Norah Piehl

Most kids know the traditional folk song "Scarborough Fair" (if they know it at all) from their parents’ and grandparents’ dusty old Simon & Garfunkel albums. For 17-year-old Lucy Scarborough, however, the haunting ballad takes on life-or-death significance when she learns that the song’s riddle-like lyrics might hold the key to breaking the curse that has entrapped generations of Scarborough women.

Raised by her adoring foster parents, Lucy has had a nurturing upbringing. Athletic, smart, funny, loving Lucy seems on track to have the kind of successful life that was never an option for her birth mother, Miranda, who had Lucy when she was 18 and went mad shortly thereafter. Now Miranda is a shadowy, often troubling figure at the margins of Lucy’s comfortable life. But Miranda’s story takes on new significance when Lucy herself becomes pregnant the night of her junior prom. Like her mother, Lucy will give birth at age 18. But is she, as the old song seems to suggest, doomed to a life of madness and alienation once she’s had her infant daughter? Reading Miranda’s old diaries, Lucy decides it’s time to take action against the powerful forces determined to take over her life. With equally powerful allies—including her foster parents and boy-next-door Zach—Lucy might be the Scarborough clan’s last, best, hope to break the curse that has enslaved them for so long.

With its romantic plot and folkloric roots, Impossible might seem at first glance to be a departure for author Nancy Werlin, best known for suspense novels such as The Killer’s Cousin and Double Helix. But, in addition to showcasing her adeptness at developing characters, Impossible remains, in the end, just as suspenseful as any of Werlin’s more traditional mystery novels. Romantic tension, a battle between good and evil, and a race against time—all set within a realistic contemporary setting—result in an intriguing medley of genres and a story that will remain in readers’ minds much like a beautiful, haunting melody.

There’s something you should know: You probably won’t like Samantha Kingston very much, at least not the first time you meet her. But by the time you’ve met her for the third, or fourth, or seventh time, you might start thinking about Samantha a little bit differently. Because she sure starts to see herself that way.

If you’ve seen the movie Groundhog Day, you’ll be familiar with the basic structure of Lauren Oliver’s debut novel, Before I Fall. Samantha relives the same day seven times. She is the only one who’s aware that her life is stuck on repeat—everyone else just keeps living life, moving forward, unaware that for Samantha at least, there’s no such thing as tomorrow. Before I Fall takes a darker, more serious tone than the Bill Murray comedy, however—because what prompts Samantha’s string of “do-overs” is her own death in a car accident.

For so long, Samantha was one of the queen bees, someone who, by her own admission, “just followed along” in the wake of her beautiful, charismatic and sometimes mean friends. But what might happen if she makes different choices—if she takes another look at the boy she’s written off, or reaches out to the outcast, or challenges her best friends’ cruelty? And what will flash before her eyes in the moments before she dies? Samantha hopes it will be the best moments of her life—but what if, instead, her final hours are replayed ad infinitum, giving her the chance to make the right choices, to make amends, even to save someone else’s life, if not her own?

It’s remarkable that Oliver can plot the same day seven times and make each retelling engaging. But Before I Fall is not just a fascinating piece of storytelling; it’s also a thought-provoking commentary on the unintended, and sometimes profound, consequences of even the smallest actions or remarks, and a powerful testimony to people’s ability to make real, meaningful changes in their own behavior and outlook—changes that can deeply affect others’ lives as well.

Norah Piehl is a freelance writer and editor in the Boston area.

In So Many Beginnings, Bethany C. Morrow (A Song Below Water) proves up to the challenge of remixing Louisa May Alcott’s most famous work: Little Women.

Like Alcott’s novel, So Many Beginnings takes place during the American Civil War. However, the experiences faced by Morrow’s March sisters—formerly enslaved young Black women—are drastically different from those of Alcott’s more sheltered white family.

In the wake of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the Marches have settled on Roanoke Island, along North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Readers may be familiar with Roanoke Island's mysterious history during the colonial period, but few are aware that it was home to a colony of free, formerly enslaved people during the Civil War. As Morrow notes in an afterword, she didn't learn about this history until researching the novel. Roanoke, and a handful of other settlements like it, were considered “contraband camps” by the Union. “Black folk were spoils of war, if they were more than a nuisance,” Morrow writes, “and their greatest value was in not being available to serve the Confederacy.

On Roanoke, the March sisters soon realize that they’ve exchanged the brutality and dehumanization of enslavement for the paternalism and disrespect of Union forces, missionary teachers and other white people who have come to the island to dictate what young Black people should learn, where they should live and even how they should dress.

