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.

Christina Hammonds Reed’s debut novel, The Black Kids, is set in 1992 but has a timeliness that often feels uncanny.

Ashley is a privileged Black teenager living the good life in Los Angeles. Her parents have tried to shield her from the reality of life as a Black person in America by enrolling her in the best schools, living in the best neighborhood and giving her the kinds of opportunities that are typically out of reach to the Black scholarship students at her private school. However, her all-white friend group constantly reminds her of her Blackness. 

When four police officers are acquitted in a trial for the beating of a Black man named Rodney King, prompting riots in Ashley’s home city, she begins to realize that in order to find her place in the world, she may need to confront her Blackness and her family’s history—even if it means leaving her old life and friends behind.

Reed addresses experiences common to Black teens in both 1992 and 2020 with grace and nuance. Her sentences are searingly beautiful, and her depiction of the breakdown in Ashley’s belief that her privileged lifestyle affords her a certain degree of protection is raw and relatable. Ashley must face what it means to be considered a so-called “good Black person” and grapple with her own culpability in having made another Black student at her school the target of judgment.

The Black Kids also explores what it means to be a good friend and how we must take responsibility when we treat others poorly, even when we haven’t intended to cause harm. The question of whether anyone can truly be deemed a “bad” person, as opposed to a good person who has done bad things, is threaded expertly through the narrative and is sure to prompt hard but necessary self-reflection from readers. This is a striking debut that fearlessly contributes to ongoing discussions of race, justice and power.

Working retail during the holiday season can be brutal, but Shoshanna is more than happy to spend her time at work as a bookseller. The independent bookstore Once Upon is her happy place—at least, it used to be. A holiday hire named Jake, who is both standoffish and good-looking, is making Shoshanna’s happy place a little more complicated than usual. Laura Silverman’s Recommended for You is a whipped cream dollop of a rom-com with an irresistible bookish setup.

Silverman places several obstacles in Shoshanna’s path. Her moms are going through a rough patch in their marriage, Shoshanna is desperately trying to keep her dying car on the road, and then a competition to bring customers into Once Upon reveals the store’s poor financial state. Shoshanna charges at each problem in full attack mode, but her solo efforts are largely ineffective. Only when she leans on her friends does their collective power make waves. The bookstore staff forms a fantastic supporting cast and features in several scenes that play out hilariously. Silverman also smartly uses the bookstore’s shopping mall locale to her advantage, as her characters duke it out for table space in the overcrowded food court and draft the on-site Santa into their schemes. 

And then there’s Jake. Sigh. No sooner does Shoshanna meet a fellow Jewish person in her “midsize” Georgia town than she manages to offend him, then finds herself competing against him at work for a cash prize she desperately wants. The novel plays out over just one week, as the heightened circumstances of the holiday rush force Shoshanna and Jake to work together, at first begrudgingly, then as tentative friends and then . . . well, let’s not spoil it.

Recommended for You is equally recommended for lovers of love stories and lovers of books and bookstores, as both are represented here delightfully.

In April of 1846, the Donner party—a group of 89 men, women and children with plenty of wagons, animals and food—headed west from Illinois. One year later, more than half the group had died, mostly from starvation and fatigue. Infamously, the survivors resorted to eating their dead after heavy snowstorms trapped them in the Sierra Nevada.

The Donner party is sometimes treated as a curious footnote to history, and perhaps rightfully so. Allan Wolf’s The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep revisits this grisly chapter of westward expansion to take a fresh and thought-provoking look at the doomed travelers.

Wolf constructs his story in a multivoice verse format he calls “narrative pointillism.” Readers experience the perspectives of adults, children and even a pair of hardworking oxen. The format also gives voice to lesser known figures in Donner party lore, such as Luis and Salvador, two Native Americans who were conscripted to help the party and were fatally betrayed.

Over the book’s nearly 400 pages, the Donner party members abandon animals, people, loyalties and hope itself. There are many deaths, including murders, and characters must grapple with the moral choice between cannibalism and survival. Readers in the mood for a lighthearted romp should look elsewhere.

