Karen M. McManus’ latest thriller is a layered whodunit that takes its time unpacking several generations’ worth of deceit and cruelty.

When Mildred Story invites her three grandchildren to spend the summer working at the resort she owns on Gull Cove Island, it’s a loaded proposition. Milly, Aubrey and Jonah barely know each other, and they don’t know their grandmother at all. Mildred is wealthy, and her decision to disinherit her children left the Story family fractured and alienated from one another. The Cousins at the heart of this mystery are tentatively curious to learn more about their family, and once they reach the island, secrets begin to come to light.

The story jumps around quite a bit by design, as chapters alternate from each cousin’s perspective and also flash back to their parents’ youth. The suspense ebbs and flows while each Story’s story plays out. Milly had hoped to grow close to the grandmother she’s named for, but Mildred flatly ignores her in favor of Aubrey. At first, Aubrey is flattered by the attention, until she realizes she’s being rewarded for compliance (but compliance with what, exactly?). Jonah keeps his head down, but his strategy of trying to stay in the background only takes him so far; when the spotlight finds him, it’s damaging to everyone.

McManus (One of Us Is Lying) populates the island’s atmospheric, Hitchcockian scenery with eccentric characters, many of whom have ties to the Story family, and slowly reveals the event that shattered their lives. The conclusion that follows is terrifically choreographed. A relationship predicated on false identity turns out to be clever foreshadowing; readers who enjoy a romantic storyline intertwined with their mysteries will be all in.

Curl up with The Cousins on a chilly day, and you’ll swear you can hear howling wind and crashing waves just outside your door.

A powerful mage is removed from a bleak orphanage to serve a usurper queen in Julia Ember’s Ruinsong, a queer re-imagining of The Phantom of the Opera. Instead of using her magical voice to honor her goddess by healing broken bodies, Cadence must use her abilities in ways she never could have imagined—singing to cause pain, fear and supplication among the nobles despised by the queen.

Because she fears for her life, Cadence submits to Queen Elene’s increasingly horrifying demands—until she is unexpectedly reunited with Remi, a friend from childhood and the daughter of a noble family brought low by the queen’s regime. As her feelings for Remi grow, Cadence must confront the consequences of using her magic to do the queen’s bidding.

Ruinsong is a compelling and delicately balanced tale of music and magic with dark undercurrents of destructive power and rebellion. Ember’s lush world building sketches and suggests rather than submerging readers in dense passages of background information. The narrative hints at larger class and power struggles while depicting a society in which rigid notions of gender and sexuality are slowly fading. The literal magic of song swirls through the story as the slow-burn attraction between Cadence and Remi begins haltingly then builds to a roaring crescendo. Ruinsong will delight readers who prefer their fantasy novels with sharp and sometimes concealed edges.

Seventeen-year-old Sunny Dae is one of three nonwhite students at his high school; the other two are his best friends. He spends his days using his anxious energy to imagineer practical effects accessories for LARPing, a type of role-playing game in which participants dress up as the characters they play. His parents are workaholics obsessed with keeping up with the well-to-do families in their new neighborhood. His older brother, Gray, is back at home after flaming out as a musician in Los Angeles, licking his wounds in the basement, his rock-star dreams drowned out more and more every day by the dull reality of khakis and neckties.

When Cirrus Soh, a beautiful new student with swagger to spare, mistakes Gray's old room—decked out with rock ’n’ roll posters, guitars and a totally metal wardrobe—for his, Sunny is happy to reinvent himself in the mold of his fallen rock god brother. Convinced Cirrus would recoil if she ever saw his real room or his real self, Sunny starts wearing his brother’s clothes, hides away the nerdy details of his life and, most consequentially, tells Cirrus he is the frontman of a rock band.

Sunny’s rock ’n’ roll charade gives him a confidence and bravado he’s never felt before. With help from his brother and best friends, he even manages to put together an actual rock band. However, author David Yoon isn’t interested telling a coming-of-age story in Super Fake Love Song, but rather a story about coming to know ourselves. Who is Sunny, and why is he so willing to leave the person he was before he met Cirrus behind? “If there were no shame,” asks Sunny, “would we be freer?” Young men openly discussing and dismantling patriarchal shame in positive ways with their peers? You love to see it.

It can be difficult for romantic comedies to strike the perfect balance between romantic and comedic, but in his sophomore outing, Yoon makes it look easy. Every character here is richly drawn, oozing with personality and overflowing with quippy one-liners that keep the laughs coming even as the emotional stakes increase. Roll down your windows and turn your speakers up to 11, because Super Fake Love Song is the real deal.

