Her family’s unofficial motto is Katsuyamas Never Quit, but that hasn’t held true for 17-year-old CJ, who knows she’s never going to be as high-powered as her ambitious single mom. CJ prefers helping her Aunt Hannah at their family floral shop, Heart’s Desire.

Heart’s Desire is a point of family pride. CJ’s grandfather spent 30 years saving enough money to buy back the shop at an astronomical markup. When the Katsuyamas and thousands of other Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps during World War II, her grandfather was forced to sell all of his property to an investor named McAllister for a fraction of its true value. But now, with Heart’s Desire struggling, CJ’s mom is threatening to sell it right back to a McAllister who currently serves as the head of the venture capital firm where she is a partner.

This outrage stokes CJ’s activist spirit, especially when she learns that the Heart’s Desire scandal is only one of many examples of the McAllister family profiting off the losses of Japanese Americans.

Misa Sugiura’s This Time Will Be Different shows CJ wrestling with her growing awareness of racism and the injustices of history while also grappling with more typical teenage concerns like an unattainable crush or a changing relationship with her best friend. With the help of a history-loving boy, CJ starts to realize that although we might never be able to fix past mistakes—both globally and personally—we can learn from them, tell their stories and try our best to avoid making them again.

Blair Thornburgh’s second novel, Ordinary Girls, is a delightful, contemporary take on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility with a bit of Brontë sprinkled in for fun.

Plum and her older sister, Ginny, live in an old house along with their widowed mom, an assortment of pets and a gay doctoral student in music whom they call “Almost-Doctor Andrew.” Unlike the sisters in Austen’s novel, it’s not the death of their father but a plumbing disaster—combined with a publishing demise—that precipitates their family’s financial ruin. Their mother learns that the popular children’s book series she illustrated is being reissued for its 25th anniversary with a new artist. The result? No more royalties.

For high school senior Ginny, who’s caught up in the pressure of college admissions, the weight of social expectations has become nearly unbearable. Like Marianne in Austen’s novel, she loses herself and even has a frightening brush with death.

Early on, however, it’s the plumbing situation that propels Plum outside her self-imposed cocoon. A loud sophomore boy named Tate Kurokawa offers Plum the use of his family’s shower. From there, Plum ends up tutoring Tate in English (her foray into governessing), and the two seemingly mismatched teens begin to make surprising discoveries about each other and themselves.

Although Thornburgh’s intended audience is young adults, Ordinary Girls is a romantic comedy that’s perfect for adult Janeites. So if you’re looking for a gift for a sister or a friend who loves books about people who love books, pick up this humorous, heartwarming tale by a very talented novelist.

Still waters run deep in With the Fire on High, the second novel from Elizabeth Acevedo, author of the award-winning The Poet X.

Emoni Santiago, known for her amazing skills in the kitchen, is a senior at her Philadelphia charter school, but her family is closer to the forefront of her mind than classes and college applications. Her 2-year-old daughter, Emma, whom Emoni calls “Babygirl,” has just started daycare. Babygirl’s father, Tyrone, is sweet to the child, but he’s a headache for Emoni. Emoni’s own father, Julio, is an activist who couldn’t handle single parenthood after Emoni’s mother, a black woman from North Carolina, died during childbirth. Now, when Julio visits from Puerto Rico, he leaves without goodbyes. And Emoni’s grandmother, ’Buela, keeps having doctor’s appointments that she doesn’t fully explain. 

But at school, a new guy is testing Emoni’s resolve not to deal with pretty boys, and then there’s the elective class she’s taking a chance on—culinary arts. When Emoni cooks at home, her dishes are inspired and have the power to bring people to tears. (Readers can try out Emoni’s dishes for themselves with the many recipes peppered throughout.) But the class assignments feature as much science as they do art, more discipline than creativity, and Emoni isn’t the school-achievement type. Plus, she’s not sure what to do about the culinary class’s study-abroad trip to Spain, which she has no money for. 

Readers will connect with Emoni as she navigates complex relationships, her irritation at being misunderstood and her self-identity with confidence and sass while trying to keep her dreams realistic and motherhood on the front burner. Although not as lyrical as Acevedo’s debut, With the Fire on High stands out for its unique, realistic subject matter and memorable characters.

Kip Wilson’s debut young adult novel, White Rose, was the first book acquired by Kwame Alexander’s new imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which aims to offer a greater diversity of voices in books for young people. Fittingly, White Rose is all about voices.

