Teen sleuth Stevie Bell is back! It’s the autumn of her senior year at Ellingham Academy, and she and her friends Nate, Janelle and Vi have been invited by Stevie’s boyfriend, David, to join him in London to solve another cold case. One rain-soaked night 1995, nine inseparable friends played a game of hide-and-seek on the country estate of Merryweather. The next morning revealed the brutally murdered bodies of two of the nine companions. A burglary gone awry was the official explanation, but Izzy, the teenage niece of one of the original nine, recently learned that her aunt saw something unusual that night but never reported it to the police. That information points to a long-hidden secret: One of the nine may be a murderer.
As Stevie and her friends pursue leads and attempt to convince the head of Ellingham that they really are in England to study, they also undertake a whirlwind tour of London’s most famous attractions, learn about some gruesome Tudor history and navigate interpersonal dramas galore. College application season is upon them, and while her friends are each coping with the pressure in their own ways, Stevie is definitely not prepared. She also tries to make space for intimate moments with David but faces new worries that his attention is being drawn away by Izzy’s infectious charm.
In Nine Liars, bestselling author Maureen Johnson employs the hallmarks of classical Agatha Christie-style mysteries, such as frontispiece maps and a (metaphorical) locked room, while cleverly subverting others. Stevie still gathers the suspects together to reveal the solution, but she does so in a fresh and unexpected way, and Johnson replaces Christie’s stock characters with Stevie’s diverse and emotionally nuanced friends.
Flashbacks to 1995, including sometimes conflicting witness statements, alternate with Johnson’s present-day narration, enabling readers to form and then question their own theories of the case. This structure allows parallel models of friendship and romance, trust and lies, to form between the two time periods. Readers who flip frequently between past and present as they read will be richly rewarded, since Johnson’s fair-play mystery provides enough clues for especially observant readers to solve the case before its resolution.
Like Johnson’s previous Stevie Bell mystery, The Box in the Woods, Nine Liars can be enjoyed as a standalone, but readers who know and love Stevie and her classmates will feel like they’re returning to a satisfying jaunt with beloved friends.
In her fifth book starring teen sleuth Stevie Bell, Maureen Johnson both employs and subverts the hallmarks of classical English country house mysteries.
Author Holly Black returns to the world of Faerie with this highly anticipated spinoff from her bestselling Folk of the Air trilogy. The Stolen Heir follows Wren, the exiled queen of the Court of Teeth, and Prince Oak, the heir to Elfhame and Wren’s former betrothed.
Wren grew up a changeling, a faerie left in the care of a mortal family when she was just a toddler. She spent a blissful childhood among humans until her vicious faerie parents, Lord Jarel and Lady Nore, stole her away to the Ice Needle Citadel in the Court of Teeth. There, she endured years of humiliation and abuse before finally making her escape. She’s lived in isolation in the woods ever since, hiding from humans and faeries alike.
A charismatic and beguiling young man, Oak has spent much of his adolescence in the cutthroat Faerie court learning to combat the many assassination attempts on his life. While his sister, Jude, and her husband (the central couple of Black’s previous trilogy) rule Elfhame, Oak has been trying to put a stop to Lady Nore’s growing power and the threat it poses. He has hatched a dangerous plan that involves infiltrating the Court of Teeth. To carry it out successfully, however, he needs Wren’s insider knowledge of the citadel.
Wren crosses paths with Oak when he rescues her from a kidnapping attempt, then conscripts her into joining his plans. The Court of Teeth—her former prison—is the last place Wren wants to return to, but if she’s ever going to stop living on the run, she must confront her past and embrace her power, no matter how monstrous it makes her feel.
Black centers The Stolen Heir, the first book in a planned duology, on the scars of childhood trauma. Wren is the rightful claimant to a throne she is too frightened to command. Although she longs to return to her human family, her pale blue skin and sharply pointed teeth are constant reminders that she can never rejoin the mortal world. Oak’s unworldly allure—his golden curls and amber, foxlike eyes—makes her doubt the sincerity of his affection. As in all of Black’s books about the world of Faerie, beauty and cruelty exist side by side, and neither is ever completely what it seems.
