Printz Honor-winning author A.S. King’s novels (Please Ignore Vera Dietz, Still Life With Tornado) are in another solar system entirely, so it can be hard to give readers a taste of what her stories are like without just handing them the books.

In Dig, her latest work of surrealist fiction, she follows five teenagers. A boy throws himself into snow shoveling and house painting in an attempt to save for a car that will help him find his dad. A girl works the drive-thru at an Arby’s and deals drugs from the window. The Freak—but what exactly is she?—moves between worlds and tries to tie a family together. These are just three threads in this tangled root ball of a story. There’s also First-Class Malcolm, who’s taking care of his terminally ill dad, and Loretta the Flea-Circus Ring Mistress.

These teens are the grandchildren of Gottfried and Marla, a couple who made their wealth developing subdivisions and are now pretty miserable. They cut off their kids and left them to their own devices, and now a traditional family gathering threatens to finally expose the extent to which their legacy of harm has eaten away at them all. 

King brings an intense surrealism to Dig’s discussion of racism and respectability politics. Plot points like the grotesque flea circus and the Freak’s magical ability to “flicker” from place to place don’t seem so exotic when placed next to scenes in which a suburban mom polishes her antebellum souvenir. Each generation hopes the next will improve; in Dig, that hope feels more urgently needed than ever.

Shaun David Hutchinson’s The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried is a weird, surreal ride—one that might be bumpy in the hands of a less adept writer. But Hutchinson (We Are the Ants) has become known for his unique and offbeat takes on the young adult experience, and in his latest, he pairs a quirky premise with vitally alive—or, in one case, half-alive—teen characters. 

Dino’s parents own a funeral home, so he’s no stranger to death. But he’s not expecting his best friend, July, to die suddenly. Their relationship was, like many teen friendships, challenged when Dino started dating. It’s clear the two had unfinished business, so it’s lucky that just days before her funeral, July comes back to life—as an animated corpse. July and Dino try to come to terms with this supernatural occurrence while revisiting their friendship and trying to find out how Dino’s relationship with his new boyfriend will be impacted. 

Could Dino and July really have done things differently to stay friends while July was alive? And what does this mean for the future? Does July even have a future? This quirky novel has just enough surrealism to keep teens wanting more.

High school students Jordan and Max couldn’t be more different. Jordan writes poetry and hangs out with his two female best friends while Max chills with the jocks on the baseball team. When Max stumbles into a summer job helping out at Jordan’s late father’s food truck, the boys are awkward coworkers at first and the truck is looking like it’s a miserable failure. Max isn’t getting paid and Jordan isn’t earning the money he needs to help his mother pay the mortgage. But once the boys redesign the truck and its menu (nevermind some bumpy false starts), their unique spicy chicken and frozen lemonade recipes start attracting customers. As sales begin to boom and the hot Phoenix summer blazes around them, the two boys begin to bond and share their vulnerabilities: Jordan is scared by his mother’s mental illness, and Max is dealing with the trauma of being assaulted by an older boy at a party. Before long, they’ve moved from being friendly coworkers to being boyfriends. But will their feelings for each other be enough to sustain them as things begin to turn sour?

Like all of Konigsberg’s previous young adult books, The Music of What Happens isn’t afraid to tackle complex personal and social issues like race and gender, but thankfully and Max and Jordan’s sexual orientations are portrayed as completely normal. This is an utterly contemporary take on the age-old summer love story.

As part of the DC Icons series, where blockbuster authors reexplore and reimagine iconic superheroes for a new, young audience, Newberry Medal-winning author Matt de la Peña’s Superman: Dawnbreaker explores Clark Kent’s early years as a teenager in his small hometown. And just as Clark is learning his true identity and extraordinary abilities, he is simultaneously balancing the risks and responsibilities that accompany such power and exploring what it means to belong in today’s America.

Set against the backdrop of a fictional, modern-day Smallville, Kansas, readers meet a cast of familiar characters, including Clark’s parents, Lana Lang and Lex Luthor, but de la Peña also introduces readers to a bevy of new characters who are involved with the powerful Mankins Corporation. The multi-millionaire Mankins family, including Clark’s fellow high school student Bryan, have moved into Smallville to supposedly bring new jobs into the farming town. But as Clark and Lana befriend Bryan and do some digging into his father’s company, they soon learn that the corporation is not as kindhearted as the bosses would like the town to believe. All the while, Smallville’s Mexican-American residents have started suddenly disappearing, and it’s up to Clark and his friends to get to the bottom of it all before it tears the town apart.

De la Peña writes in an introductory note that “Superman belongs to all of us . . . he is an outsider who longs to make the world a kinder, safer place,” and the author does a phenomenal job of humanizing this powerful superhero in a way that makes him more relatable than he’s ever been before.

Each season, for 327 years, Prince Rhen of Emberfell faces a curse. The terms? Find a girl to fall in love with him, or turn into a ferocious beast who destroys everything in its path. And every season his devoted guard commander Grey—the only member of the Royal Guard to escape the murderous beast—travels to a parallel world to bring back a romantic prospect for Rhen. Every year, Rhen fails, which brings endless amusement of the enchantress who cursed him. Every time the beast is killed, his enchanted castle resets and a new season begins. But in this final season, Rhen’s death will be permanent.

