As bombs pelt World War II London, a group of young siblings are transported to another world. Once there, they befriend magical creatures, fight a war, grow into adults and finally, via a majestic stag, return home at the exact moment they departed. If it feels like you’ve read this story before, rest assured The Light Between Worlds still has some surprises in store.

Evelyn hasn’t been the same since she abruptly returned from a magical land called the Woodlands six years ago. Each night, she sneaks out of her boarding school to wander the woods, seeking a way back to the world of her heart. Evelyn’s older sister, Philippa, has long been her main source of support, but Philippa’s become so interested in chasing popularity that Evelyn barely recognizes her.

Surrounding herself with a swirl of activities has become Philippa’s defense and coping mechanism against her own sadness. When an unexpected development leads Philippa to take a job in the conservation department at the National Gallery, she meets a young man with his own reasons for wanting to repair damaged treasures.

The unspoken presence of C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia pervades Laura E. Weymouth’s debut novel. How might travelers feel upon finding themselves children again after living half a lifetime in another world? What could explain a teen’s defection from fantasy, turning instead toward seemingly spurious concerns? And what can someone do when their heart calls them home to a different world?

Fans of Narnia and contemporary interpretations like Lev Grossman’s The Magicians will relish The Light Between Worlds.

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Teen Top Pick, December 2018

The teen years can be taken over by impossible ideals of beauty informed by images of airbrushed bodies that inundate popular media, as well as rigorous college applications that demand impeccable transcripts, off-the-charts test scores and athletic prowess.

As genetic science advances—specifically with the experimental protein known as CRISPR that can “cut” chunks of DNA and essentially edit the strands—and with the rising popularity of plastic surgery among teens, Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful is a chilling, necessary look at a near-future world where the quest for human improvement runs amok.

Structured like the popular sci-fi Netflix series “Black Mirror,” Arwen Elys Dayton’s novel unfolds in a series of six vignettes that each follows a different young protagonist.

In one story reminiscent of Kazuo Ishiguro’s wrenching classic Never Let Me Go, a 15-year-old twin wrestles with allowing the heart of his beloved, dying sister to be fused with his own failing organ in order to create a “super-heart.” Another story examines the societal repercussions of using biomachinery to save gravely injured trauma patients. Those who have had their vital organs and limbs rebuilt become targets of intense scorn and hate crimes, while religious pushback against the procedures spirals violently out control.

We can’t put the proverbial genie back in the bottle in terms of scientific discovery, but as Dayton proves in these thrilling and often poignant stories, we can, and we should, seriously consider the constraints of what makes us human and the dangers of chasing an ideal.

This article was originally published in the December 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Laini Taylor returns to the city of Weep in this sequel to her 2018 Printz Honor book, Strange the Dreamer. Muse of Nightmares starts the moment Strange the Dreamer ends, with many characters facing new circumstances and others continuing to struggle against old problems. Minya, tamer of ghosts, remains ever vigilant; Eril-Fane, both hero and villain, remains trapped in his inability to love. Meanwhile, Lazlo and Sarai face beginnings and endings of their own.

Minya is determined to destroy Weep, but her fellow godspawn want to break the cycle of violence. As the godspawn argue—and as Sarai mines Minya’s dreams, seeking ways to calm her appetite for vengeance—a second plot is introduced. In this new time and place, two sisters are separated by the whim of a powerful young metalsmith with godly ambitions. As the two plots converge, the world of the story expands, eventually answering the core question from Strange the Dreamer: Why have the gods spent 200 years raping human women to breed half-god children, and where have all the godspawn babies gone?

Not everything is serious, though. Feral and Ruby continue their romantic squabbles, while the untouchably princely Thyon is teased for the first time, making a friend and possibly more. Observant readers will also notice a reference to Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone series.

Overflowing with the luscious language, moral ambiguity and detailed fantasy world-building characteristic of Taylor’s writing, Muse of Nightmares brings the story of Weep to a satisfying conclusion.

BookPage Teen Top Pick, November 2018

Cutthroat. Ruthless. Unpredictable. That’s modern politics, but it’s also modern high school. In Gordon Jack’s satirical novel, Your Own Worst Enemy, three candidates fight dirty to be Lincoln High’s next student-body president.