Readers awaiting cameos from Jude and Cardan may feel slightly disappointed that Black keeps them in the background here. The Stolen Heir belongs wholly to Wren and Oak, but their story is just as satisfying as readers could hope for, deliciously wrought with mistrust and longing. Meanwhile, newcomers to Black’s Faerie books will be enticed to gobble up everything she has ever penned.
This highly anticipated spinoff to Holly Black’s bestselling Folk of the Air trilogy offers a tale deliciously wrought with mistrust and longing.
After solving two notorious cold cases, Stevie and her friends from Ellingham Academy are off to jolly old England to uncover the truth about a double murder that took place at a wealthy country estate in 1995. Meanwhile, they’re also dealing with college applications, academic pressures, romantic entanglements and more. In Nine Liars, bestselling author Maureen Johnson offers another satisfying standalone mystery and gives us a chance to spend more time with characters we’ve grown to love.
Nine Liars is your fifth novel about Stevie, but a reader could easily pick it up without having read the previous books. What are the challenges of achieving that effect from your side of the page? When I set out to write Truly Devious, I was making a detective mystery with the intention of having my detective go off in other books to work on other cases. That’s how most detective novels work—you can pick up pretty much any one of them and read it without knowing the characters beforehand. Of course, you get a little extra if you do.
Doing the “previously on” part—compressing it—can be tricky. I really want the experience to stand alone.
All of your books about Stevie balance page-turning mysteries with real emotional stakes for Stevie and her friends. Did you begin Nine Liars by asking, “What crime do I want Stevie to solve this time?” or “What’s happening in Stevie’s life now?” It’s the first one, though I’m always thinking about what happens in the second. Stevie’s life—that’s an organic process. The murder mystery is a machine I build piece by piece and assemble carefully. Stevie’s life grows around it, like a flowering vine, she said, writerly.
The case Stevie investigates in Nine Liars is a country house murder. What was appealing to you about this mystery subgenre? What classic aspects were you excited about including—or even putting your own spin on? The country house murder is a classic puzzle from the golden age of mystery for a reason: You have a set cast of suspects and a contained staging area for the puzzle to play out. Country houses are small enough in the grand scope of things to give the problem limits, but big enough and weird enough to have lots of hidey-holes and passages and things like that.
There’s also an air of unreality to them. They feel like a backdrop, not a place people would really live. That’s part of the appeal of this kind of mystery novel; it’s not meant to feel like a real crime, like people are being hurt. It’s Clue. It’s a revolving cast of professors and butlers and strange relatives who want to know about the will.
In Nine Liars, I wanted to play with that a little. It’s a group of actors, it’s a game, it’s a murder in the woodshed. But then the story continues to the present. The clues are still scattered around. The events in the woodshed had a real impact. And to solve it, Stevie must go back to the stage where this all went down.
“In puzzle mysteries like [Agatha] Christie’s, the world can be made right. There are solutions and often consequences. They serve as a psychological steam valve.”
We’ve seen Stevie solve cases from the 1930s and the 1970s, but in Nine Liars, she investigates a crime from 1995. How did this more recent setting impact the research you did for this novel? I was in London for the summer of 1995. I lived there with my friend Kate (who is now my agent is well—we’re close). I was a waitress during the day and a bartender at night; she worked in the office of a theater. We never had any money and mostly subsisted on Honey Nut Cheerios and whatever was left over from my work.
Kate worked in the theater where the show Riverdance was playing. It was the biggest show of the year. Everyone wanted to see it. We had no money to do anything and sometimes paid our rent in change, but we could go see Riverdance every night if we wanted to.
We lived in a flat that had three doors that were impossible to open, so we usually climbed over the trash cans in front of our room and went in through the window, so it was very secure. It was a hot, trashy summer. It was great.
