It’s hard enough to be a teenager without having to deal with, say, ghosts, disappearances or murder. In this trio of YA mysteries, smart and determined girls do whatever it takes to solve the case.

When All the Girls Are Sleeping

Never has a supply closet been so ominous as in Emily Arsenault’s slow-burning gothic mystery, When All the Girls Are Sleeping. The site of said closet is Dearborn Hall, the senior dorm at Windham-Farnswood Academy. Until last year, the closet was room 408, home to the mercurial Taylor Blakey. In the wee hours of a frigid February night, screams echoed down the hallway, and Taylor’s lifeless body was found on the ground beneath her open window. Since that night, Taylor’s former room has become a taboo space, intentionally ignored and never entered . . . or has it? 

Haley Peppler, Taylor’s erstwhile best friend, isn’t so sure. She’s skeptical of rumors about the ghostly Winter Girl who supposedly haunts Dearborn Hall. But lately, unexplainable things have been happening around the closet (its window left open during a freeze, whispers emanating from within), and Haley is starting to think there really could be something supernatural afoot.

When Haley receives a strange video filmed the night of Taylor’s death, it heightens her unease and spurs her to investigate: Is there another explanation for Taylor’s demise than the flimsy story the school offered? As Haley researches Dearborn Hall’s colorful history, Arsenault does an excellent job of unfurling a centuries-old mystery within the context of this contemporary tale. 

Carefully timed flashbacks and revelations make for a tantalizingly suspenseful read. Using newspaper archives, social media and interviews, Haley unearths plausible motives and suspicious sorts aplenty, contributing to the book’s atmosphere of increasing dread. As the anniversary of Taylor’s death looms, a thought-provoking undercurrent of class conflict and unresolved anger adds urgency to Haley’s quest for the truth. When All the Girls Are Sleeping is a spooky and compelling examination of what truly haunts us.

That Weekend

On prom weekend, Claire Keough and her closest friends, couple Kat and Jesse, head up to a cabin in the Catskills to celebrate their entry into adulthood. It should be a fun, secret trip, but when Claire wakes up in a forest clearing alone and seriously injured, That Weekend becomes the most definitive event of her life thus far. Kat and Jesse are missing, and due to Claire’s head trauma, the last 36 hours are a blank. It’s a horrific dilemma: “All that matters is what happened on that mountain. The only important information is what I can’t remember.” 

This dramatic and terrifying turn of events is just the tip of the iceberg in this twisty, fast-paced mystery. Kat and Claire take turns telling the inventive story, which moves to and fro in time. The question of motive is at the heart of the story, which offers readers a rich mine of human behavior to ponder as characters crack under the stress of the weekend’s aftermath. Kat’s wealthy, powerful family tries to take control, the FBI gets involved and a Nancy Grace-esque journalist seems determined to portray Claire as a villain. The resultant media attention coupled with her nagging self-doubt compel Claire to conduct her own investigation in hopes of regaining control over her reputation, emotions and future. As we draw nearer to the truth of that fateful weekend getaway, author Kara Thomas (2018’s The Cheerleaders, et al.) expertly layers plenty of reasons to suspect almost everyone. Whodunit lovers will be delighted.

Lies, betrayals and pulse-pounding moments abound as Claire questions whether she can ever trust or even know anyone. The book’s shocking ending will surely cause readers to look upon innocuous things in their lives (friends, family, weekend jaunts) with sharp eyes.

The Box in the Woods

Readers who heaved sad sighs upon reaching the end of Maureen Johnson’s The Vanishing Stair, the final book in her Truly Devious trilogy, will be thrilled to learn that smart, funny teen sleuth Stevie Bell is back in The Box in the Woods.

It’s summertime, and Stevie is home from Ellingham Academy, the boarding school where she solved a 1930s cold case. That amazing feat made her famous for a time, but now she’s pondering what’s next and making the best of a deli job where the customers feel “entitled to her entire soul as she [gets] them ham.” 

She needn’t ponder for long. Tech bro CEO Carson Buchwald makes Stevie an intriguing proposition. He recently purchased Camp Sunny Pines, formerly Camp Wonder Falls, the site of an unsolved murder committed in 1978 that devastated the town of Barlow Corners. Carson intends to make a podcast and documentary about the case, and he wants Stevie to investigate. She can even bring her friends Janelle and Nate, and they’ll all work as counselors while Stevie attempts to solve the brutal crime.