In a stroke of brilliance, Hunger serves as a Greek chorus throughout the book. The hunger for food becomes the characters’ primary focus once the expedition goes figuratively south. But this narrative device also cleverly speaks to the many motivations of various Donner party members, including hunger for land, prestige, love, warmth and closeness to God.

Although the surviving members of the group are eventually rescued, nothing is tied up with a neat and tidy bow. To his credit, Wolf does not sensationalize this story’s numerous tragedies, nor spare the reader illuminating details. The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep is historical fiction at its very best.

Henri Haltiwanger is the founder of his own dog-walking business, a valued member of the debate team and a popular kid at New York’s prestigious FATE Academy. He attributes his success to his capital-S Smiles and his carefully cultivated ability to charm just about anyone. That ability is especially important now, as Henri, a first-generation Haitian American, counts down the days until he receives his Columbia University acceptance letter, which will fulfill his parents’ “American dream” for him. But when a classmate named Corinne begins blackmailing him into helping her improve her social status, Henri discovers that his trademark charm may not be his ticket to the American dream after all, and that his dream may not be exactly what he thought it was.

As he did in his debut novel, the William C. Morris Award-winning The Field Guide to the North American Teenager, Ben Philippe once again places readers directly inside the mind of a lovable but flawed protagonist. Henri’s conspiratorial and, yes, charming narration feels like he’s letting us in on secret after secret as he navigates the challenges of senior year, college applications, family pressure and friendships. Henri makes some serious mistakes, and it’s satisfying to watch him evolve into a more honest, open and vulnerable person.

Philippe has a true knack for developing rich casts of supporting characters who bring his protagonists’ worlds to life. Here, this includes Henri’s devoted parents, his sneaker-obsessed best friend, Ming, as well as the students and faculty who populate his high school experience. And of course, there’s Corinne, an academic dynamo who marches to the beat of her own drum, reminiscent of other ambitious yet socially awkward teens such as Paris Geller of “Gilmore Girls” or Rushmore’s Max Fischer. Philippe renders every character as a human being with their own aspirations and imperfections.

Give Charming as a Verb to readers looking for a dynamic YA romp, a touch of romance and the permission to question whether what they’ve always dreamed of is truly what they want.

In an alternate Texas where major cities have Fairy Ring Transport Centers and the university offers an invasive monster program, Ellie, a Lipan Apache teenager, just wants to reincarnate prehistoric fossils and teach her ghost dog new tricks. Then her cousin visits her in a dream, says that a man named Abe Allerton murdered him and asks her to protect his family from further harm.

Together with her parents and her friend Jay, Ellie travels to Willowbee to uncover the truth about Abe Allerton, who by all external appearances has led a virtuous life. As Ellie gathers evidence, pieces together clues and retells the myth-tinged adventures of her six-generations-back great-grandmother, whom she calls Six-Great, it becomes clear that the cousin’s murder is part of a larger secret. With Willowbee’s bicentennial just days away, the time is right to vanquish a horror that’s preyed on Native people for far too long.

Darcie Little Badger’s Elatsoe is a clever mystery narrated by a teen whose voice radiates with wonderful self-confidence. Six-Great’s stories highlight the importance of storytelling in Ellie’s world, and observant readers will delight in the setting’s sociopolitical details: Same-sex marriage is unremarkable, as is Ellie’s asexuality, and the villain is marked in part by his environmentally unfriendly overuse of disposable eating utensils.

Like the self-published comics Ellie regularly devours, Elatsoe presents readers with a strong heroine, a supernatural mystery and a unique and powerful Native American voice.

Lilliam Rivera’s third young adult novel, Never Look Back, breathes new life into the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, an ancient tale of a girl gone before her time and the boy who would do anything to save her. Rivera transforms this classic tale into a symphony that intertwines the melodies of her characters, their neighborhood in the Bronx and even readers themselves. It builds to a crescendo that reverberates into your very bones, the way only the most exquisite music can.