One of the questions Stevie tells her head of school that she’ll study on her trip to the U.K. is why reading about murder can be a comforting activity. What are your thoughts on that question? It’s a strange one, right? Much is made about the fact that what’s called the golden age of mystery was between and during World War I and II. Books written during that time have a constant background of war. Agatha Christie was doing a lot of writing when England was being bombed. She wrote the final stories for Poirot, a war refugee from Belgium, and Miss Marple in case she didn’t survive. She wanted to be the one to finish her characters. These books, Curtain and Sleeping Murder, respectively, were locked in a bank vault until her death in 1976.
In puzzle mysteries like Christie’s, the world can be made right. There are solutions and often consequences. They serve as a psychological steam valve. Think about the world right now. Nine Liars is coming out into a world of YA readers who have undergone major trauma and confusion. I think there’s a very good reason everyone’s going back to the classic puzzle mystery.
“Stevie has to solve the crime in the context of a real world, full of people, with all the joys and complications they bring.”
Can you talk about the role that Stevie’s friends Nate, Janelle and Vi continue to play in her life and in these books? Many detectives famously have partners. Sherlock has Watson. Poirot has Hastings some of the time, and often a random friend or assistant he’s picked up along the way. Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane are a duo (both in crime solving and in love).
My entire high school and college world was my friends. Stevie has to solve the crime in the context of a real world, full of people, with all the joys and complications they bring.
What was the most challenging part of writing Nine Liars? What aspect of it are you most proud of? I work quite hard on the puzzle and making sure I’ve checked everything. By the end, I feel like I am doing embroidery and using tweezers, placing each little detail—the necessary clues, the fakeouts. I love watching it work. It’s like I’ve built a monster out of spare body parts and then it gets off the slab!
What do you love about coming back to the character of Stevie after four books? I’ve been writing Stevie for several years now. She’s good company. She never moves my stuff.
Coretta Scott King Honor author Lesa Cline-Ransome has earned a reputation as an excellent chronicler of American history in more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction. In For Lamb, she powerfully captures the events that lead to a fictitious lynching in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1940.
Cline-Ransome was inspired to write For Lamb after visiting the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, where she became interested in the untold stories of Black women who were victims of lynching. Within the novel, Cline-Ransome names a number of characters after these women, including the titular protagonist, whose namesake, Lamb Whittle, was lynched in Louisiana in 1907.
As the novel opens, 16-year-old Lamb Clark (who was “quiet as a lamb” when she was born) is a naive girl, sheltered by her protective mother, Marion, and older brother, Simeon, an enterprising student determined to attend college and leave the South behind. After an encounter between Simeon and a bigoted white optometrist, the doctor’s daughter decides to befriend Lamb. Their friendship sets off a series of developments and leads to a horrifying, expertly plotted climax with unimaginable consequences.
Cline-Ransome skillfully conveys Lamb’s transformation into a young woman determined to chart her own course in life despite the obstacles and horrors of the Jim Crow South, including a sexual assault and the lynching of a member of her family. Lamb comes to a new understanding of Marion’s romantic relationship with a woman and forms a new connection with her father, who has been largely absent for many years.
Cline-Ransome depicts injustice and violence with a perfect balance of brutality and sensitivity. She particularly excels at portraying the nuances of relationships and character motivations, which are often at odds among the members of Lamb’s family. Simeon, for instance, longs to be free from the need to act submissive around white people, while Marion believes this behavior can be key to survival, and readers gain deep understandings of both characters’ perspectives.
For Lamb is a heartbreaking novel that will leave readers with a visceral understanding of history.
Lesa Cline-Ransome powerfully chronicles the events that lead to a fictitious lynching in For Lamb, which expertly balances brutality and sensitivity.
Accepting dares is a way of life for Theo Wright. His close-knit friendships with Jay and Darren revolve around tasking one another with all manner of physical challenges and public humiliations. When Jay dares Theo to ask his crush to prom, Theo knows that his only chance to do so will be at the biggest house party of the year. Unfortunately, Theo’s promposal goes awry, and he exiles himself to an empty bedroom belonging to the host’s little sister.