Based on a true story, this novel-in-verse gives voice to German teen Sophie Scholl and her fellow members of the White Rose movement. The group spoke out against Hitler and the rise of the Nazis by distributing leaflets that encouraged Germans to rise up and join their resistance. But Sophie and her brother, Hans, were not successful in their mission, and after they were caught passing out leaflets at Munich University, they were arrested, interrogated and imprisoned.

In Wilson’s fictionalized account, Sophie is the narrator, and the story is largely hers, with an occasional letter from Hans and voices of a few other characters—like Robert Mohr, the Gestapo interrogator; Jakob Schmid, the janitor at the university who caught the Scholls and turned them in; Else Gebel, another prisoner; and Roland Freisler, the judge. The innovative narrative structure begins at “The End” in 1943, with Sophie at the Gestapo headquarters, and then the story shifts back to 1935, when Sophie was 14. The intervening years trace Sophie’s life and gradual political awakening. By writing in verse and exploring several secondary characters, Wilson offers a compelling work that will be perfect for the reader’s theater exercises in English or history classrooms, and it pairs nicely with Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s Hitler Youth and Russell Freedman’s We Will Not Be Silent.

In their latest novel, If I’m Being Honest, Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka (Always Never Yours) bring The Taming of the Shrew (and, with it, Ten Things I Hate About You) into present-day context as high school senior Cameron Bright grapples with what it means to change yourself in order to please others.

Beautiful, smart and brutally honest Cameron has been called a b*tch more times than she can count. But it never bothers her. The people who know her well love her, so why should she care about anyone else? But when her crush, Andrew, calls her out on her behavior, she decides it’s time for a change. Inspired by her English class assignment, The Taming of the Shrew, she decides to “tame herself.” But as one attempt after the next goes awry, Cameron learns that being nice doesn’t mean being soft. And, more importantly, nobody’s approval is worth losing who you are.

Wibberley and Siegemund-Broka’s punchy prose and deft (mis)handling of Shakespeare make for an entertaining read on their own, but the authors’ real strength lies in their treatment of Cameron and her friends, both new and old. While most of these characters aren’t exactly likable, they are all so complex and thoroughly developed that we can’t help but root for them—and see ourselves in them—as they work through the drama and the expectations that come with senior year.

For 41 cycles over thousands of years, the wizard Merlin has had the same agenda: Find Arthur, train Arthur, and nudge him onto the nearest throne. Then Arthur is supposed to defeat the greatest evil in the universe and unite all of humankind. Every cycle so far, Arthur has died and Merlin has aged backward—until this 42nd reincarnation of the once and future monarch.

This time, Arthur is a teenage Arab interplanetary refugee who was taken in by an adoptive brother named Kay and his two moms. Arthur is also a girl named Ari. And, like nearly everyone else in this futuristic world, Ari is queer.

Familiar characters and places from the legend are here in new guises. Gweneviere is the multi-racial leader of a rebel planet, Lamarack is gender-fluid, and Camelot is a combination of a run-down spacecraft and a world where medieval entertainment takes center stage. The greatest evil in the universe is a mega-corporation known as Mercer that’s led by an unforgiving Administrator. When a quest to reveal Mercer’s dark side—and to rescue Kay and Ari’s moms—goes awry, Ari and her friends must draw on previously unrecognized strengths to save themselves and the universe, and the stunning conclusion leaves room for future stories.

Authors Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy, best known for their Rainbow Boxes project to stock libraries and shelters with fiction featuring LGBTQ+ characters, bring the King Arthur story to life in an entirely new way, complete with space battles, steamy romance and high adventure.

Author Natasha Deen, whose Guyanese family moved to Canada when she was a young girl, mines her own immigration experience for her newest YA novel, In the Key of Nira Ghani.

Fitting in as a teen is anxiety provoking, but it’s even more difficult when you’re an immigrant and one of only two people of color in your whole school. Nira’s parents want the best for her, and the family recently fled Guyana with just their belongings in order to make a better life in Canada. They want her to become a doctor and to live a comfortable life. Since Nira is a dutiful daughter, she studies faithfully, but she has a love in her life that she hides from them—jazz trumpet.

For Nira, playing her instrument provides a welcome escape from the mean girl at school who makes ignorant, racist comments and asks rude questions about Nira’s identity. Nira’s best friend, Emily, also helps until she becomes good friends with the mean girl. To further complicate things in her life, Nira is forced to spend time with a cousin whom she can’t stand.

