom Corporation defends Ana’s inability to supersede her programming, Ana herself begins to question all she has known. Is everything in the Kingdom really as ideal as it seems? Is she able to doubt, deceive or love? The Kingdom invites readers to ponder how far technology can—or should—go in the quest to create a perfect world.
High school can be a theme park all its own, as Arvin Ahmadi’s Girl Gone Viral attests. Students at the exclusive Palo Alto Academy of Science and Technology (PAAST) build virtual reality worlds, interact with wall-size screens in their dorm rooms and grumble about using old-fashioned iPhones in their history of social media class. Opal Hopper isn’t distracted by holos, Zapps or even her college applications. She and her friends are focused on entering the Make-A-Splash virtual content creation contest. The winning team will be showered with rewards, but the prize Opal cares about most is a meeting with Silicon Valley superstar Howie Mendelsohn, who may hold the key to understanding why Opal’s father mysteriously disappeared seven years ago.
The team—Opal, Moyo, Shane and Kara—hopes that their show “Behind the Scenes” will reach top popularity in a virtual universe where success is measured in LiveTags, comment volume and number of avatars in attendance at each broadcast. Viewership of “Behind the Scenes” skyrockets, but their success has its downsides: Opal’s values are questioned at every turn, including her decision to make her budding romance with Moyo part of her public persona. Meanwhile, a presidential election pits a progressive candidate against one from the anti-technology Luddite party. College acceptances come in, friends and couples at PAAST bicker and fight and make up again, and the truth that Opal seeks lurks constantly in the background, waiting to emerge. Pick up Girl Gone Viral for a boarding school mystery with a technological twist.
Two new YA thrillers set in the not-so-distant future explore the complex relationships between humans and their digital creations.
The nights are getting longer, the weather is getting colder, and Hanukkah is just around the corner.
Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights, celebrates both an ancient military victory and the flame of a tiny oil lamp miraculously lasting for eight days. It’s a chance for families to light candles in a menorah, say blessings, exchange gifts . . . and read books! Two new offerings are perfect for Hanukkah gift-giving.
The Newish Jewish Encyclopediaby Stephanie Butnick, Liel Leibovitz & Mark Oppenheimer
The hosts of Tablet magazine’s “Unorthodox” podcast branch out into book format with The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia, a compendium of all things Jewish, covering everything from bagels to the Book of Life, Shabbat to “Seinfeld.” Alternately irreverent and profound—but always informative—entries range from single sentences (“chutzpah: What it takes to think you can write an encyclopedia of Jewish life”) to four-page spreads (check out the sections about Jewish gangsters and Jewish Hollywood). Photographs of Jewish people and places abound, and quick-reference sections about holidays answer such questions as “What do we do?” and “Anything good to eat?”
The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia is a great gift for the Jewish maven in your life who’d relish quoting facts about the history of the garment industry or brushing up on their Yiddish curses.
The Jewish Cookbookby Leah Koenig
You can never have too many cookbooks, and The Jewish Cookbook by Leah Koenig is one you’ll pull off the shelf over and over again. Sections for standard cookbook fare, such as soups and stews, are joined by Jewish-specific chapters (“Dumplings, Noodles, and Kugels” is a go-to), and symbols indicate when a recipe is gluten-free, vegan or meets other criteria for ingredients or prep time.
Dozens of photographs show Ashkenazi favorites like braided challah, fruit-drenched blintzes and crisp pickles alongside curried fish balls from South Africa, coconut rice from India and beloved Middle Eastern desserts like sweet egg meringue and sufganiyot (jelly donuts). You’ll find recipes from chefs at renowned restaurants and for food-specific holidays like Passover. Best of all, every recipe begins with a story: where the recipe comes from, what traditions surround it and how it can best be accompanied.
Give The Jewish Cookbook to a Jewish cook who wants to combine the tastes of their childhood (wherever it may have been) with adventurous forays into Jewish cooking around the world.
The nights are getting longer, the weather is getting colder, and Hanukkah is just around the corner.