Gradually, four more teens, each with their own troubles, join Theo in the mermaid-themed room to escape the social pressures of the party below. There’s Luca, whose own promposal disaster has gone viral; River, a nonbinary teen who’s nervous about announcing their identity; Makayla, a cheerleader who has endured years of slut shaming; and Aleah, Theo’s former best friend. Several heartfelt conversations and one fateful Waffle House run later, the five teens become unlikely allies in a plan to confront their respective emotional hurdles.
Although Theo narrates As You Walk on By, each of the five teens could carry their own story, and the web of relationships among the novel’s large cast is realistically complex. Author Julian Winters skillfully uses his characters’ rich interpersonal dynamics to explore the complicated emotions of fractured friendships, the pressures of reputation and family, and the friction between self-image and public identity. Winters also does an excellent job of highlighting how the teens’ diverse and often intersecting racial backgrounds, gender identities and sexualities influence their particular experiences of high school’s social battlefields.
Winters’ dialogue remains as effortlessly funny and charming as fans of his previous books have come to expect. Friends engage in easy banter, gently tease one another and drop plenty of pop culture references. Even the chapter titles are sometimes humorous (“The Same Post Malone Songs on Repeat”). This lightheartedness gives even more impact to the moments when friendships are strained, as characters weaponize their connections to one another with cutting words and painful betrayals.
All five central characters experience complete story arcs that coalesce in a natural, satisfying way to tell a joyful story of friendship, support and standing up for the life you want. As You Walk on By will leave readers feeling a little less invisible—and a little more invincible.
When Theo’s promposal during the biggest house party of the year doesn’t go as planned, he escapes to an empty bedroom to regroup. Over the course of the evening, four more teens, each with their own troubles, join Theo in the mermaid-themed bedroom. What follows is a night of heartfelt conversation and more than one revelation as the five unlikely allies form a plan to confront their respective emotional hurdles. Joyful, funny and deeply felt, As You Walk on By is a story of friendship, love and standing up for the life you want.
Your publisher describes As You Walk on By as The Breakfast Club meets Can’t Hardly Wait, and the book itself references a number of other movies, including House Party. How have movies influenced you as a writer? Movies have been a huge influence on my writing. Like I do with any great book, I find myself dissecting the movies I really love to discover why they make me feel the way I do. Why am I crying? Laughing? Why am I so invested in a protagonist or side character? There have been some great teen films over the years that have stuck with me, and I took this opportunity to pay homage to them while also giving queer, BIPOC characters their shine.
As You Walk on By opens as Theo is dared to prompose to his crush. Have you ever accepted any wild dares that you could share with us? Unfortunately, I have accepted one too many dares in my life. One of the wildest was my senior year of high school. I was in Junior ROTC, and we were traveling by charter bus to Orlando, Florida. My best friend dared me to lick one of the windows. It was not the cleanest of buses, but as a queer teen, I think I was more afraid of sharing a truth about myself with my peers than ingesting the germs from a window. Not much has changed!
“Vulnerability is infectious. One moment of honesty from someone can unlock so much about yourself.”
The book features five central characters, but we experience the story from Theo’s point of view. Tell us about Theo and why this is his story. Theo is a funny, loyal, determined 17-year-old who’s one dare away from learning that he’s also a complete mess. He has a tightknit friend group, a solid relationship with his father and big (romantic) dreams he’s scared to chase.
I wanted to show this messy, queer Black boy who makes awful decisions and is forced to come to terms with the toxicity he allows to exist in his relationships with people. I’d never written a character like Theo, but I wanted to.
While each character has a very important, meaningful storyline, Theo’s felt like the core of what I wanted to explore with this novel: growing, learning and owning our mistakes so we can become the people we want to be.
The alliance that forms between the five teens hiding in the same bedroom becomes central to their growth as characters. Have you ever found support or encouragement from an unexpected source? Yes. As a queer Black person, I’m always searching for spaces where I feel safe, valued and understood. Although I’ve had the same core group of friends since high school, sometimes my deepest and most personal conversations have happened with people I’ve known for weeks or hours. Vulnerability is infectious. One moment of honesty from someone can unlock so much about yourself.
