Norah Piehl

Jenny Hubbard’s outstanding debut novel, 2011’s Paper Covers Rock, was set at a boys’ boarding school in the 1980s, where a young man struggled to find his poetic voice while overcoming a personal tragedy. Hubbard’s second novel, And We Stay, explores many of the same themes from a female perspective.

It’s early 1995, and Emily Beam has just started school at Amherst School for Girls, notable for its most famous alumna, Emily Dickinson. No one at ASG knows Emily’s whole story, which she begins to explore via poems, although she’s never before had any inclination to write poetry. As Emily attempts to fit in at ASG and strives to articulate her feelings about the events surrounding her boyfriend’s recent death, she begins to feel a real kinship with Dickinson, whose work proves “to other daughters of America, the ones who endure, who rise like rare birds from the ashes, that they are not alone.”

Hubbard is an accomplished poet as well as a novelist, and Emily Beam’s poems are remarkably good. Writing these poems leads Emily out of the darkness of a New England winter and into a fragile spring—out of tragedy and into something resembling hope.

In Ketchup Clouds, Annabel Pitcher introduces what must be one of the more unusual pen-pal relationships ever set to paper. Zoe is a teenage girl living in Bath, England, and the recipient of her letters is Mr. Stuart Harris, an inmate on Texas’ death row. At first glance, the two seem to have nothing in common, but as Zoe begins to reveal her story through her letters to Stuart, readers start to understand why Zoe feels an affinity for this doomed man half a world away.

Zoe is consumed with guilt over events that happened a year ago. What should have been a fun and exciting experience—her very first time falling in love—instead resulted in heartbreak, betrayal and death. In addition to concealing her own role in this tragedy, she’s still secretly grieving and nursing a broken heart—things she imagines that Stuart, who’s been sentenced to death for murdering his wife, also must feel.

Zoe’s letters alternate between telling Stuart about her life as it is right now—complete with family dramas and ongoing attempts to avoid the dead boy’s mother—and gradually recounting the events from the year before. Throughout the novel, Pitcher delays revealing not only Zoe’s role in the death, but also the identity of the dead boy, skillfully building suspense while inciting sympathy. Ketchup Clouds is alternately romantic, sad and even surprisingly funny, as readers come to know this quirky character through her most unconventional confession.

Outside their high school, two boys—armed with their friends, some sympathetic teachers and a carefully devised plan—start to kiss. Their goal? To break the world record for longest kiss, clocking in at 32 hours, 12 minutes and 10 seconds. Craig and Harry, the two boys in question, used to be a couple. Now, though, they are aiming to break this specific record as friends, both to honor their mutual friend Tariq, who has recently been the victim of gay bashing, and, as Craig eventually comes to realize, to honor the sheer joy of being and feeling alive.

Craig and Harry’s story is interspersed with those of other boys—kissing, wanting to be kissed or being terrified to kiss. Neil and Peter have been a couple long enough that dating no longer feels like dating, but Neil’s parents refuse to acknowledge that Peter is his boyfriend. Avery and Ryan, who just met at a regional gay prom, are tentatively exploring their new feelings for each other, both hesitant to reveal too much of themselves. And Cooper, after being caught cruising gay sex sites by his father, runs away from his parents’ anger, fear and rejection—but to what?

Levithan’s powerful, multifaceted novel explores just how far things have come for many gay teens—and how far things still need to go. The most poignant aspect of Two Boys Kissing is its narrator—or rather, narrators, as the stories are told by a Greek chorus composed of the generation of gay men who lost their lives to AIDS. These narrators mourn the all-too-familiar scenes of violence and despair, and marvel at the freedom and acceptance they could only have imagined.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with David Levithan for Two Boys Kissing.

The Gregorys are one of those families that can do no wrong—literally. Rulers of their community, this wealthy family presides over local institutions like the Hawthorne Lake Country Club, and if family members sometimes run afoul of the law, then the law has a tendency to look the other way. But when the body of popular Willa Ames-Rowan (a champion swimmer) is pulled from the lake at the country club, and when golden boy James Gregory is likely the last person to see her alive, four of Willa’s friends and acquaintances can’t look the other way any longer.

Willa’s friends Sloane and Lina, Willa’s intense sister Madge and Club newcomer (and outsider) Rose each have their own motives for trying to solve Willa’s death and unseat the Gregory dynasty. But this well-funded group (whose relationships with each other range from tense to barely tolerant) will stop at nothing to get their revenge. The novel, divided into four sections—each one from the point of view of one of the girls—unfolds at a rapid clip, leaving readers feeling at times disoriented, unsettled, swept up in the girls’ mission just as they are. As the pieces of the puzzle come together, however, readers will start to understand not only what happened that fateful night but also what compels each girl to declare “war” on the Gregory family—and perhaps to start a new trend in vigilante justice elsewhere, too.

This Is W.A.R. illustrates what can happen when four girls with enough motivation (and enough money) unite behind a common cause: uncovering the truth.

In the near-future world of Suzanne Young's new novel, teen suicide has reached epic proportions, with one in three teenagers killing themselves before their 18th birthdays. Sloane knows this statistic as well as anyone: Her older brother Brady killed himself, and Sloane’s parents are desperate to keep their only daughter from following in his footsteps. And they’re not alone. A massive undertaking known only as “The Program” aims to save depressed kids from themselves—but at what cost? Teens who spend six weeks at The Program return to their old lives spacey and clueless, unable to remember anything or anyone who might have once triggered their depression.

Despite grieving Brady’s death, Sloane feels a measure of protection; she’s madly in love with her long-term boyfriend James, Brady’s best friend and the only person who can help her through the depths of her sadness. But when one of their friends commits suicide, both James and Sloane might be unable to escape their own time in The Program—but what will that mean for their future together?

Suzanne Young’s novel is divided into three parts, detailing Sloane's time before, during and after The Program, each of which challenges and changes readers’ expectations, simultaneously building suspense and sympathy. Readers will certainly identify parallels between Sloane’s scarily dystopian society and their own, and they’ll consider issues as wide-ranging as the nature of depression, the necessity of memory and the concept of true love.

Sloane is a flawed but thoroughly believable and sympathetic character, and readers will cheer for her through every act of resistance and moment of weakness. There are a lot of unanswered questions at the end of The Program, but that's okay—this is just the first book in a projected series that’s bound to further explore Sloane’s character and uncover the true breadth of The Program.