Harper lives in Washington D.C. Cerebral palsy has twisted her muscles, her mother is dying, her father is absent and her brother has violent debt collectors at his heels. When an accidental encounter with Grey transports her to his magical world of Emberfell, her first goal is to find a way back home. Soon, though, she comes to care for Emberfell, and she and Rhen concoct a plan to protect the land from an invading foreign power. She’ll pretend to be Princess Harper of “Disi,” an ally with an army ready to push back the invaders.

As politics swirl and violence erupts, Harper also finds herself slowly falling for Rhen. But will her love be enough to break the spell in time? A great choice for readers who swoon at Beauty and the Beast narratives and who relish a story that ends in the thick of the action.

Debut author Jodie Lynn Zdrok transports readers to 1887 Paris in this fascinating YA murder mystery that follows a 16-year-old newspaper reporter named Nathalie Baudin. Nathalie finds her new beat—reporting on the unclaimed bodies that show up at the public morgue—fascinating but also a bit grisly. As the story opens, we find her waiting her turn in an incredibly long line to enter a morgue. Morgue viewing was indeed a popular pastime in fin de siècle Paris—even for families with young children.

But soon one corpse claims Nathalie’s attention: a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who was viciously stabbed. As she looks at the girl, Nathalie suddenly finds herself transported to the scene of the murder and relives the girl’s final moments. Nathalie feels shaken to her core, “as if the horror she’d witnessed was both real and not real.” The incident marks the beginning of Nathalie’s quest to understand her strange new supernatural abilities and harness them to help find the serial killer who is terrorizing the city

Zdrok holds a degree in European history, and her writing sparkles with details that evoke 19th-century Paris. Spectacle’s cliffhanger ending will leave readers eager for Nathalie’s next case. 

Paris Secord—known as DJ ParSec to her growing fan base—is throwing one last pop-up party before taking the world by storm. But then she’s unexpectedly murdered. Her body is found by Paris’ friends, Kya and Fuse, but the two are sworn enemies. But in order to find ParSec’s killer, they’ll have to set their differences aside and work together. Spin is a fast-paced, intricately layered whodunit: Be prepared to stay up late to finish it.

Edgar Award-nominated author Lamar Giles (Overturned) serves up plenty of potential suspects in this thriller, from a demanding ex-boyfriend to ParSec’s older manager who was fired, to a subset of fans whose love sometimes turns into obsession. Fuse and Kya have to bridge uncomfortable class divisions to find common ground; they unite in the belief that the police don’t care about finding their friend’s killer, an assumption that’s proven to be not entirely correct. The generational gap between these tech-savvy kids and their parents—whose 1980s and ’90s rap and R&B records are the classics these teens were raised on and inspired by—tugs at the reader’s heart.

By the time the killer is sussed out, our frenemies have found they have more than their late friend in common. Giles has created a true-to-form mystery that’s utterly modern and occasionally surreal. (The horror movie masks favored by ParSec’s more out-there fans are deeply creepy, just like their behaviors.) Even the title, Spin, is eventually revealed to mean more than it does at first glance, just one more twist in this gripping thriller.

Josie and Delia are so similar that they’re often confused for sisters, especially when they’re decked out as their alter egos Rayne Ravenscroft and Delilah Darkwood in order to host their campy public access horror show, “Midnite Matinee.” But as graduation approaches, Josie dreads having to choose between staying in her hometown with Delia and leaving to pursue her TV career. Delia, meanwhile, is desperate to find a way to make each Saturday broadcast of “Midnite Matinee” good enough to hold Josie’s attention and maybe even bring back her own estranged father. 

Tensions come to a head, but eventually the friends realize that moving on doesn’t have to mean breaking up. In Rayne & Delilah’s Midnite Matinee, bestselling author Jeff Zentner (Goodbye Days) trades in his signature weightiness for a story filled with campy humor and a dash of feminism as he takes us behind the scenes of Josie and Delia’s public access show—and their friendship. But in making the shift in tone, Zentner has successfully retained his knack for crafting unique and charming teen characters who are tackling tough issues—like abandonment and mental illness—with grace and wit.

Josie and Delia’s spitfire dialogue will have readers in stitches, while the tough lessons they learn about growing up (despite all their best efforts) will be a powerful catharsis for anyone who’s felt the pain and loss that so often comes with changing friendships.

The cleverly plotted, page-turning sequel to Maureen Johnson’s hit bestseller Truly Devious (2018) manages to outshine its predecessor as true crime aficionado Stevie Bell returns to posh private school Ellingham Academy and unearths even more confounding clues in her investigation of a classmate’s mysterious disappearance.

Stevie promised school officials and her parents that she would refrain from inserting herself into any more real-life murder investigations and decades-old cold cases. But when she gets an internship with the wacky Dr. Fenton—who wrote the book on the 1936 unsolved kidnappings of Academy founder Albert Ellingham’s wife and daughter—she makes a gruesome discovery that rattles the school once more.