Young adult books tend to gravitate toward portraying romantic relationships, but much of your work focuses instead on friendships. What do you hope readers take away from your books to help them navigate their own friendships? I hope readers see that friendships are complex and complicated. Even messy! There’s so much to gain from a friendship, but also so much to lose. I’ve had to learn that the hard way. But when you find that person or group of people, especially as a queer person, you’ll learn what love and growth truly mean. Not just for someone else, but yourself.
“Most of my teen years and early 20s were spent thinking happily ever afters weren’t possible for people like me. . . . Now I get to show young readers we’re more than deserving of the magic promised to everyone else.”
Many of your books deal with queer Black boys as they struggle with how the stories around them don’t reflect their experiences. Theo, for example, finds it hard to picture himself in the fairy-tale-esque prom romances that his straight and/or white classmates take for granted. How does it feel to know that your books are helping real-life Theos imagine their own happily ever afters? It has been the most rewarding, unexpected part of being an author. Hearing from readers is my favorite thing. I grew up wanting so many of the things I write about. Most of my teen years and early 20s were spent thinking happily ever afters weren’t possible for people like me. There weren’t a ton of examples that I could have one, so I started writing them for myself. Now I get to show young readers we’re more than deserving of the magic promised to everyone else.
Although the characters in As You Walk on By deal with serious issues, the book itself is so uplifting, funny and warmhearted. Is it always your goal to center joy in your writing? Why? Always. I was given too many books as a kid where the queer or Black person’s storyline was about trauma, pain, discrimination and death. Their existence was a lesson for the readers who didn’t look or identify like them. It left me in a dark place. I refuse to let the next generation of BIPOC and/or queer people feel as though their lives are a lesson for someone else instead of being about finding joy in who they are.
Bradley Graeme and Celine Bangura used to be best friends. Then Brad joined the popular football crowd, leaving Celine to lean into nerd culture and her TikTok account. Though Celine has no shortage of self-confidence, she’s always resented Brad for choosing popularity over loyalty. Their friendship fallout feels especially painful since Celine and Brad are among the few Black students at their school. Shouldn’t they be supporting each other?
But the former besties still have plenty in common. They both aspire to get accepted into Oxford or Cambridge and pursue careers in law, so it’s not surprising that they both find themselves in a competitive program run by one of the U.K.’s most prominent Black lawyers, a woman who is Celine’s personal hero. At stake is a university scholarship—if the participants can survive a series of leadership and team-building challenges in the forests of England and Scotland. Brad and Celine will have to overcome their differences and get along, but their reconciliation might be more complicated—and more romantic—than either of them expect.
Author Talia Hibbert’s fantastic BrownSisters rom-com trilogy won over adult romance readers with her signature blend of witty dialogue, self-discovery and true love. She makes her YA debut with Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute, and the result is sheer delight.
In her previous books, Hibbert has skillfully explored complicated family dynamics as well as themes of mental health and disability, and she does so here as well. Brad speaks candidly about having obsessive-compulsive disorder and the strategies he’s learned to manage it. Celine gradually realizes that she could benefit from therapy, especially once she recognizes that she might have selected her career goals for the wrong reasons. Along the way, both teens find the courage to be honest—with others and with themselves—about their desires.
The novel’s dialogue is fast-paced and funny, and thanks to a hilarious glossary, U.S. readers can learn a great deal about U.K. secondary school and youth culture. Hibbert’s book launches Joy Revolution, a new imprint curated by YA authors Nicola and David Yoon and dedicated to YA romances by and about people of color. Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute will leave readers eager to discover what else Joy Revolution will publish.
Adult romance author Talia Hibbert makes her YA debut with this rom-com about two former BFFs who must work together in order to achieve their ambitious goals.
With this story of two teens desperate to leave their small town, Tahir proves she’s just as skilled at contemporary fiction as she is at epic fantasy.
By the end of a YA book, we have watched as a teenage protagonist has taken a critical step from childhood toward adulthood. In the year’s best YA novels, no two of those steps were alike except for how honored we felt to witness them.
