Ellen Lopez-Rourke is determined to spend every moment of the last summer before college with her two best friends, Melissa and Xiumiao. But all that changes when, after one too many sociopolitical arguments with her stepmother, Ellen finds herself grounded. With Melissa’s help, Ellen negotiates an exception to her house arrest: joining a local league of Quidditch players.

Never interested in sports until they became her last resort, Ellen isn’t sure what to expect when Melissa invites her to join the league and try playing the game based on a fictional sport from the world of Harry Potter. But as her relationships with her family and and her friends become increasingly complicated, Ellen finds herself becoming deeply ingrained in the inclusive community of Quidditch players. Her on-field confidence in her role as a beater (a defensive position) grows, and she begins to recognize that she’s found a home on the pitch. Even though the brooms don’t actually fly, it still feels a little bit like magic.

Anna Meriano’s first young adult novel, This Is How We Fly, transforms “Cinderella” into a coming-of-age story about a young woman who movingly navigates difficult family dynamics and searches for an outlet for her own fears and frustrations—about her friendships, her gender identity and the state of the world. Meriano’s teen characters are dimensional and ready to fly off the page on their PVC-pipe brooms, though the same can’t be said for the adults in the book, particularly Connie, Ellen’s stepmother. The diverse cast of characters authentically reflect the reality of teen lives in 2020, and their interests in and perspectives on political and social issues including global climate change, racial inequality and gender norms feel fresh and contemporary.

Wrapped around all of this is what feels like a glowing love letter to fan culture as Ellen and her new friends immerse themselves in a community that originated from a shared enthusiasm for Harry Potter. This Is How We Fly testifies to the power of fans to breathe new life into stories beyond the pages of books or the wildest dreams of their creators.

Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter, teams up with acclaimed YA author Tiffany D. Jackson to tell the story of the time that the American icon spent in prison for charges related to a series of burglaries. The Awakening of Malcolm X opens in a courtroom in 1946, where Malcolm and his friend Shorty are betrayed by Malcolm’s white girlfriend and sentenced to separate prisons. So begins a nightmare from which Malcolm cannot awaken.

Amid the inhumane conditions and cruel treatment at the Charlestown State Prison, it isn’t long before Malcolm realizes how far he has strayed from the ideals his family raised him to hold. His family never abandons him, however, and as they visit him in dreams, through letters and in the flesh, they help him pick up the pieces of his life and lay the foundation for his future as a leader.

When Malcolm is transferred to a facility that provides opportunities for rehabilitation, he joins its successful debate team and the Nation of Islam. When he is finally released, though his mind is still full of questions, he is armed with the confidence and self-awareness he will need to make a difference for his people.

Shabazz and Jackson’s retelling of the experiences that transformed Malcolm at one of the lowest points in his life makes for a powerful read. As he dwells on his upbringing, readers will see significant connections between the foundation Malcolm’s parents laid for him in the Garveyism movement, which advocated for racial separation, Black economic independence and Pan-Africanism, and the self-love Malcolm eventually finds in the Nation of Islam, which is presented as a sort of homecoming.

Shabazz and Jackson don’t sugarcoat the ugly side of American society in this moment in history, and mesmerizing scenes in which the personal meets the political infuse the story with the fire and passion for which Malcolm X is so well known. The Awakening of Malcolm X is a welcome invitation to consider the light that Malcolm X shone on society’s injustices and what it continues to reveal today.

Ever since Alva’s Da, the latest in an ancestral line of caretakers of the loch near their village, murdered her mother seven years ago, Alva has been secretly planning her escape to a new life in town. Recently, her father has begun disappearing at night, demanding that Alva not leave their cottage after dark—which is a problem since Alva needs to meet her friend Ren, a boy from the nearby town who’s bringing her the supplies she’ll need to make her escape. Alva is beginning to worry that Da suspects something.