To further complicate matters, Stevie has made a deal with corrupt Senator Edward King to keep tabs on his son, David, the boy with whom she shares a burgeoning romance. And then there’s Dr. Fenton’s handsome nephew, who has some revelations of his own for Stevie. It’s not just several murders that Stevie is trying to puzzle out, but her social life as well. All the adults keep warning her away from investigating, but Stevie can’t resist a good mystery, and her murder obsession might get her killed.

Suspense and intrigue abound in The Vanishing Stair as Johnson illuminates suspects and teases out clues that will flummox even the most adept murder mystery aficionado. Like the humorous and intellectually curious Stevie, Johnson is a true crime lover, and she dedicates this sequel “to all the murderinos” (fans of the popular “My Favorite Murder” podcast).

Savvy sleuths will devour this sequel in one gulp, but they’ll have to wait until 2020 for the next installment.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Goodbye, Perfect, the latest novel from British author Sara Barnard (A Quiet Kind of Thunder, Fragile), is a bittersweet exploration of the bonds of friendship, the limits of how well we can know one another and the power of internal and external pressures to unravel our identities.

Eden and Bonnie have been best friends since they were 7 years old, when Eden—a rough-around-the-edges foster kid—arrived for her first day of school and perfect-in-every-way Bonnie took her under her wing. Though the two girls are drastically different, they’ve always balanced each other and kept each other steady. 

But during the week before the start of final exams, now 15-year-old Bonnie runs off with Jack, her secret boyfriend who is also their school’s 29-year-old music teacher, and Eden is left to question everything she thought she knew—both about her best friend and about herself.

In the vein of Carrie Fountain’s I’m Not Missing, Barnard’s novel is written from the point of view of the friend who’s left behind. Bonnie’s disappearance is the catalyst for Eden to begin a complex journey of growth and self-discovery, and Barnard uses a light touch to bring readers along as Eden receives a string of emails from Bonnie and re-evaluates her perceptions of love, friendship and her relationships with her adoptive family and her “lovely, non-secret, drama-free” boyfriend, Connor.

Fans of Sarah Dessen will be eager to inhale this nuanced, heartfelt coming-of-age story about the pain of losing what you once held dear—and the joy and satisfaction of finding yourself in the process.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

“I might have to kill somebody tonight.” It’s a powerful opening line for multiple award-winning author Angie Thomas’ sophomore novel, On the Come Up, which brings readers back to the neighborhood of Garden Heights, the setting of her debut, The Hate U Give. But what 16-year-old Bri really wants to slay is her competitor in the Ring, a place where wannabe rappers come to compete against each other. She’s beyond confident; after all, she’s the daughter of Lawless, a legendary and influential rapper who was killed in the midst of gang violence.

Fueled with a desire to be like her father, Bri goes big with her verse—maybe too big. When she wins the rap battle and a buzzworthy video of her performance goes viral, she discovers that her war has just begun. Bri’s raw and controversial lyrics put her in danger when they incite misunderstanding and anger, and her classmates label her as “hood.” Add to that an eviction notice, a drug-dealing aunt and an out-of-work mom who’s a recovering addict, and it looks like Bri has bitten off more than she can chew on her way to the top.

Can Bri remain true to herself while rapping behind a tough persona? And is free speech really free—especially for young black people? Bri discovers that this fighting-for-your-life thing gets real in more ways than one.

Thomas knocked it out of the park with The Hate U Give—amassing scores of literary awards and a blockbuster movie deal. In the introduction to her new book, she calls that experience “surreal.” But Thomas should prepare for even more attention and accolades, because On the Come Up is another raw and powerful look at the challenges of being young and black in America.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Someday We Will Fly, Rachel DeWoskin presents a perspective of World War II that is seldom represented in contemporary classrooms—the Jewish people who found refuge in Japanese-occupied China, one of the last places to accept European refugees without visas.

In 1940, both Warsaw and Shanghai were situated within countries that were devoured by conquering nations, and both cities were populated by those who were either ignored or shunned by the rest of the world. Fifteen-year-old Lillia Kazka has a good life in Poland, performing with her parents in an acrobatic circus and attending school with her friends. But everything changes when her mother is taken by Nazis during a raid on their final circus performance, and Lillia, her father and her disabled younger sister are forced to set out on a multi-month journey to reach Shanghai. Although Lillia is free from Nazi violence and persecution when she first arrives in China, she finds that life in an occupied country so far from home is anything but comfortable or easy.

Meticulously researched and breathtakingly detailed, Someday We Will Fly is based on real accounts of Jewish refugees living in Shanghai and the difficult conditions they endured in order to survive. DeWoskin beautifully intertwines Lillia’s hope, pain, joy, sorrow and love with the larger narrative of the war-torn world’s fear and uncertainty. DeWoskin gives a voice to tens of thousands of forgotten people as she uncovers their stories and experiences. This is essential reading.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.