“Get in. Get out, No drama. Focus forward.” That’s the motto guiding Avery Anderson at the beginning of her senior year of high school, when she and her parents move from Washington, D.C., to Bardell, Georgia, in order to care for Avery’s estranged, dying grandmother. Yet Avery soon finds herself surrounded by drama in Jas Hammonds’ superb debut novel, We Deserve Monuments.
Avery’s life isn’t just in limbo from the move; she’s also fresh off a breakup with her girlfriend back home. Avery’s relationship with her grandmother, Mama Letty, isn’t all smooth sailing either. The first time they meet, Mama Letty tells Avery that her lip piercing makes her look “like a fish caught on a hook.” Avery’s mother, a renowned astrophysicist, grapples with her own relationship with Letty, who was often drunk and abusive during Zora’s childhood, while Avery and Letty eventually form a close bond.
Meanwhile, Avery gets to know the town of Bardell, where “every corner [holds] a story,” with the help of two new friends: next-door neighbor Simone, who is Black, and Jade, whose wealthy white family lives on a former plantation and owns a posh hotel in town. Yet her new knowledge only inspires more questions for Avery, including what happened to her late grandfather, Ray, whom neither Zora nor Letty will discuss.
In We Deserve Monuments, Hammonds takes on two challenges—exploring the ugly legacy of racism in a small town and telling a moving love story—and succeeds at both. The author blends these two plot strands in a wonderfully organic fashion, and their prose is sure-footed every step of the way, with snappy dialogue so fresh that readers will feel as though they’re eavesdropping on real conversations.
Avery is an engaging, appealing narrator whose story is occasionally supplemented by short chapters of omniscient narration that efficiently fill in gaps from the past. As Avery navigates a seemingly forbidden new romance and drifts from her intention of following in her mother’s professional footsteps, readers are rewarded with a number of startling plot twists and a host of tender moments between Avery and her love interest. Just as rich are the relationships among the members of Avery’s family, especially the magnificently complex Letty.
Life, identity, love, death—it’s all here. We Deserve Monuments marks a noteworthy debut from a writer paving her own literary future.
In We Deserve Monuments, author Jas Hammonds takes on two challenges—exploring the legacy of racism and telling a moving love story—and succeeds at both.
Give this to a reader who has a competitive streak, whether it manifests on the field, in the classroom or at game night.
Game On: 15 Stories of Wins, Losses, and Everything in Between highlights the importance of “playing the game” to find yourself. In each tale, characters interact with a game, from sports and video games to neighborhood pastimes and more. Many stories illustrate the thrill of competition, even as characters grapple with why rivalries and the act of winning mean so much to them. Nearly all the stories capture the central game’s emotional underpinnings, allowing characters to become closer to one another, to find courage in other aspects of their lives or to see something in a new light.
Standout story: Gloria Chao’s “Mystery Hunt” follows two college freshmen who share an adorably nerdy passion for language puzzles as they embark on the linguistics department’s annual scavenger hunt. As they race to piece clues together, Faye’s growing friendship with her cute classmate, Pierce, inspires her to form deeper connections with other people in her life. The story’s puzzles are challenging, the emotional stakes are high, the pace is fast, and by the end of the hunt, readers will be eager for more adventures with Faye and Pierce.
—Annie Metcalf
★ Tasting Light
Give this to a reader who yearns to expand the limits of what is possible.
Every story in Tasting Light: Ten Science Fiction Stories to Rewire Your Perceptions masterfully demonstrates how powerful science fiction can be. Whether the teens in these futuristic tales are sipping coffee in a spinning city, exploring parallel universes or experiencing bold new technologies, they’re contemplating themes like race, class, disability and gender as thoughtfully as teens today, while dreaming up new and inventive ways to improve themselves and their worlds. As one character muses, “You can be a teenager and make things happen. They’re not mutually exclusive at all.”
Standout story: Junauda Petrus-Nasah’s “Melanitis” begins in the middle. What’s a FAN, and why is it a big deal that another one has been murdered by police? To give away more would spoil the experience: As narrator Amari processes the unfolding news, so do we. Petrus-Nasah takes a classical sci-fi theme—the perils of scientific overreach—and applies it to the disparity between joyous Black energy and the dangers of being Black in a white-dominated society. The result is daring and devastating.