Cerys lives an idyllic life in the serene, prosperous kingdom of Aloriya. She supports her best friend, Princess Anwen; tends flowers with her father, the royal gardener; and befriends a spunky fox who’s taken a shine to her. All seems well, though Cerys wonders whether her future role as royal gardener is what she really wants. But when evil forces invade Aloriya on the day of Anwen’s coronation, Cerys flees into the Wildwood, a dark forest that has already claimed many lives. As everything she took for granted crumbles around her, Cerys must uncover the truth about herself and Aloriya to save the people she loves.

Ashley Poston’s Among the Beasts & Briars reads like a classical fairy tale in the best way. Fantasy readers will appreciate how Poston conjures familiar elements but employs them with thrilling originality and flair. She turns tropes such as the damsel in distress and the dangerous curse upside down: What if the heroic prince disappears before the action starts? Could evil creatures have noble intentions? What if the heroine’s magical power is useless in a battle between darkness and light?

Poston depicts how beautiful things such as flowers or princesses can suddenly become terrifying. She paints a vivid yet dreamlike world of regal palaces, lively festivals and foreboding forests, inviting readers to admire the beauty of ballgowns while forcing them to confront the creepiness of crawling creatures and rotting flesh. But Poston also grounds the book’s decadent atmosphere in realistic, well-drawn characters and the relationships between them, ensuring that the fantastical trappings of her story never interfere with its wholly human heart.

By day, Catherine works in a print shop. At night, her boss sends her to the cemetery to raise the dead and give families a final hour with their loved ones—but each raising takes an hour off her life. It’s an unfortunate bargain, but Catherine is at the mercy of her employer, who can toss her out on the street at any moment—and he does when Catherine and her friend Guy, a watchmaker, fail to unearth a magical timepiece buried in a boy’s coffin. Instead, they inexplicably revive the boy permanently. Though he can’t remember anything about his life, the boy is their only link to the timepiece, and finding it is the only way they can save Catherine’s livelihood.

Set in an alternate Victorian England, Magic Dark and Strange combines mystery, magic and a touch of the macabre while underscoring the harsh conditions of the working class. Catherine depends on her employer for income and lodging, and her quest for the timepiece gains urgency from her fear of destitution. Guy and his father struggle to keep their shop afloat, and the revived boy must find an apprenticeship or risk the poorhouse.

A lack of rules to govern the magical elements of this story may frustrate detail-oriented fantasy fans. Nonetheless, the novel’s moody, gothic atmosphere, appealing romance and brisk mystery plot will satisfy readers who enjoy storytelling that blends genre conventions with ease.

Scotland, 1940: At the Limehouse pub, the paths of the four protagonists of Elizabeth Wein’s gripping The Enigma Game intersect. The proprietor hires recently orphaned Louisa as a personal assistant to her elderly, feisty Aunt Jane, an arrangement that benefits them both; getting a job has been difficult for Jamaican-born Louisa due to her dark skin, and no one wants to care for a German woman who might have once been a spy. Meanwhile, Ellen relishes the opportunity to conceal her Scottish Traveler heritage behind her respectable job as a military driver, and Flight Lieutenant Jaime Beaufort-Stuart simply hopes to bring his crew home alive after each mission. He and his fellow airmen from the nearby base each leave a sixpence in a crack in the Limehouse’s soft wood beams. If they return from their missions, they’ll use the money to buy themselves a drink; if their planes are shot down, their coins will remain as tokens, small marks upon the world.

A rogue German pilot leaves a mysterious object behind at the pub. It looks a bit like a typewriter but has additional switches and dials. Its keys, when pressed, light up, but the letter illuminated on the letter plate doesn’t match the letter typed. Louisa and Ellen work together to master the Enigma machine in order to break the German codes and feed Jaime the information he needs to save his pilots’ lives. But the codes themselves are sometimes in code, and an even larger intelligence mission waits in the wings.

Readers will enjoy The Enigma Game as a standalone thriller or as a prequel to Wein’s 2013 Printz Honor book, Code Name Verity, and 2017’s The Pearl Thief (watch for a favorite character to appear—in disguise). Highly distinct narrative voices spin a story of suspense and intrigue, including several remarkable incidents taken directly from historical records, as Wein explains in her detailed “Declaration of Accountability.” The Enigma Game furthers Wein’s streak of excellent historical fiction.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Author Elizabeth Wein reveals her literary superpower and the deeply personal inspiration behind one of the protagonists of The Enigma Game.

In Candice Iloh’s debut novel in verse, Every Body Looking, college and the newfound independence it brings launch 18-year-old Ada from her conservative upbringing into a discovery of what she wants.