Guyanese cultural references add to the richness of this tale. A possible romance is on the horizon for Nina, but familial conflicts abound, with Nira’s wise grandmother often smoothing out rough patches until something happens that even she can’t fix.

This layered story ripples with jazz-like rhythms, and Deen gracefully shows what it’s like to be an outsider and how a true conviction of spirit is sometimes all the improvising one needs.

In Australian author Helena Fox’s debut, How It Feels to Float, 17-year-old Elizabeth’s father still appears to her 10 years after his death. Biz, as she’s called by friends and family, finds comfort in his ghostly presence and indulges in his stories about her childhood and his love for her mother. But Biz also feels at home among her self-described “Posse” of classmates and with her best friend, Grace.

During Biz’s junior year, her life starts to unravel. She discovers that she may be attracted to Grace, but her sexual orientation is still a conundrum. And when rumors about her sexuality start to spread around school, the Posse officially shuns her. Worst of all, her father disappears one night while she’s at the beach. As she finds herself alone, Biz may start to understand what it’s like for her father to float, “to watch and not be seen.”

In this lyrical story, we follow Biz as she sets out to find her lost father. As she connects with a new boy at school named Jasper (whose sexual orientation is also undefined) and an older female mentor, Biz’s narration occasionally turns from prose to poetry. In order to connect with her father, she will have to do the hard work of confronting her PTSD and unresolved grief. 

This is a frank story of mental illness, loss and sexual identity, and Fox responsibly concludes her story with information and support services for readers facing similar issues. How It Feels to Float is a beautifully crafted story of finding hope and love when both appear to be gone forever.

In Sarah Henstra’s We Contain Multitudes, an unlikely duo are paired up as pen pals for a weekly writing assignment, an arrangement that leads to friendship and even love.

Senior Adam “Kurl” Kurlansky and sophomore Jonathan “Jo” Hopkirk couldn’t be more mismatched: Kurl plays football and works for his family’s roofing business, while Jo plays the mandolin and loves Walt Whitman so much he dresses like him.

Telling the story solely via their exchanged letters, Henstra pulls off an especially neat trick: Jo and Kurl start off as different as night and day in both voice and temperament, but over time they begin to sound more like one another as they discover common ground and learn a bit more about each other’s lives. Jo is bullied mercilessly at school but is also grieving a loss from early childhood; Kurl is obsessed with his brother’s military service in Afghanistan, yet he fails to make the connection between combat trauma and his own perilous home life. Henstra doesn’t sugarcoat any of these challenges, which makes the teens’ love story a hard-won treasure. Throughout the Minneapolis-set novel runs a sad and lovely thread about Prince, which encourages playlist creation while reading.

There’s something about seeing the world through these boys’ separate points of view that brings the story to life in a visceral way. We Contain Multitudes is a heartbreaker in many ways, but it’s ultimately a beautiful story about how love (and poetry) are sometimes enough to carry the day. 

Sixteen-year-old Tiger Tolliver never wanted to learn how to make friends with the dark. But that’s what happens when her mom dies unexpectedly and her ensuing grief becomes overwhelming.

“If you looked at yourself in a mirror right now, could you see pieces of bone close to the surface?” Tiger wonders. “Is this how it will feel every day from now on?” Tiger may be strong, but she’s genuinely scared of what’s to come. 

She initially channels her “Grand Canyon of grief” by wearing the same ugly dress for days on end—the same dress that Tiger and her mom argued about. During that argument, they exchanged their last words.

In these early days of grieving, Tiger feels like she is surrounded by the dark. All she feels is fear, sadness and uncertainty as she takes on the responsibilities of organizing her mother’s funeral and end-of-life documents. She never knew her father, and she doesn’t have any extended family that she knows of, so she becomes a ward of the state of Arizona, and she’s soon shuttled from foster home to foster home.

When a previously unknown half-sister is discovered, Tiger becomes her charge, and together they reach out to their incarcerated father and try to navigate an uncertain (but hopefully forward-looking) future as a family. Secondary characters feed the narrative and provide balance to Tiger in her journey, which she measures in minutes since her mother’s death.

Bestselling author Kathleen Glasgow’s second novel, How to Make Friends With the Dark, is an honest and extremely harrowing read. As young readers take this journey with Tiger, they will learn that grief takes all forms and that life, somehow, does go on—even amid the surrounding dark.