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.

Newt lives in Bearmouth, a labyrinth of mines ruled by toil and tradition, populated by hardened boys and men (Newt has been told they are a eunuch). But the arrival of a new boy named Devlin forces Newt to question everything about Bearmouth, freedom and even Newt's own identity.

Newt narrates this tale with striking frankness and originality, elaborating on the culture of Bearmouth and offering personal opinions on the mine, the miners and their place among them. Newt's best friend, Thomas, is beginning to teach Newt to read and write, which the text itself reflects—Bearmouth is written nearly phonetically. “Learnin letters is hard. My eyes strayne at the end o lessun wi the bryteness o the candul lyte,” Newt explains in the opening pages. Readers shouldn’t hesitate to read Newt’s words aloud as they begin Bearmouth, as doing so brings us closer to the way Newt is working to uncover reading, writing and new ideas.

Bearmouth drapes a mysterious and fantastical veil over well-trodden young adult themes. Gender, identity, rebellion and even revolution are shrouded in literal darkness in Bearmouth’s caverns, and readers will share in the characters’ confusion as the story twists and winds like the mine’s passages. Rest assured, there’s light at the end of its tunnels.

Newt’s discovery of the truth about Bearmouth and about who they really are makes for a fresh take on coming-of-age tropes. In this impressive debut novel, Liz Hyder spins a satisfying web of tension, action and revelation, rooted in a truly unique narrative voice.

“We’re already fighting a war out there. Why do we have to fight one in our own country too?” wonders Minoru “Minnow” Ito, a Japanese American teenager living in San Francisco during World War II. He’s one of the 14 characters whose story Traci Chee tells in We Are Not Free, a captivating portrait of teens whose experiences were shared by over 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry who were forced to live in inhumane incarceration camps during the war.

The topic is a departure for the New York Times bestselling Chee, whose acclaimed debut novel, The Reader, kicked off an epic fantasy adventure trilogy that concluded with 2018’s The Storyteller. But it’s also a deeply personal one, inspired by the experiences of her grandparents and their families; the book's title comes from words spoken by her great-aunt during her incarceration.

We Are Not Free is a lively but sobering saga that starts in March 1942, just before the forced removal of Japanese Americans from their homes began, and continues through March 1945 as several characters return to their much-changed neighborhoods, where lives and livelihoods have been destroyed and racism remains rampant. The grand sweep of the novel allows her to explore the wide variety of situations that Japanese Americans faced during this time: forced resettlement, loyalty pledges with hidden consequences and military service that often included unjust treatment.

Chee’s 14 narrators hail from nine different families and include Minnow, who loves to draw; lively, rebellious Twitchy; college student Mas; softball-loving Yuki; and Frankie, who “always looks like he’s spoiling for a fight.” The connections and relationships among these teenagers form the heart and soul of the novel, and their yearnings, heartbreaks, fear and anger ring true on every single page. A “character registry” at the beginning of the book helps readers keep track of the sprawling cast, though readers may find themselves occasionally wishing they could follow some characters more closely. Even so, what Chee sacrifices in depth, she makes up for in breadth, rewarding readers with an exceptional portrait of a community scarred by prejudice, intolerance and racism.

Whether she is describing Yuki’s dismay at a shop owner’s refusal to serve her and her teammates ice cream or portraying the horrors Twitchy faces on the battlefield in France and Italy, Chee is an extraordinarily gifted writer whose words here have a searing intensity. Though her book is packed with historical detail, her characters and their interactions sparkle with energy, even as their experiences remain all-too-timely. One character warns, “It’ll happen again, if we’re not careful.” We Are Not Free is a superb addition to the works of literature that chronicle this shameful chapter of American history.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Author Traci Chee shares her personal connection to the history she depicts in We Are Not Free.

Prison is a box. Once a person is trapped inside, the box’s hard lines and confines become their entire world. The box presses down on the people it holds captive and tries to destroy what makes them unique, what makes them human, all in the interests of conformity, survival and the comfort of others. In Punching the Air, 16-year-old Amal Shahid finds himself slammed inside the cold, concrete box of a juvenile detention center after a false accusation.

Amal is a talented visual artist, an aspiring poet and rapper, a well-read scholar and a skilled skater, beloved by his Muslim family. He’s never fit easily into any box. Caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, Amal and his friends got into a fight with a group of white kids at the basketball court in Amal’s gentrifying neighborhood. Amal admits to throwing the first punch, but he definitely didn’t throw the punch that put one of the white kids in a coma. That doesn’t save him from becoming the victim of an unjust, racist system that punishes him for it anyway. As Amal serves out his sentence, he tries to write and paint his way out of the box, even as the box itself—and many of those trapped inside it with him—try to break him. In spite of his surroundings, he clings to hope and saves himself by finding his truth through art and creativity.

