No one in the tiny town of Mursey would expect legally blind Agnes Atwood to run off with bad girl Bo Dickinson. Everyone in Mursey knows the Dickinsons are nothing but white trash. For her part, Bo is drawn to Agnes. Maybe it’s due to Agnes’ aching desire for freedom, or maybe Bo is a little in love with Agnes. In any event, the two decide to steal Agnes’ sister’s car and run away.

In alternating chapters, Bo describes the events on the road, and Agnes fills in the backstory. At first glance, the girls seem to be archetypes of small-town Southern personas. Bo is labeled a druggie and a whore, but she conceals sensitivity beneath her brokenness. Church-going Agnes is obedient and docile, but she craves escape. Her blindness adds another dimension to the story, although she is surprisingly conscious of visible elements such as “rich, sweet-tea” eye color and less attuned to sensation, sound and smell. 

Like Wendy Wunder’s The Museum of Intangible Things, this road trip explores the boundaries of friendship and truth.

Diane Colson is the Library Director at City College in Gainesville, Florida.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kaz and Ruby are road-tripping to a music festival with friends, a summer blowout to shake off some ghosts and renew their friendship. Kaz is smarting from a breakup with a guy she thought had forever potential. Ruby is academically adrift, and with her beloved brother heading out into the world, she needs to get a plan in place—after some quality time in the mosh pit. Remix celebrates female friendships while being brutally honest about how they can fall apart.

Author Non Pratt includes hilariously on-point details about the grunginess of field camping, from trashed Port-O-Lets to strangers making out in your tent at odd hours. Kaz and Ruby’s alternating points of view can be difficult to tell apart, but this speaks to the ways they overlap as friends. There are some funny supporting players sharing their campsite who enhance the festie vibe. 

Remix reminds us that boyfriends are hardly worth fighting over, but female friendships are absolutely worth fighting for.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Everyone always does what Lorna says, especially her BFF, Jackie, her boyfriend, Finn, and Lucas, who is (not-so) secretly in love with her, too. When Lorna slips off the rocks in Provincetown on Cape Cod and into the icy Atlantic Ocean, her disappearance leaves a gaping hole in their lives. In Local Girl Swept Away, 17-year-old Jackie recounts the tense months after Lorna goes missing and how it affects their tight circle of friends.

Jackie’s initial disbelief and grief slowly give way to anger as she remembers the truth about Lorna. How easily Lorna could manipulate everyone, how she always seemed to get her way and captured Finn’s heart when Jackie loved him more. Slowly, Jackie begins to reclaim her independence, working on her photography and hoping, despite her fishing family’s expectations, to make a life as an artist beyond the Cape. She even discovers that there are other guys besides Finn, namely Cooper, an up-and-coming novelist, who’s cute, charming—and 30.

Just as Jackie starts to form secrets of her own, her taut narration takes on Gone Girl-style twists as she pieces together why Lorna disappeared. Author Ellen Wittlinger proves once again why she’s a master of realistic fiction, creating believable dialogue, events and emotions, especially as Jackie must decide if she’s still one of Lorna’s pawns in the end.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Louis Bayard may be familiar to fans of his adult novels, including Roosevelt's Beast, or from his deliciously entertaining reviews of “Downton Abbey” for The New York Times. Now he brings his prodigious talents to a young adult novel set in 1934, Depression-era Virginia. The protagonist of Lucky Strikes is a spirited, gutsy 14-year old named Amelia, a dedicated older sister and gas station proprietor who can “fill a radiator faster than anyone this side of the Blue Ridge.”

As the story begins, Melia has just buried her mama. Literally. During her mother’s illness, Melia took to visiting her favorite spot on a nearby hill, and soon began taking a shovel there. By the time Mama passed on, Melia, along with her younger brother and sister, Earle and Janey, simply drive the truck on over and lower Mama into the waiting grave. When Janey wonders what they’ll do next, Melia’s thought that out as well. Melia will carry on running Brenda’s Oasis as best she can—fixing cars, pumping gas for tired truckers coming off Highway 55 and, most of all, trying to stay ahead of their bills.

It won’t be easy. And Melia also knows it won’t be long before the vultures start circling. First, there’s the evil Harley Blevins (surely the most villainous gas station owner in all of literature), who won’t be satisfied unless he eats up the station (and Melia, too). The only good thing about Blevins is his nephew, Dudley, whom Melia can’t help noticing. Next, there are the do-gooders, ready to split the siblings up and put them in dreaded “Fos. Ter. Care.”

Melia simply won’t have that. So when a vagrant with a dubious past falls off a flatbed truck carrying coal, Melia hatches a plan to turn Mr. Hiram Watts into her long-lost father.

While the violent steps Blevins takes to try to destroy Melia’s gas station (and the regrettable and unnecessary inclusion of a pejorative Native-American term) makes it best suited to older teen readers, Lucky Strikes is a memorable, warmhearted story of family and redemption with an engaging, unforgettable heroine.