When we first meet Ada, she doesn’t seem to know how to articulate her own desires, either for her relationships or for the direction her life will take. A first-generation Nigerian American girl, Ada has been sheltered as much as her religious father could manage. After working hard in high school, she earns a scholarship to a historically Black college and leaves Chicago on her own for the first time. Though she registers for accounting classes, it doesn’t take long for Ada to realize that she doesn’t care about credits and debits. What she really wants to do is dance—something she’s always done but has kept hidden from her dad. When Ada meets an entrancing dancer named Kendra, she begins to see a way to build her future around her love of dance.

Every Body Looking pivots and spins across time, from Ada’s early childhood all the way to her first year of college, as it touches on themes of abuse, trauma and healing. Ada experiences abuse at a young age, and it impacts her life in ways that Iloh depicts with sensitivity. Ada also struggles with loving and being loved by her unreliable and sometimes cruel mother, who is dealing with addiction.

Iloh movingly explores the concept of safety through Ada’s relationships with her parents, as well as in her evolving perspectives on money, potential careers and budding romantic crushes. Teen readers who long for more independence than adults are willing to grant them, or who long to be seen as individuals rather than vessels for adult influence and direction, will find many points of identification with Ada’s story.

As Ada learns to feel and appreciate the power of her own body through dance, she develops strength in other areas of her life as well. Every Body Looking is a powerful acknowledgement of what we gain when we grant ourselves permission to embrace who we are fully and completely.

Mila has spent the past four years in the foster care system. Now that she’s turning 18, she can’t be placed with another foster family, so she’s stunned and humbled to receive a placement as an intern with a couple named Julia and Terry, who have raised dozens of children on their idyllic farm tucked between the mountains and the sea. Alongside two other interns, Mila will tutor the younger children and contribute to the daily workings of farm life, tending the crops, learning about flowers and taking harvests to the nearby farmers market.

Mila quickly becomes close to her student, 9-year-old Lee, beneath whose quiet demeanor lies a traumatic history. The two also bond over their shared distrust of the ghostly figures who seem to haunt the farm at night. The farm’s other residents seem to relish their mysterious presence, but Mila and Lee aren’t ready to welcome them in. Even as Mila settles into her new life, she worries that she doesn’t really belong on the farm. She becomes increasingly unsettled when disturbing tokens from her old life begin to show up on the doorstep of her cabin.

Watch Over Me is an unusual ghost story in which the ghosts are both metaphors and characters in their own right. Printz Medalist Nina LaCour (We Are Okay) effectively blends contemporary perspectives on psychological themes, including abuse, childhood trauma, guilt and grief, with a setting and a narrative that seem to exist somehow outside of time.

As the story opens, Mila is at the crossroads between childhood and adulthood. Her regrets over events in her youth and her longing to have had a more secure childhood like those Julia and Terry’s adoptees enjoy is poignant and palpable. Simultaneously, however, as her deepening relationship with Lee causes her to want to be the best teacher she can, Mila begins to craft a vision of her future that wouldn’t have been possible without the farm.

Richly atmospheric and both haunting and hopeful, Watch Over Me is a rewarding novel about a young woman on the brink of a new life.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Go behind the scenes of Watch Over Me with author Nina LaCour.

The trope of a bully blackmailing a closeted queer person is well established in YA. Arvin Ahmadi’s How It All Blew Up makes an intriguing addition to the canon of such stories. We’re introduced to recent high school graduate Amir in an airport interrogation room, as he recounts the last year of his life to very patient Customs and Border Protection agents.

During senior year, two of Amir’s longtime bullies discover his secret relationship with Jackson, a sensitive football player, and demand that he pay them off with money he earns online. When they get greedy, Amir feels trapped, afraid of revealing his sexuality to his conservative Muslim family. With logic that only a desperate teenager could make sense of, he makes a run for it and finds himself in scenic Rome.

Ahmadi blows through the entirety of Love, Simon in this setup, and thank goodness, because once the familiar signposts of the trope fall away, the story really shines. Amir explores his identity and desires along with his new surroundings. He makes older queer friends who teach him about Nina Simone and “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” takes Italian lessons and parties into the wee hours of the morning. His new friends become a chosen family of mentors whose help any young outsider would be happy to have on their journey to self-discovery. The relationships Amir builds with these characters are truly the highlight of the novel.

Amir can be a frustrating protagonist, but Ahmadi authentically depicts the growing pains of a young queer person reconciling his sexual orientation with the expectations of two communities—LGBTQ and Muslim. The result is occasionally awkward but always brimming with sincerity. “It’s such a privilege, you know?” Amir reflects. “To get to be yourself, all of yourself, in this great big world.”