A fast-paced novel in verse co-authored by National Book Award finalist Ibi Zoboi (American Street) and activist Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five, Punching the Air is an intimate and moving portrait of the realities and consequences of the school-to-prison pipeline. Amal’s first-person narration is an extraordinary achievement of characterization. His voice on the page is youthful but wise, cutting but inviting, quiet but resonant; his words read effortlessly, but that effortlessness is clearly the result of skilled effort. Punching the Air more than deserves a place among both outstanding YA novels in verse, including Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X and Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down, and among YA novels that explore the intersection of race and justice, including Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give and Kim Johnson’s This Is My America. This is vital reading for every teen.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Punching the Air authors Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam discuss the power of art and creativity to set us free.

It’s immediately clear that Vesper Stamper’s second novel, with its carefully crafted prose and artfully illustrated pages, could hardly have been rushed out in response to current events. Nevertheless, A Cloud of Outrageous Blue feels urgently timely—despite the fact that it’s set in the 15th century.

After what happened to her and her family, Edyth isn’t sure she believes in God. She’s certainly not devout, but after a series of violent and tragic events robs her of nearly her entire family and her sense of security, she finds herself headed to a priory. There she will serve as a conversa, a laborer working alongside the young women who are training to become nuns.

At the priory, Edyth finds trusted friends and more than one enemy, including the Sub-Prioress, Agnes, who takes an instant dislike to her. But Edyth, a talented artist, is delighted to be assigned to work in the priory’s scriptorium, where she can help mix the pigments the scribes use to create their beautiful manuscripts. Edyth also has a hidden gift: She has strange visions and is physically affected by colors. She can see, taste and smell them, and sometimes their power and intensity overwhelm her. Edyth is also simultaneously pleased and confused when Mason, the young man with whom she had begun a relationship back in their village, arrives at the priory to work on a building project. Will pursuing a romance with Mason jeopardize Edyth’s aspirations?

Edyth’s personal struggles become even more fraught when whispers of a mysterious illness appear to be more than rumors. In the face of the threat this illness poses, some within the priory walls will rise to the occasion, while others will become twisted by fear—and many will die.

Set during the Great Plague of 1349, A Cloud of Outrageous Blue is both a riveting work of historical fiction and an elegantly understated fantasy, as Edyth’s visions can seem prophetic. Edyth’s story is interspersed with gorgeously composed, two-page spreads of Stamper’s artwork, which bring Edyth’s daily routines as well as more fantastical subjects to life in bold lines and hues. The story’s atmosphere of fear and paranoia juxtaposed against acts that demonstrate extraordinary generosity of spirit during a plague cannot help but have special resonance for readers now. Although the book’s ending may cause some polarization, the impression that will linger in the minds of those who read this expansive, beautifully crafted novel is the triumph of empathy above all.

As children, we learn sunny, sanitized versions of fairy tales that always begin “once upon a time” and end “happily ever after.” It’s only when we’re older that we learn how the original versions of those stories, including those by the German folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, contained far more violence, cruelty and darkness. If the Brothers Grimm were still putting pen to paper today, they might conjure up something like Corey Ann Haydu’s Ever Cursed, a modern fairy tale of rage, revenge and power.

Princess Jane is the oldest daughter of the king of Ever. She used to believe her kingdom to be a loving and just place, but she and her four sisters lived a cosseted life in which the harsh realities just outside their castle walls have been carefully concealed from them. Then a young witch named Reagan placed Jane and her sisters under a powerful curse that would become permanent if it was not broken in five years’ time, on the youngest sister’s 13th birthday. Haydu brings readers into the story just before this momentous day, as Jane tries to lift the curse and Reagan reflects on her reasons for casting it in the first place.

Ever Cursed is at its strongest when Haydu employs all the trappings of traditional fairy tales—princesses and kings, witches and spells—to illustrate how men encourage divisions among women in order to diminish female power. Unlike in our world, magic in the kingdom of Ever can be deployed by women in order to silence or to save. As both Jane and Reagan discover their their families are not who they seem to be, Haydu’s tale treads a dark path, well-worn and lined with the familiar thorns of all the cruelties humans inflict on one another. Yet in its contemporary-minded depiction of the age-old battle between good and evil, Ever Cursed casts a bewitching spell indeed.