Deborah Hopkinson lives near Portland, Oregon. Her most recent book for young readers is A Bandit's Tale.

BookPage Teen Top Pick, July 2016

In Lara Avery’s heartfelt, funny and bittersweet new novel, a gifted teen’s future is derailed when she’s diagnosed with a debilitating genetic condition. High school valedictorian Sammie McCoy can’t wait to escape small-town Vermont and start college at NYU. But when she learns she has Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC), her freshman-year plans begin to look unlikely. “Basically,” Sammie says of NPC, “it’s dementia.” 

Due to the disorder, Sammie will eventually lose her memory, and so she begins chronicling the major events and little details of her life on a laptop, “writing to remember” all the things she’s bound to forget. Meanwhile, she hides her condition from her friends, which works just fine until she bungles a critical debate-club tournament.

Avery is a skillful storyteller who lets Sammie’s decline unfold gradually over the course of the novel. From the start, Sammie comes across as smart and sassy, an overachiever with all the answers, but as NPC takes over, she regresses. Her thoughts and perspectives become less sophisticated, more childlike—a reflection of her inner deterioration. Avery fleshes out the narrative with a cast of authentic characters, including Maddie, Sammie’s debate-club partner (who sports an electric-red mohawk), and Stuart, a handsome would-be writer and Sammie’s longtime crush. 

Avery presents Sammie’s story not as a tragedy but as a tale of self-discovery. Without lapsing into sentiment or melodrama, she tackles big questions in a style that teen readers will find appealing. The Memory Book is a memorable read, indeed.

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Set in the suburbs of modern-day Austin, Texas, Lucky Few follows three outsider teenagers as they attempt to discover themselves, their places in the world and just how much they mean to one another.

Junior Stevie Hart and her best friend, Sanger, have been homeschooled together since they were toddlers. But they swear they’re the “normal” kind of homeschoolers—not the weird children of hippies or religious fanatics. And yet when Stevie and Sanger discover a young guy who pretends he’s committed suicide—twice in one day—their lives and friendship take a turn for the extra weird.

They learn that this cute guy, Max, is actually Stevie’s new neighbor, and he only has eight fingers. In two months he’ll ship off to some sort of boarding school, and before he moves, he’s trying to complete an epic list of “23 Ways to Fake My Death Without Dying.” Stevie and Sanger don’t know what to think about Max at first, but once they agree to help him complete his list, readers watch the trio through their shared shenanigans and learn how they truly feel about each other. But as they attempt to defy death over and over again in the name of some “innocent fun,” are Stevie, Sanger and Max too weird even for Austin?

Lucky Few is Kathryn Ormsbee’s first young adult novel, in which she adeptly captures the feeling of being “other” that every single teenager feels at some point, no matter where or how they learn about life.

Justin Barisich is a freelancer, satirist, poet and performer living in Atlanta. More of his writing can be found at littlewritingman.com.

Near the end of her senior year of high school, Jill Charron wakes up in a hospital bed with no memory of the events that led her there. She learns that the trip to Italy she was longing for has already happened, that she was in a horrible car accident there and that her best friend, Simone, died at the scene. Reeling from the news, Jill slowly comes to realize that Italian authorities believe she caused the crash intentionally and want to try her for murder. As she recovers from her physical injuries, Jill also fights to regain her memories of the past six weeks, hoping they will confirm what she knows in her heart—she would never harm her best friend.

Told from Jill’s perspective but punctuated with police evidence and articles from blogs and travel books, With Malice unravels the notion that young women can be easily categorized. As the media rushes to vilify Jill and sanctify Simone, the readers will instinctively defend the protagonist—but are we, too, jumping to conclusions about a character? Veteran YA author Eileen Cook (Remember) uses snippets of testimony from other characters to deepen the mystery and nudge readers further into uncertainty. Cook creates a disturbing portrait of female friendship and doesn’t shy away from dark, complex characters despite the age of her readership. Readers paying close attention won’t be as shocked by the ending as the marketing suggests, but Cook has still delivered a solid summer thriller for the teen set. 

Stacey Lee pens an endearing story of one teen’s determination to survive and succeed amid disaster.

Fifteen-year-old Mercy Wong has high hopes of having her own herbal tea business someday—but the year is 1906, and education available to Chinese-American girls is less than stellar. Using her suave and shrewd ruses, Mercy finagles a business proposition with Mr. Du Lac, the president of the elite St. Clare’s School for Girls. Du Lac offers Mercy a three-month trial period with an agreement that she assumes the role of a Chinese heiress. Unfortunately, life at St. Clare’s is more difficult than Mercy expects, with one grueling situation rolling into the next. While serving a punishment, Mercy has no idea that her life is about to change, when an earthquake devastates much of her beloved Chinatown.