Stacey Wynn was supposed to have this in the bag. She’s running unopposed, and after all, who has done more for this California high school than she? She champions all the clubs, attends all the spirit rallies, and she hands out free cupcakes—off school grounds and in accordance with the state’s strict nutritional policy, of course.

With her best friend and campaign advisor, Brian, by her side, Stacey thinks that all she needs to do is rehearse her acceptance speech—until Julia Romero, a new student and French-Canadian immigrant, shows up and throws her hat into the ring. The race gets even more complicated when Chinese-American Tony Guo, a stoner and slacker, is manipulated by a Steve Bannon-esque freshman into running on a populist platform.

What should have been a quiet election turns into a circus of misinformation, fake news and low-down tactics. Will the best candidate for the job win?

Jack succeeds in using the microcosm of high school to explore the complexities of race, privilege and class as it relates to the American political process. And through multiple points of view (the three candidates, Brian and his troubled brother), readers get a sense of the personal stakes involved for everyone in the political arena. While the current political landscape is polarized, Your Own Worst Enemy reminds us that hope lies with the younger generations.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Leanne “Lee” Bauer is ready to set the record straight. It has been three years since her high school’s mass shooting led to the deaths of 9 students (10 if you count the shooter himself) and 2 teachers. The shooting also left one student paralyzed and the others severely traumatized. Lee was in the bathroom holding hands with her best friend, Sarah, as the shooter aimed and fired at Sarah. Everyone believes that Sarah died while proclaiming her religious faith, but only Lee and one other survivor know the truth of what really happened in the bathroom that day.

When Sarah’s family decides to publish a book about their daughter and the massacre, Lee decides it’s time to reveal what actually happened, because all of the survivors deserve to have a voice.

Keplinger (The Duff) pens an extremely powerful, mind-blowing and chilling account of what it is like to be on the inside of a high school shooting and how details and facts can become misconstrued as a result of trauma. In chapters that deserve a trigger warning, Lee and the other survivors recount the massacre as they experienced it. Featuring a cast of diverse characters, and unique narration that includes poetry and letters,    Keplinger shows she’s up to snuff with this heavy hitting that is unfortunately trending. Reminiscent of Marieke Nijkamp’s This Is Where It Ends (2016), this novel would make an excellent springboard for parents or teachers who want to open a discussion about gun violence with their teens.

The truth is out there and Penny wants to find it. The “real” truth, of course, and not that garbage her paranormal conspiracy-theory touting father feeds the readers of his publication, Strange World. In Lindsey Klingele ’s The Truth Lies Here, Penny is determined to get accepted into Northwestern’s school of journalism, even if that means returning to her tiny hometown of Bone Lake to write the article that will get her there. What Penny finds, however, is much more than she bargained for.

Things seem immediately amiss, as Penny’s father doesn’t pick her up from the airport, and, in fact, seems to be missing. Couple that with the fact the people keep repeating the same phrase to her over and over, strange men are wandering around town and burned bodies keep showing up in the woods, and Penny has to rethink her stance on the paranormal. She decides to take matters into her own hands and begins to search for her father with the help of Dex, her closest childhood friend, and Micah, the high-school quarterback (and Penny’s hidden crush). This search leads all of them to discover that things in Bone Lake are much stranger than they believed.

Ideal for fans of Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” The Truth Lies Here brilliantly keeps readers second-guessing. Multiple, complex plot lines are woven together with rich, thoughtful characters, and an eerie and unsettling mood hangs over every page. This is the kind of book that keeps you up at night. You won’t want to stop reading until you reach the deeply satisfying and somewhat disturbing conclusion.

The youngest dancer in the Atlanta Ballet Conservatory, Cason Martin is one of the best ballerinas in the country. Her very first memories are of ballet, and she’s well on her way to a successful career on the stage. But when a strain in her leg turns into her worst nightmare, she knows she may never perform again. While Cason is learning to give up control of her life, Davis Channing—a cancer survivor and recovering drug addict—is regaining control of his by volunteering in the oncology department that saved him once before. As the two teens get to know each other at the hospital, they discover that, together, they may just be brave enough to reinvent their dreams.