Who among us has never wondered whether life exists elsewhere in the cosmos? These two YA novels explore this perennially popular topic from very different perspectives. In the first, a neurodivergent teen’s science project spirals into an otherworldly hoax. In the other, a Mexican American girl learns that the disappearance of her mother, who had immigrated to the U.S. without documentation, may be connected to an extraterrestrial plot.
“There were never really aliens,” narrator Gideon Hofstadt tells readers on the first page of his case files. Gideon's brain works differently from other people's. He makes decisions based on what's most practical and can't tolerate messy food or the sensory overload of driving a car. He also has trouble communicating his feelings to his boyfriend, Owen, a relationship that he has been keeping secret. (Gideon’s mother, unaware that he's spoken for, keeps trying to set him up on blind dates with other boys.)
All Gideon originally planned to do was test his newly built seismograph by creating an explosion large enough that it would be picked up by a nearby university. But when his brother, Ishmael, interferes and creates a much bigger explosion than either boy intended, a rumor starts to circulate in their small Pennsylvania town that aliens landed on their family’s farm. Instead of denying the rumors, Gideon encourages them and documents the resulting hysteria as a study in group psychology, all in the hopes of getting into MIT, getting a job at NASA and becoming one of the world's leading astronomers.
Soon people around town are claiming to have been abducted by aliens, and Gideon and Ishmael must continually raise the stakes to keep control of their own narrative. But when the leader of a cultish multilevel marketing (MLM) business comes to town and declares that the aliens have given him the recipe for a tonic that will grant immortality, all bets are off. What will happen to Gideon's MIT. application if his sociological project is exposed as a hoax?
Chelsea Sedoti (The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett) tells It Came From the Sky through a series of news reports, interviews, explanatory interludes and other forms of data that Gideon has collected. A bovine escape artist, a bizarre reality TV show and a curious (but explainable) sighting of the late John F. Kennedy in the woods add laugh-out-loud humor to her fast-paced tale. Divergent storylines involving Gideon's younger sister, his lonely friend Arden and his mother's MLM connections dovetail into a highly satisfying conclusion. The aliens may never have been real, but the human foibles, challenges and hopes Sedoti depicts in a breezy and engaging documentary style definitely are.
With her debut novel, Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland transports readers far from the verdant fields of Pennsylvania farm country, across the continent to the American Southwest and into the realms of speculative fiction and magical realism.
Sia’s favorite place is a spot in the Arizona desert that might have been where the world began. There, two human-shaped cactus plants seem to be reaching their arms out to each other, as though asking to dance. She goes there sometimes to light candles to guide her mother's spirit home. Not quite two years ago, Sia's mother, who immigrated to the United States without documentation, died in the Sonoran desert after being deported. And yet Sia’s grandmother insisted, until her own recent death, “M'ija vive.” My daughter lives.
Sia's anger at the local cop who reported her mother to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is sometimes soothed by the corn she plants, a family tradition with deep roots. She can sense her departed abuela's watchful presence in her garden, among her cacti and sometimes even in her car. Meanwhile, there's a school project about the moon to complete and Harry Potter fan fiction to read. Sia's relationship with her best friend, Rose, becomes strained by Rose's new girlfriend, Samara, leaving Sia room to pursue a romance of her own with Noah, the new boy at school, which is complicated by Sia's personal history with sexual assault. Everything is finally coming together, as friends reunite and love grows stronger.
And that's when Sia sees the blue lights in the sky.
Like the best speculative fiction, Sia Martinez and the Moonlit Beginning of Everything uses imaginative elements as metaphors for contemporary issues, in this case racism, immigration and abuse of police power. Sia’s narration is also pervaded by intense spirituality that blends Catholicism with the spirits and ghosts of Mexican folklore. The book teems with vivid imagery and explicit social commentary; "I guess when your skin is light enough, you get to cast the benefit of the doubt like a spell or something," Sia muses at one point.
Don't be disoriented when the narrative seems to radically shift genre just before the halfway point. Vasquez Gilliland skillfully sows the seeds of science fiction and magical realism early in the story, and like Sia's maíz, they have been waiting for just the right time to bloom.
Who among us has never wondered whether life exists elsewhere in the cosmos? These two YA novels explore this perennially popular topic.
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