As the story alternates between the present day and the 1970s, Johnson offers funny vignettes of summer-camp life and context for the deaths of the murdered camp counselors—locals whose family and friends still live in town. Readers will root for the irrepressible Stevie, who thrills to tracking down clues. Her romantic relationship is realistic and sweet, and her kindness toward the still-grieving residents of Barlow Corners is touching.

As Stevie fits pieces of the past together, the danger lurking in Barlow Corners emerges and creates irresistible tension, particularly after another murder happens mid-investigation. Can she find the truth before someone else meets an untimely end? The Box in the Woods is a gripping and complex mystery bolstered by its commentary on the popular fascination with true crime—and its empathetic reminder to consider the perspectives of those they leave behind in their wake.

The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat and the scourge of sexism are front and center in these stories of talented, fierce girls who find collective power on and off the field. These powerful YA novels celebrate sports, friendship and the pursuit of justice. Read them and cheer!

At 16 years old and 6 feet, 2 inches tall, Mara Deeble has a few chips on her well-muscled shoulders, thanks to the suppressed anger she wrangles every day in the affecting, funny and timely Like Other Girls by Britta Lundin, a writer on the CW show “Riverdale” and author of 2018’s Ship It.

Mara’s got a three-pronged strategy to escape her conservative rural Oregon hometown. Step 1: Win a basketball scholarship. Step 2: Go to college in Portland. Step 3: Come out. For now, however, the pressure of her all-important plans and the time it’s taking to implement them is wearing her down. So, too, are her mother’s insistence that she attend church clad in a dress and heels and her frustration at having crushes she knows she can never act on.

To top it all off, Mara gets booted from her beloved basketball team for fighting, and Coach Joyce says she can’t return unless she succeeds on another team—sans violence. Mara scornfully deems volleyball too girly, what with all the hair ribbons and giggling, so she joins the football team instead. Her brother, Noah, and her BFF, Quinn, are on it, and the three of them have been playing together since childhood. What could go wrong?

Well. She’s spent years acting like just another one of the guys, so as Mara begins to actually excel on the gridiron, she’s surprised when her teammates’ sexism turns on her with full, resentful force. Even worse, four volleyball girls—including Mara’s frenemy, Carly, and crush, Valentina—join the team. Suddenly Mara’s a role model whether she likes it or not. (Reader, she does not.) 

A newcomer to town named Jupiter, who is an older, out lesbian, helps Maya reframe some of her own biases. She offers empathy even as she notes that the way Maya’s mother gatekeeps femininity is not all that different from how Mara stereotypes the volleyball girls. Jupiter also serves as a lovely, hope-inspiring example of what life could be like for Mara and her queer classmates someday.

Along with suspenseful and exciting gameplay, Like Other Girls features a winning mix of coming-of-age revelations, fun romantic subplots and thought-provoking musings on what it really means to be comfortable with yourself as part of a family, a community and a team.

Like Mara, high school junior and field hockey star Zoe Alamandar has a plan in Dangerous Play. She’ll lead her team to New York state field hockey championships victory, impress a scout from and get a full ride to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and bid her central New York hometown a hearty farewell.

After a summer of training the team with co-captain Ava at her side, Zoe’s feeling pretty great about her chances for success. Her teammates are united in their shared goal. She’s had fun working at her uncle’s ice cream shack with her best friend, Liv. Her dad has been dealing with lingering pain from a work accident but has been more upbeat lately. Zoe might even get up the nerve to talk to her crush, a boy named Grove.

In Dangerous Play, debut author Emma Kress demonstrates with devastating realism just how quickly things can change. When Zoe is sexually assaulted at a party, her optimism and confidence are crushed under the weight of PTSD, and her bright “fockey”-filled future now seems impossibly far away.

Kress, who has worked as a sexual violence peer counselor, writes in her author’s note that she “wanted to examine what happens to a group of girls and their community when rape culture goes unchecked.” She has created a memorable portrait of a girl who struggles with her new reality as emotions roll over her like so much rough surf.

But what if the team could prevent the same thing from happening to other girls? Vengeance takes center stage as a new mission generates excitement and controversy among the girls. They’re an adventurous bunch (parkour is a beloved team hobby), but how far is too far? And who gets to decide what equals justice?

Dangerous Play celebrates female friendship with wit, heart and plenty of pulse-pounding field hockey action as the championship game draws ever closer. Readers will root for Zoe, her teammates and their families as they strive to find common ground: “We’re all strands of yarn and gradually . . . we knit together and become something. Something bigger.”

The novel in verse is experiencing a bit of a renaissance in children’s and YA literature. Writers including Kwame Alexander, Elizabeth Acevedo, Jason Reynolds, Candice Iloh, Jasmine Warga and Joy McCullough have garnered both critical acclaim and commercial success. These two YA novels feature teenage narrators for whom the carefully chosen words of poetry hold the key to self-discovery.