Morrow’s nuanced take on what life was like for newly freed Black people at this time will prompt readers to reconsider the simplistic good vs. evil, North vs. South mythologies that characterize too many Civil War narratives. Morrow also skillfully incorporates cultural divisions between Southern Black people like the Marches, who lived through enslavement, with those of Northerners who never experienced enslavement firsthand.

Part of the new Remixed Classics series, which reinterprets canonical texts like Treasure Island and Wuthering Heights through diverse cultural lenses, So Many Beginnings contains twists that will surprise even the most devoted Little Women fans. In addition to shedding light on a lesser-known chapter of American history, Morrow takes creative (and for many readers, long-desired) liberties with the fates of the four March sisters. Alcott fans and newcomers alike will find much to appreciate in Morrow’s sophisticated remix.

There’s no shortage of YA novels in which a commoner gets involved with a royal family and/or discovers their royal lineage, but as enjoyable as this trope is, most of these novels involve British or European monarchies. Emiko Jean’s Tokyo Ever After sets a thoroughly modern fairy tale in the Imperial House of Japan.

Seventeen-year-old Izumi Tanaka has never felt like she completely belongs in her insular, mostly white Northern California town. Sure, she loves and admires her single mom, and she absolutely adores her small group of pan-Asian friends, who’ve dubbed themselves the “Asian Girl Gang,” or AGG for short. (“Think less organized crime, more ‘Golden Girls.’”). But unlike her friends, Izumi has no clear idea what’s next after senior year or why she feels so adrift.

Then Izumi’s friend Noora discovers an evocative love note hidden in one of Izumi’s mom’s books, dated with Izumi’s birth year, and traces it to none other than the crown prince of Japan. Izumi is intrigued: Surely it’s impossible that her dad could be someone so distinguished, right? But when Izumi’s mom—and soon after, an entourage from the Japanese Embassy, followed closely by an entourage from the Japanese tabloid media—confirms the truth, Izumi is whisked off to Tokyo to meet the royal family she didn’t know she had.

In addition to her lack of Japanese language skills, Izumi struggles with constant scrutiny from some of her particularly judgmental relatives, her hot yet chilly bodyguard and members of the press. But she is charmed by Japan’s beauty, and her father and other family members welcome her warmly, even when she makes missteps by wearing inappropriately casual clothing or choosing the wrong knife at dinner. 

Jean impeccably blends Izumi’s thoroughly American sensibilities with a fond and cheerful depiction of Japanese culture. Izumi and her love interest even confess their feelings to each other using waka, a traditional poetic form, instead of letters. Along with excerpts from the Tokyo Tattler and the AGG’s group text, Izumi’s vulnerable yet brash first-person narration propels the novel forward and gives it a contemporary feel despite the thousands of years of tradition underpinning her experiences. Readers in search of a witty fairy tale that delivers plenty of romance and glamour should look no further than Tokyo Ever After.

Over the course of her nine YA novels, including Michael L. Printz Honor book Please Ignore Vera Dietz and Printz Medal winner Dig., A.S. King has earned a reputation for writing books that are consistently smart and timely. She is unafraid to challenge readers with ambitious prose and structure or to confront them with frank treatments of weighty themes including race, sexuality and mental health. Switch continues this work. 

In Truda Becker’s world, time has stopped. It’s been June 23, 2020, for nine months, more or less. An online program called N3WCLOCK has stepped in to fill the void, informing everyone from airline pilots to high school students what time it would be, had time continued to function properly. At school, Tru and her classmates participate in an initiative called Solution Time, pooling their resources and creativity to either solve the time problem or sufficiently distract themselves so they stop caring about it altogether. 

Tru’s attempts to solve the problem are complicated by a couple of issues. At home, her father has begun building a series of nested plywood boxes around a mysterious light switch at the center of their house. As the novel progresses, the house begins to turn on its axis, Tru and her family members separated into boxes within it, casualties of this inscrutable DIY project. 

Tru has also recently discovered that she’s a javelin-throwing prodigy. The media has begun to report on people with special abilities, so-called Anomalies who can solve impossible math problems, heal injuries with a mere touch or even fly. As Tru navigates both the situation at her house and her newfound athletic fame, she wonders how all these strange circumstances could be connected—and whether she can break open the boxes that are keeping people apart from one another.

At first, the story’s intriguingly abstract world is so surreal as to be disorienting, as is Tru’s fragmented narration, her scattered thoughts punctuated only by forward slashes (like / so). broken apart by slashes (/) between them. Readers would do well to relax and settle into the novel’s bizarre, provocative premise and follow King where she wants to lead them. As Switch explores the spectrum between isolation and connection, it becomes an unsettling but emotionally resonant novel for our own unsettling times.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: A.S. King reveals how an invitation to speak at a library led to the genesis of Switch.