—Jill Ratzan
Eternally Yours
Give this to a reader who is smitten with all things magical, mysterious and macabre.
In Eternally Yours, editor Patrice Caldwell collects 15 paranormal romance stories that feature supernatural suitors ranging from ancient immortals to undead high school students. Many of the tales have contemporary settings, their speculative elements intertwined with familiar teenage concerns like part-time jobs and parties. These realistic details—and the often relatable protagonists—give the collection a grounded core that allows readers to truly connect with larger-than-life dramas such as hunting vampires or making out with mermaids. This anthology will sweep romance-minded readers away into one otherworldly love story after another.
The standout story: Marie Rutkoski’s dreamlike “Bride-Heart” follows a teenage waitress caught up in the ominous affections of a wealthy older man. As it becomes clear that there is far more to the rich stranger than anyone suspects, a test of agency, control and subtle magic unfolds. Rutkoski crafts an atmosphere of creeping dread as she upends many paranormal romance tropes. Her tense, twisty tale will keep readers guessing all the way to the end.
—RJ Witherow
Generation Wonder
Give this to a reader who knows exactly what they’d do if they woke up with superpowers.
Many of today’s most successful superhero stories were dreamed up long before current teenage readers were born. The 13 tales in Generation Wonder: The New Age of Heroes introduce brand-new, contemporary superheroes across a range of genres, from comical adventures to fast-paced thrillers. In a clever touch, each story opens with an illustration in the epic style of a comic book cover by artist Colleen Doran. Diverse, imaginative and entertaining, these stories prove that extraordinary heroes can truly come from the most ordinary circumstances.
The standout story: In Nulhegan Abenaki author Joseph Bruchac’s “Ordinary Kid,” Leonard is a Native American teen just trying to survive high school—and figure out how to use his newly acquired superpowers, of course. After an encounter with a mysterious entity called Crow, Leonard becomes telekinetic and gains an “uncanny ability to sense when someone [is] picking on someone else.” He decides to use his powers to disrupt his town’s drug trade before turning his attention to an even more dangerous target. Leonard’s self-deprecating humor and hunger for justice call to mind such well-known superheroes as Captain America and Spiderman.
—Hannah Lamb
Teens will discover whole new worlds within the short stories of these four anthologies.
Vega is a girl with stars on her skin. Her mother created the tattoos when Vega was small, knowing that one day she would take up the mantle of the last Astronomer. Vega has never left their valley and knows only the safety of her mother’s cottage. But her mother is dying from a sickness that has claimed much of the world’s population, and twin stars have appeared in the sky, signifying that Vega must fulfill her duty: to find the Architect and go to the sea.
Vega is unprepared for the dusty, desperate world outside the valley, where branded men called Theorists hunt her mercilessly, believing she holds the key to a cure for the sickness. She is rescued by a girl named Cricket, who leads her to Noah, a mysterious, secretive boy with green eyes. Together, the three of them set off across the desert, guided by ancient stories and starlight. But as the twin stars move along their orbital path, Vega knows that time is running low.
A Wilderness of Stars is an atmospheric adventure romance that pulls from a constellation of genres as author Shea Ernshaw crafts a world that seems both familiar and alien. Full of ghost towns and outlaws, much of the setting feels straight out of a Western, but without the identifiable geography of the American West. Ernshaw employs a similar tactic with the novel’s temporal scope, giving enough clues to place the story in a far-off future where our current technologies are considered ancient myths, but no real specifics about when the story takes place.
Ernshaw’s narrative relies on intentional ambiguity and the slow unspooling of secrets, which is sometimes effective and other times frustrating. Many characters hold their cards close to their chests, and as a consequence, Ernshaw often writes around plot points rather than through them. Although her writing can be dense, readers who appreciate a focus on romance will enjoy the time she spends lavishing Vega and Noah’s love story with florid prose.
Overall, A Wilderness of Stars will delight readers who love soft science fiction, measured reveals and romances that are written in the stars.