Kati Garnder’s debut novel, Brave Enough, is in many ways a frothy, fun teenage romance, but the author—a childhood cancer survivor and amputee herself—tackles tough subjects with a masterful nuance that is both candid and compassionate. The emotions Gardner’s characters experience as they swing through hope and grief and back again feel raw, real and deserved, and each is well developed and complex. Whether they can always see it or not, Gardner has made sure Cason, Davis and their friends are much more than their afflictions.

Though the plot is somewhat predictable, Gardner’s strong storytelling skills and her knack for dealing with subject matter that is so often relegated to hushed whispers make her debut novel a powerful one.

In Markus Zusak’s first release since the publication of his number one New York Times bestseller The Book Thief, he weaves a modern epic of great love, wrenching loss and the sustaining power of familial bonds.

The world of the five Dunbar boys is one of love and blasphemy, fists and forgiveness. It is a world marked by tragedy—first by the untimely death of their mother and then by their father’s abrupt abandonment. Each of the boys deals with grief in their own way, but Clay, the fourth boy, holds a secret. And when their father suddenly reappears with a strange request, it is Clay who answers his plea. But in doing so, he must face the wrath and confusion of his brothers and ultimately help them piece together the full truth of their family legacy.

With fully developed characters and intricate depictions of both adolescence and adulthood, this book straddles the line between young adult and adult fiction. Either way, Bridge of Clay is Zusak at his best. To read a novel by this masterful author is to embark on an immersive journey that challenges readers to expand their understanding of what it is to be human. In this tale, Zusak explores how the intricate tapestries of our lives are woven not just by the decisions we make but also by those of the people closest to us, creating an interconnectedness from which no one, for better or worse, can ever completely extract themselves.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A year after 9/11, 16-year-old Shirin is starting yet another first day of school at her third high school in two years, and she’s over it. Having grown used to the misconceptions, name-calling and outright racism hurled her way for wearing a hijab, Muslim-American Shirin has developed a tough exterior and an even tougher interior. The one place she feels comfortable is in the dance studio with her brother and his break-dancing team. When Shirin joins in and perfects her power moves like crab walks and head spins, she becomes someone else—someone who isn’t afraid of being hurt. But when Shirin is paired with Ocean James in biology class, he slowly begins to chip away at the walls Shirin has constructed.

Tahereh Mafi, best known for her Shatter Me series, has stepped away from fantasy to pen this incredibly realistic novel based on her own experiences. While immersing themselves in gorgeous prose, readers will feel for Shirin as she stands up for her beliefs in the midst of hurtful words and violence, and they’ll cheer as she experiences first love and laugh-out-loud moments. Intense, emotional and resonant, A Very Large Expanse of Sea is a riptide that pulls readers in.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In this sequel to Mackenzi Lee’s Stonewall Honor-winning novel, The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue, Monty’s younger sister, the prickly and ambitious Felicity Montague, embarks on her own adventure.

After being denied entrance to numerous medical colleges in London because she’s a woman, Felicity hatches a plan to crash her ex-best friend Johanna Hoffman’s wedding in Germany along with the help of Simmaa “Sim” Aldajah—a black Muslim girl with access to a ship. Once there, Felicity will plead her case to the groom-to-be, the renowned Dr. Alexander Platt, in hopes she can study under him on his next expedition. But when the bride ditches the wedding, Felicity and Sim chase her to Zurich. They discover that Johanna’s deceased mother, a naturalist, was working toward a discovery that most men would kill for, including Dr. Platt.

Felicity and Johanna team up with Sim, who admits she’s actually a pirate from northern Africa, and the trio travels to the Mediterranean coast, where they encounter rival pirate fleets, ruthless Englishmen and fantastical beasts. How are they ever to get out of this alive?

Fans of this novel’s predecessor will be delighted to know that Monty and Percy do make cameos in A Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy, but they are not the focus of the book, nor should they be. Felicity’s story is a feminist feast that challenges societal norms and forgoes all romance, which is unconventional, albeit refreshing, in young adult literature. Readers will do themselves a disservice if they don’t explore the author’s note, as they’ll learn how women such as Felicity have always contributed to scientific exploration through their inexhaustible persistence and spirit.

This article was originally published in the October 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.