The title and cover of Tina Cane’s first YA book, Alma Presses Play, set the scene immediately: Portable cassette players and big headphones are the technology of the day as 13-year-old Alma and her Jewish Chinese family ring in the new year of 1982 in New York City.

For Alma, eighth grade and the following summer are a time when “there’s a lot going on / but also nothing at all.” She ponders her possibly romantic feelings for her neighbor Miguel, gets her first period, dodges her parents’ increasingly frequent arguments and misses a friend who moves away. Along the way, Alma’s guidance counselor, Ms. Nola, encourages her to write down her feelings about race, gender and life in her neighborhood. Plus there’s candy to eat and share—Tootsie Rolls and Pop Rocks and Twizzlers—and music for every mood, from Stevie Wonder and Blondie to David Bowie and the Pretenders.

The most noticeable feature of Alma Presses Play is the way Cane arranges Alma’s words on the page. Most lines consist of blocks of words set apart by white space, which allows readers to inhale between each phrase and makes Alma’s words feel breathy, immediate and authentic. Lists, letters, dictionary-style definitions and outlines break up the pace. Cane sprinkles in details of life in the 1980s such as mixtapes, Atari video game systems and Judy Blume novels, as well as the ever present question of what, exactly, the plural of Walkman is.

The Greek and Roman mythology that Alma studies in school—especially the character of Janus, the god of transitions, and stories of female protagonists such as Helen and Pandora—provides an ongoing lens through which Alma makes sense of her life. Cane offers multiple, sometimes contradictory versions of these myths, enabling Alma and the reader to wrestle with the stories’ alternating messages of women’s power and powerlessness. “Even though fiction is made-up / it contains a certain kind of truth," Alma muses, a fitting description of Cane's writing. As Alma makes decisions about school, relationships and even the city she wants to live in, it’s wonderful to watch her realize that she can set her life to the music that she chooses.

Two years ago, Moth’s parents and brother were killed in a car crash, leaving an emotionally and physically scarred Moth to live with her aunt. Despite being an elite, talented dancer, Moth vows that she will never dance again: It “feels too joyful, too greedy now.” Moth wishes that she had learned more Hoodoo practice from her grandfather, who promised before he died that he would “never leave [her] trapped—defenseless.”

None of the other Black kids at her mostly white school want to be friends, but soon Moth meets Sani, who also feels out of place living with his mother’s white family after his Navajo father left, and whose depression stops him from singing and playing the music that once brought him joy and meaning. Together, they depart on a cross-country road trip, visiting historical sites where enslavement and genocide underly white prosperity, exploring moth-related metaphors for growth and maybe even starting to fall in love. Will they find the courage to break out of their cocoons and emerge in new forms?

If you think you know where this story is going, think again. Me (Moth) will surprise you.

As in Alma Presses Play, the placement and alignment of words on the page plays a key role in the storytelling of Me (Moth). Line spacing varies, and some lines are only one or two words long. Even punctuation is unusual: Ampersands replace standard conjunctions, and names often appear in parentheses even when meanings are otherwise clear (“my aunt (Jack)” or “my mom (Meghan)”). Author Amber McBride rhymes occasionally (“the accident that split / our car like a candy bar”), drawing attention to the sounds of words, and her imagery is often tactile and tangible (“the choreography is choppy water instead of wind blowing / through a field of wheat”).

Moth engages in Hoodoo practices like lighting candles, burying significant objects and leaving offerings of food to ancestral spirits in the hopes of shifting odds in her favor. She also matches Sani’s Navajo creation stories with traditional Hoodoo stories of her own. “All stories have ghosts,” Moth tells Sani, and she’s right. In this brilliant novel, the past haunts the present in places where history, memory and spirituality intertwine.

Coming-of-age goes supernatural in three spellbinding YA books featuring teen witches with amazing abilities and major magic. Toil, trouble and the curses of adolescence are no match for their power!

Edie in Between

In Laura Sibson’s Edie in Between, Edie Mitchell treasures the silver acorn pendant her mother gave her, but she avoids nearly every other aspect of her heritage. Edie comes from a long line of witches, but the 17-year-old considers magic something to be avoided rather than embraced.

Since her mother’s recent death, Edie has been living with her grandmother, GG, in the small town of Cedar Branch, where she refuses to touch the herbs and small bones hanging in the kitchen or interact with the inquisitive ghosts of her ancestors who like to float around the houseboat they share with a cat named Temperance. Her mother is a ghostly presence, too, but Edie won’t chat with her like GG does; she’s “a constant reminder of what I’ve lost.”