This atmospheric adventure will delight readers who love soft science fiction, measured reveals and romances that are written in the stars.
Two years after his mother dies of breast cancer, high school junior and amateur photographer Jamison Deever decides to channel his grief into a photography project. At a street corner he could see from his mother’s hospital window, Jamison photographs whoever happens to show up at 9:09 p.m., the exact time at which his mother died.
Initially, Jamison simply wants to honor his mother’s memory, but when he creates a website and begins uploading his work online, the photos garner attention, both local and national. A popular girl named Kennedy exploits Jamison’s talent in the hope of kickstarting a modeling career, while another girl named Assi, who is dealing with her own loss, butts heads with Jamison in English class. Friendship—and then something more—grows between them. As Jamison’s photography inspires others to embark on their own 9:09 projects, he begins to understand the transformational power of expressing his grief.
As author Mark H. Parsons was drafting The 9:09 Project, his mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, and she died before the book was published. Through Jamison, Parsons offers a strikingly honest and moving depiction of loss, grief and healing. As the novel opens, Jamison is adrift, struggling with the reality that life after the death of a loved one doesn’t come with a road map. Instead, he must find his own path, apart from but alongside his supportive sister, father and friends.
Parsons’ first-person narration is spare and never weighed down by heavy descriptions, focusing instead on Jamison’s thoughts from moment to moment. This strong internality adds to the novel’s appeal as Jamison undertakes a journey through grief, which, sooner or later, every reader must also experience. Not every teen who has suffered a loss will be ready for the raw emotions Parsons captures here, but when they are, the novel’s honesty will likely be a comfort.
In The 9:09 Project, author Mark H. Parsons draws on personal experience to craft a strikingly honest depiction of loss, grief and healing.
It’s four days before Christmas, and Atlanta is in the middle of an unprecedented blizzard. Highway traffic has slowed to a halt; flights are grounded; malls are closing. The abundant chaos as a surprise snowstorm hits a wholly unprepared Southern city serves as the perfect setting for a race against time in the delightful, suspenseful Whiteout. Can a couple reunite and reconcile before it’s too late?
Stevie and Sola’s middle school friendship transformed into high school love. Together, they’ve plotted out their future: Howard University, marriage, kids, in that order. But after a truly disastrous weekend, that future is in serious jeopardy. First, Sola was deeply hurt by the hypothesis of Stevie’s science experiment, which posited that love is nothing more than “a biological response built into human brains to ensure the survival of the population.” Then, in a spectacular explosion of arrogance and humiliation, Stevie ruined their meticulously planned coming-out dinner with Sola’s extended family. And so Sola has issued Stevie an ultimatum: provide a satisfactory explanation and apology by midnight, or they’re over—for good.
Heartsick Stevie leaps into action, asking several friends to join her elaborate plan to win back Sola. When the blizzard arrives, she cancels those requests, but in an encouraging display of loyalty, the other teens pitch in nonetheless. It’s not easy; they get stuck in locations all around their snow-besieged city while also unraveling their own entanglements. As the clock ticks down to midnight, readers will root for multiple couples to take their own leaps of faith as they assist Stevie with hers.
This unabashedly romantic effort by acclaimed and bestselling YA authors Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Ashley Woodfolk and Nicola Yoon will captivate readers who adored the group’s first novel, 2021’s Blackout. While both books celebrate Black and queer love, the writers took a different approach for Whiteout, blending their contributions rather than crafting alternating chapters. (For extra fun, be sure to check out their authors’ note, which offers tantalizing hints about who wrote which characters.) The result is a charming and captivating second-chance romance that pays homage to friendship, honesty and the power of swoonworthy grand gestures.
A surprise snowstorm in a wholly unprepared city serves as the perfect setting for a romantic race against time in the delightful, suspenseful Whiteout.
Sign Up
Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.
Maria Ressa’s book is a political history of the Philippines and an intimate memoir, but it’s also a warning to democracies everywhere: Authoritarianism is a threat to us all.
Sean Adams has dialed down the dystopian quotient from his first satirical novel, The Heap, but that element is still very much present in The Thing in the Snow.