Featuring Mercy as raconteur, Outrun the Moon surrounds its principal character with a complex cast designed to develop her dynamic role. Lee’s characters reflect two distinct racial groups: the marginalized and the affluent. Utilizing the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Lee brings the survivors of these groups together to highlight that which cannot be changed by race or class, those universal elements of humanity that connect us all.

A poignant combination of fact and fiction, Outrun the Moon is a welcome addition to American immigrant historical fiction, punctuated with Mercy’s snarky and often uproariously funny comments, as well as plenty of thought-provoking maxims and proverbs—all leading up to compassion for others.

Marshall Holt sits behind Waverly Camdenmar in Spanish class and is aware of her every move. She’s smart and organized and lovely, as close to perfect as he is to ruin. But Marshall doesn’t know the real Waverly. Real Waverly doesn’t sleep. She runs for miles, looking for a sense of calm. She tolerates the arrogant behavior of her best friend, because without a veneer of invulnerability, who the hell is Waverly?

One night Waverly lights an old candle and, in an attempt to entice sleep, starts counting backwards. In a very realistic dream, Marshall looks directly at Waverly and speaks to her. The following night, Waverly follows the ritual again and is transported to a party where Marshall is on a bad LSD trip. The connection between the two grows ever stronger through nightly visits, even as they maintain their separation during the day. After all, perfect Waverly could hardly have a romantic relationship with drug-addled Marshall.

Few writers delve as intimately into raw emotion as Brenna Yovanoff as she strips her characters of their practiced self-delusions and faulty coping strategies. The wonder of mystical nighttime visits is a small part of the love story; the truer love develops as Waverly and Marshall reach for authenticity in real life. The result is a seductive blend of humor and romance with a dash of magical realism. This is perfect for fans of Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun or Martha Brockenbrough’s The Game of Love and Death.

Diane Colson is the Library Director at City College in Gainesville, Florida.

In a sort of modern retelling of the Faustian myth that legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson achieved his success by selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads, Devil and the Bluebird follows the winding and heart-wrenching path of one young girl who’s trying to save her sister’s soul.

Blue Riley is willing to give up anything to find her missing older sister, Cass, who left to chase dreams of musical fame not long after their mother died of cancer. Blue finds the devil down at the nearby crossroads and bargains her soul to try to save her sister’s. She gives up her voice as collateral and gets only six months and a pair of vaguely magical boots in exchange. 

Throughout her journey to find Cass, Blue meets all sorts of gifted and seedy characters. And as the devil changes the terms of their deal, she must re-evaluate her understanding of good and evil, all while hoping that a bluebird has a chance in hell of defeating the devil.

Debut author Jennifer Mason-Black’s prose is fittingly lyrical, and her narrative always takes the most devilish of turns.

Justin Barisich is a freelancer, satirist, poet and performer living in Atlanta. More of his writing can be found at littlewritingman.com.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

High school seniors Mark and Kate have sat next to each other in class all year but have rarely spoken. On the first night of Pride, the two run into each other in a San Francisco bar, where Kate is avoiding a setup with her (likely) soul mate, Violet, and Mark is trying to impress the (definite) love of his life, Ryan. Through this chance encounter, they realize they are each uniquely prepared to guide each other through the loneliness of first loves, friendship crises and heartbreaks that lie ahead.

You Know Me Well perfectly encapsulates those fraught, end-all-be-all feelings of high-school romance and graduation. Authors Nina LaCour and David Levithan have the utmost respect for their subjects. Kate and Mark—and all their friends—are allowed to feel like every fight and every heartbreak is the end of the world; they’re allowed to run away, to lash out, to curl up in bed and cry.

The raw emotion of this novel will delight fans of Rainbow Rowell and John Green.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Adrian is gay and perfectly content to blend into the background at his stereotypically conservative Texas high school. He prefers to escape into the world of his Renaissance-inspired art and his superhero creation, Graphite. But when he intervenes during the brutal beating of another gay student, he draws unwanted attention to himself. No longer in the background, Adrian must decide whether he (and Graphite) should stand for something more than solitude and invisibility. 

Laurent Linn’s debut novel is less “coming out” and more “coming-of-age,” as it asks compelling questions about responsibility, retaliation and integrity. Adrian’s two sidekicks, the drastically different Audrey and Trent, are well-rounded characters who support and challenge Adrian in equal measure.

The text is interspersed with beautiful snippets of the Graphite comic, drawn by the author, and a believable budding romance lends lightness to the otherwise violent plot. Despite the novel’s length, the story unfolds over just a few weeks, which underscores how quickly and drastically circumstances can change, an especially important message for young readers. Draw the Line does leave a few loose ends untied, but readers will appreciate the happy place Adrian finds himself in at the story’s conclusion and the admirable choices he made to get there.

This article was originally published in the June 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.