Edie manages her longing for her former Baltimore home and her uncertainty about the future by going on daily runs with her new friend, Tess. But when a threatening force is accidentally roused, Edie’s reluctance to embrace magic becomes a liability. She must get up to speed on her powers before something terrible befalls her and those she cares about—including the beautiful and appealing Rhia, an aspiring witch who’s delighted to share with Edie what she’s learned about magic thus far.

The discovery of her mom’s old journal proves pivotal to Edie’s rushed education. Each entry hints at something Edie must find or do and opens a window into her mother’s life before she became pregnant. Sibson (The Art of Breaking Things) draws the past into the present with empathy and skill, respecting the pain of Edie’s grief while allowing her to know her mother in a way she might not have otherwise.

Edie in Between is a winning portrait of a girl’s evolution from embarrassment to openly embracing what makes her different, including celebrating her magical kinship with the witches who came before her.

The Witch Haven

When 17-year-old seamstress Frances Hallowell discovers her powers in The Witch Haven, she is horrified, relieved and hopeful. It’s 1911 in New York City, and after a violent attack on her life, Frances is appalled to realize she may have killed her attacker with her emotions. Thankfully, two nurses suddenly appear on the scene and whisk her away to Haxahaven Sanitarium, helping her avoid police suspicion and catapulting her into an astonishing new chapter of her life.

That’s because the nurses are witches and Haxahaven isn’t a medical facility. Instead, it’s a 200-year-old school for the magical, complete with dramatic architecture, noisy dining hall and imperious headmistress. Now that Frances’ powers have been awakened, Haxahaven will help her use them for good.

And that’s where the hopefulness comes in, as magic holds both the promise of a better future and the solution to a more immediate problem: Can Frances’ new powers help her find out what happened to her brother, William, who was found dead in the East River four months ago? Her grief is ever-present—“like a punch to the gut fifty times a day”—as is her desire to solve his murder and prevent others from suffering as he did.

Debut author Sasha Peyton Smith has created a compelling character in Frances. She’s smart and often funny, impulsive and occasionally frustrating as she makes decisions born of naivete and desperation, often with new friends Maxine and Lena in tow. The arrival of William’s friend Finn offers a way for Frances to learn meaningful magic (disappointingly, Haxahaven focuses on housekeeping-centric spells) and to investigate William’s death. There’s romantic potential between them, too, but Finn belongs to a gentlemen’s club full of power-hungry wizards. Should she judge him by the company he keeps?

The Witch Haven is an immersive excursion into early 20th-century New York City. Beneath the grit and darkness of the period, Smith layers in a supernatural underworld that intrigues Frances as much as it endangers her. The result is an atmospheric and mystical adventure that offers a realistic exploration of grief and a memorable take on coming-of-age tropes.

Bad Witch Burning

Katrell Davis suffers greatly in debut author Jessica Lewis’ Bad Witch Burning, enduring wrenching emotional pain, violent beatings and overwhelming exhaustion. Even so, the 16-year-old stubbornly insists on survival even when her options are meager and dangerous. She works 30 hours a week at a burger joint, trying to pay the rent and bills for the decrepit townhouse where she lives with her neglectful mother and her mother’s abusive boyfriend, Gerald. She has a side gig, too: Using her magical powers, she conjures up her clients’ dead relatives, even though it causes her physical pain.

Her best friend, Will, loves to chat with her late grandma Clara, who warns Katrell that she must stop her seances: “You’ll burn down not only yourself, but everyone and everything around you.” Katrell pays Clara no mind; she’s got work to do. But when her hours at the burger joint are cut and Gerald kills her dog, Katrell’s anguish and rage burn hotter than ever, leading her to discover an even more powerful ability than merely communing with the dead. So what if people are crawling out of their graves and walking around? It’s a huge risk, but Katrell will figure it out, and she’ll monetize it.

A series of resurrections earns her more cash than she’s ever had—but more attention, too. As threatening types close in and Katrell realizes her powers aren’t completely under her control, Lewis’ story becomes an even wilder ride, its horror tinged with the darkest of humor as Katrell’s life hangs in the balance.

Bad Witch Burning is a powerful debut, a moving gift of a story from a writer who, per an author’s note included with advance editions of the book, worked through her own valid anger and emerged stronger on the other side to create a book “for girls who need to scream but smile instead.” It’s an exciting, harrowing supernatural tale filled with thrills, poignancy and heart.