When Da shows Alva that one of the nets he’s set around the loch’s depths has been shredded with mysterious precision and demands that she replace it with a new net, it seems to confirm her concerns. And then she sees the first creature.

Drawing on Scottish mythology, author Melinda Salisbury pulls readers into a world of ribbon dances and tea trays, where woolen cloaks and silver horseshoes abound and dark, damp caves hold ancient secrets. She combines these folkloric motifs with the contemporary issue of climate change: The bustling town’s mill is draining the loch to dangerously low levels, allowing that which has long been concealed by the water’s depths to emerge. As Alva begins to question every assumption she’s ever made about her father, the loch and the villagers who have always shunned them, time may be running out. The creatures only appear after dusk, but the chilly autumn days are giving way to the long nights of winter.

Misty, atmospheric and suspenseful, Hold Back the Tide alternates between tenderness and violence as it explores how the choices we make influence our environment and why that matters. Who are the monsters here, and who is just trying to survive? It’s perfect for readers who loved Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races and Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island, or anyone who wants to curl up with a blanket, a cup of tea and a good story on a gloomy day.

Footage of Black Americans being brutalized and even killed at the hands of police has been part of our media landscape for years. It may be hard to open a book and read about fictional brutality that hews so closely to reality that it feels like salt poured on a wound, but in their second novel, sisters Maika and Maritza Moulite aren’t simply picking at a scab. They are digging deep to help flush out an infection created by generations of injustice.

Three timelines tell the story of Kezi, a straight-A teen activist who dies in police custody after she attends a protest. In the present, Kezi’s younger sister, Happi, must deal with the grief that has enveloped her family. Just before Kezi’s death, Shaqueria, a down-on-her-luck actor, hopes for the break that will give her a way out of her circumstances. And in the distant past, Happi and Kezi’s great-grandmother Evelyn bears witness to the horrors of an unjust world.

When Happi sets out on a road trip across the country to honor Kezi’s memory—a trip they’d planned to take together—the connections between the three timelines emerge. As Happi comes to terms with her loss and learns more about her family’s history, the Moulites introduce hallmarks of American history such as sundown towns and the Negro Motorist Green Book. Barreling through subtlety, the novel goes out of its way to bridge the gap between readers who may be unfamiliar with this history and readers who know it all too well.

One of the Good Ones initially appears to share a premise with Angie Thomas’ influential 2017 novel, The Hate U Give. Like Thomas’ protagonist, Starr, Happi is navigating a world where she and her family are unsafe because of the color of their skin. However, once the puzzle pieces of the Moulites’ novel start coming together, it takes a sharp turn toward the unexpected. Stylistic differences as well as an incredible act of violence will shatter any comparisons to Thomas’ novel. Part history lesson and part mystery thrill ride, One of the Good Ones makes a pointed case for the power of sisterhood and the resilience of Black women.

Readers who love complex, mythology-based fantasies, meet your newest obsession.

For seven days every seven years, Greek gods must walk the earth as mere mortals during a period they call the Agon. Well, they don’t so much walk as fight for their lives. After thousands of years, many of the gods haven’t survived, as they’ve been hunted down by the descendants of ancient Greek heroes. Each heroic bloodline is sworn to protect a god, but these hunters are also eager to slay other families’ gods in order to seize the deities’ divine power and immortality.

Once an Agon ends, the family reaps the benefits of their deity’s powers, which they can use to build family-owned business empires. For example, a god’s healing powers can help create a pharmaceutical company, the powers of war are a boon to a weapons manufacturer, and so on.

Seventeen-year-old Melora “Lore” Perseous is the descendant of Greek hero Perseus, and as the last of her bloodline, she’s gone to great pains to remove herself from the Agon’s brutality. A rival bloodline led by Wrath, a hunter who slayed Ares and inherited his powers to become a god himself, viciously murdered Lore’s family during the last Agon, and though Lore is a highly skilled fighter, she went into hiding to avoid sharing her family’s fate.