Days before her high school graduation, Claudine’s parents announce that they’re divorcing. She and her mom will spend Claude’s last summer before college on an island in Georgia with spotty Wi-Fi and relentless mosquitoes. Claude feels like the floor’s been pulled out from under her until she meets Jeremiah, the enigmatic islander who sees through every wall she puts up. Slowly but surely, Claude and Jeremiah rebuild her foundations, taking risks with their hearts and control of their lives.

As in Jennifer Niven’s previous YA novels, Breathless introduces its protagonist at a moment when her world feels upside down, confronting her struggles head-on. For Claude, these include the emotional fallout from her parents’ divorce and her growing desire to have sex before she heads off to college. (Though she knows virginity is a patriarchal construct, Claude is ready to lose hers ASAP.)

Although Claude’s parents and the novel’s other adult characters lack dimensionality, the teens—including Claude, Jeremiah and Claude’s best friend, Saz—are all richly developed, deep flaws and all. Claude and Jeremiah’s romance has just the right amount of sweetness as they grapple with the line between love and lust, what it means to feel grounded and what they might mean to each other once the summer comes to a close.

Breathless is a frank and tender novel of self-discovery that fans of Sarah Dessen’s transformational summer romances and John Green’s stories of poignant self-discovery and difficult growth will enjoy.

Bree Matthews has everything she ever wanted. She’s starting an early college program at her dream school, and her best friend is her roommate. But she’s also reeling from her mother’s death in a hit-and-run accident and finding that achieving her dreams isn’t as sweet as she thought it would be. Then Bree stumbles onto a secret society of people who claim to be descendants of King Arthur and his court. She also learns that her mother’s death may not have been an accident. As Bree immerses herself in the society to uncover the truth, she begins to exhibit a power that could save her loved ones from a looming darkness—but could also threaten both her heart and her happiness.

Legendborn, Tracy Deonn’s debut novel, upends fantasy tropes with skill and style. Within a classical “chosen one” narrative, Bree becomes the only Black member of a society that she knows never intended to include her. Deonn balances moments of levity with heavier scenes, such as when Bree is mistaken for a servant and experiences unequal treatment due to her race and gender. Through depictions of subtle microaggressions and blatant racism, Deonn places Bree’s identity front and center, down to the silk scarf she sleeps in, and demonstrates a young woman coming into her power in a world designed to smother it.

Both Bree’s personal grief for her mother and her collective grief for her forebears play key roles in how she understands the world. What does it mean to grieve for your history as a Black American after it is rewritten by your oppressors? Deonn’s exploration of ancestry and our feelings of connection to those who came before is beautiful and moving. She allows Bree to be angry, to be loved, to be a nerd and, most crucially, to be powerful.

Legendborn establishes Deonn as an important new voice in YA. Its gorgeous prose and heart-splitting honesty compel an eyes-wide-open reading experience.

High school is hard enough without having to live in your car to avoid your sister’s abusive boyfriend. Avery Grambs is just gritting her teeth and getting through it one day at a time when a letter arrives that turns her life on its head. Billionaire Tobias Hawthorne has died and left his massive fortune to Avery. Of course, there’s a catch: She must spend a year living in his mansion, alongside his disinherited—and livid—descendants.

Jennifer Lynn Barnes (The Naturals series) has a rollicking good time setting the gears of her plot in motion. Avery is whisked away from her life so quickly, her life thrown into such disarray by the revelation of Hawthorne’s will, that it’s easy to overlook the critical fact that she has no idea who Hawthorne is. In fact, she’s never even heard of the man, nor does she have any idea why he would leave her his entire fortune. By the time Avery meets his family, things have already taken a turn for the sinister. Hawthorne has built puzzles into his sprawling home that alternately pit Avery and Hawthorne’s four grandsons against one another and draw them into working together.

When any wall might conceal a doorway to a secret passage and everyone around her speaks in riddles and evasions, it’s nearly impossible for Avery to decide who she can trust. Each brother warns Avery to keep her distance, but she’s powerfully drawn to two brothers in particular who once fought over a girl. Avery realizes that history might hold some answers . . . but it could also be another red herring in a story positively swimming with them.

The Inheritance Games wraps a mystery in an enigma and throws in four hot brothers for fun. The Hawthorne family, furious at their disinheritance, bring a Knives Out energy to this story, which is full of as many twists, turns and narrative trap doors as Hawthorne’s sprawling estate itself. Yet for all its intricacies and secrets, The Inheritance Games is ultimately a story about a complicated family fracturing and coming back together, only to fall apart all over again.