Pheus is ready to spend the summer at his dad’s, hanging at the beach with his friends and taking full advantage of his musical talents and charm. Then Eury and her struggles arrive. Displaced after losing her home in Puerto Rico to Hurricane Maria, Eury is staying with her cousin in the Bronx to get some rest and to give her mother a break after what the family calls Eury’s “episode.” But Eury hasn’t come to New York alone. Everywhere she goes, Ato, an evil spirit, follows. When Eury and Pheus meet and sparks fly, Ato makes a move to ensure he and Eury will stay together—forever.

Never Look Back honors the Afro Latinx music, language, heritage and history of its characters. It reads like a concert, each chapter a different song, some languid and slow, keeping readers hanging on every word, others fast and staccato, whipping readers around at a dizzying pace, running to keep up and lost in a cacophonous flood of words. Defying expectation and categorization, Never Look Back is a book not to be read with the mind but to be experienced with the soul. It is a revelation.

—Kevin Delecki

The Sullivan sisters might be bound together by genetics, but they couldn’t be more different. Eileen, the eldest, harbors a family secret and a drinking problem. Claire, the high-strung middle sister, has just been inexplicably rejected by Yale. And Murphy, the baby of the family, is a natural performer who can’t seem to get any attention. Despite their father’s death at a young age and their mother’s perpetual absence from their lives, the sisters used to be close, building blanket forts and exchanging Christmas gifts, until a few years ago. Now their interactions are rife with tension. When a mysterious uncle dies and leaves the sisters property on the Oregon coast in his will, the girls embark on a trip to visit their father’s childhood home. A storm rolls in, trapping them in the creepy old house where they must confront their family’s disturbing legacy.

Shifting through each sister's point of view, The Sullivan Sisters lightly drapes a murder mystery over a story about family. Author Kathryn Ormsbee shines an honest light on her characters, introspectively revealing their pain and struggles. When the sisters’ connections to each other were broken, leaving them lacking any source of familial affection, they compensated by seeking comfort outside the bonds of family. Murphy performs magic to feel seen, Claire takes dubious life advice from an Instagram influencer, and Eileen gives up art school for alcohol. Each girl’s ship seems destined to crash on a rocky shore, with no one around to help them steer a smoother course.

The action revs up when the sisters arrive at the sleepy seaside town, and, posing as podcasters, uncover their family’s origin story from the locals. The tension between the sisters dissipates as they’re forced together into close quarters, and the reader gets swept along on their journey. The Sullivan Sisters captures the singular love that only sisters can share as the girls realize that their bond can be battered but never broken.

The victim of a childhood kidnapping that made international headlines, Kate Hildebrand was already famous when she came to stay with her grandfather, a former silent film star, in his Hollywood mansion. An aspiring astronomer, Kate expects a warm welcome from her grandfather, but instead she walks in on a crime scene. As Kate acclimates to her new life in 1938 Hollywood, a challenging job and a burgeoning romance, there’s also a killer to track down. A girl could get blisters doing all that in heels! 

Chasing Starlight is full of golden-age Hollywood glamour but spotlights the sweat and sacrifice that make it all happen. Teri Bailey Black juggles multiple storylines with the same efficiency Kate uses to land a gig as a production assistant. The misfits who rent rooms from Kate’s grandfather are distinct and mostly lovable. Black organically incorporates mentions of the Hays Code, which required strict moral standards in movies during this era, while exploring women’s roles in film and the industry’s history of persecution and blacklisting of communists. It all plays out as if on a movie set, giving things a delightfully meta kick. 

The book’s disparate strands entwine in a conclusion straight out of film noir, complete with speeding roadsters, a complicated switcheroo, a race to find the killer and an overdue reckoning with old family trauma. When you spend your days creating things that aren’t real, it’s doubly important to find the solid ground of truth beneath your feet. 

Chasing Starlight reminds us that there are truths overhead in the night sky, too, and it lets both kinds shine. It’s a fast-paced crime story that nods knowingly at cinematic tropes even as it employs them, and it tugs at the heartstrings just the same.