But when the Agon begins again in New York City, Athena, one of the last remaining gods, comes knocking at Lore’s door. In exchange for Lore’s help to survive the Agon, Athena agrees to slay Wrath, their shared enemy, who’s set on slaughtering the other gods in order to ensure he—and no one else—inherits their powers.

Bestselling author Alexandra Bracken, whose Darkest Minds series was adapted into a movie of the same name in 2018, strikes a notably darker tone here than in her previous work. Lore’s world is a violent place, and Bracken doesn’t hold back. Though keeping track of hunter family genealogies as well as the histories of gods both old and new can be cumbersome at times, readers eager for detail-oriented world building will find Lore enthralling. Bracken’s well-drawn characters drive the narrative, keeping it anchored in gritty prose and high-stakes emotions.

Lore is a wildly inventive and ambitious blend of reimagined Greek mythology and contemporary urban fantasy.

At the edge of a forest that haunts his family, Owen Merrick cares for his baby sister and grieving father. The witch who took Owen’s mother has transformed the trees into sirens that lure people to violent deaths. The sirens are Owen’s sworn enemies, but when he is caught in the woods one day and a siren named Seren rescues him, a tentative trust builds between them. Into the Heartless Wood is a fantasy novel that packs an emotional punch as it explores how doing the right, kind and gentle thing can require far more courage than waging war.

Joanna Ruth Meyer’s choice to place sirens—typically associated with the sea—in a forest setting is wonderfully imaginative. Owen’s cozy home contrasts with scenes of train travel and the bustle of the city. The train runs through the forest, however, which threatens to overtake the kingdom as the witch extracts more souls.

The battle between the witch and the king—and the consequences that befall Owen’s father, an astronomer who foretells some of what’s to come by interpreting messages from constellations—are grand and violent. Seren wants to break with the witch’s destructive ways, and she goes to fantastical lengths to help defeat her and keep watch over Owen. The witch is genuinely scary, and scenes involving the removal of souls are shocking in their cruelty.

Though kingdoms rise and fall, the human soul is at the center of this invented world. Like the woods just beyond Owen’s home, Into the Heartless Wood is easy to get lost in and hard to come back from, thanks to Meyer’s excellent world building.

Tessa Johnson is a writer. The words pour out of her into romance novels that star heroines with brown skin like hers—and that feature the boys of her dreams, of course. So when Tessa and her family move to Long Beach, California, and she enrolls in a highly selective art school, she’s thrilled at the opportunity to spend hours each day honing her craft. But faced with sharing her work with other artists for the first time, Tessa’s anxiety skyrockets. Her writer’s block is so intense that, for weeks, she can’t write a single word. What if she never gets her groove back? Who is she if she’s not a writer?

When her best friend, Caroline, suggests that finding a boyfriend might jump-start her novel, Tessa zeros in on her classmate Nico, who’s model-handsome and a fellow writer. But as she pursues Nico, her friendships with Caroline and her goofy yet caring neighbor Sam begin to fall apart, and Tessa starts to suspect that she’s looking for validation in all the wrong places.

In her charming debut novel, Happily Ever Afters, Elise Bryant nimbly blends bubbly, will-they-won’t-they teen romance with a frank look at issues ranging from impostor syndrome and identity to race and mental health. Bryant treats the tough stuff with nuance and compassion through conversations among a richly drawn cast of diverse and appealing characters. From a scene in which Tessa and her new friend Lenore bond in the restroom over surprise periods, to Sam’s easy interactions with Tessa’s brother, Miles, who has cerebral palsy and cognitive impairment, to Caroline’s ability to firmly but gently draw her own boundaries, Happily Ever Afters is filled with delightful examples of strong, healthy friendships. Crucially, these friendships ultimately guide Tessa to strengthen her most important relationship: with herself.

Happily Ever Afters captures just how difficult—and rewarding—high school can be. Though the title telegraphs how her story will end, Tessa’s journey to get there is all her own.

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.