Margot lives with her mom in a run-down apartment. They’re barely getting by; there’s never enough food or heat, and forget about love. After she finds a photograph from her mother’s younger days, Margot becomes obsessed with trying to learn about her mother’s past. Why did she leave Phalene, the small town where she grew up? Why won’t she talk about it?

Burn Our Bodies Down takes off when Margot goes to Phalene to unravel the fabric of her life, starting with a devastating fire and the death of an unidentified girl who happens to look just like Margot. Add in a grandmother who seems loving but who’s definitely hiding something, a tangled ancestral mystery and a heaping dose of brimstone, and you’ll only have scratched the surface of Rory Power’s fast-paced, unnerving thriller.

Burn Our Bodies Down is a tightly woven tale of intergenerational trauma and abuse that maps out a truly poisonous family tree. The novel’s earth-shattering suspense builds to a resolution that will leave readers unsettled in the best way.

Sirscha Ashwyn is convinced that earning a place as the queen’s spy will finally transform her from an orphan with no past into a warrior with a purpose. But when a deadly encounter with shamans results in the death of her best friend, Saengo, Sirscha is shocked to discover the incredible power within herself—power that reveals itself by bringing Saengo back to life. Together, Sirscha and Saengo are thrown into the midst of a sprawling clash among kingdoms and magical powers. Their path leads them into the Dead Wood, a forest possessed by spirits and ruled by the mysterious and ancient Spider King.

Lori M. Lee’s Forest of Souls plunges readers into a fast-paced narrative and captivates with an expansive, lore-filled world that juxtaposes lush fantasy with horror and violence. Thiy, a continent home to creatures both mundane and magical, is as sociopolitically complex as our own world. The obstacles Sirscha and Saengo must confront there reflect the internal challenges they face: Bloody battles and terrifying spirits go hand-in-hand with fear, prejudice and loss.

Lee’s pacing propels the story relentlessly forward as she explores themes of identity, confidence and sisterhood. The revelation of Sirscha’s magical power ultimately forces her to question everything she believes about her loyalties and her values, and Lee isn’t afraid to be as honest about how she depicts her characters’ failures as she is in celebrating their moments of triumph. Readers will be hooked by Forest of Souls’ appealing fantasy narrative, but it’s Sirscha, a girl from nowhere who, against all odds, learns to recognize her power and worth, who’ll win their hearts.

Seventeen-year-old Lou has always been drawn to the grand but empty house just across the causeway from her own home—so drawn, in fact, that when she discovered an open window in the house’s library, she went in and made herself comfortable. When the house’s owners, the Cardew siblings, return for the summer of 1929, they invite Lou into their circle and introduce her into to their intoxicating, glamorous world. But what lies hidden beneath the opulent surface of their lives? In a moment when Lou is feeling hemmed in by the pressures of life in her small Cornish town—pressures to grow up and settle down—her summer with the Cardews may be just what she needs to find out what she really wants.

Middle grade novelist Laura Wood’s first YA novel is dazzling in every way, starting with its gorgeous prose. From Lou’s small and plain but bustling family home, to the luxurious quiet of a Sunday afternoon at the Cardew house, to the glitz of one of their many Gatsby-esque parties, Wood creates atmospheres that readers can dive into headfirs. Lou’s perspective—smart and capable but a little naive and utterly in awe of the new world she’s suddenly part of—enables readers to get swept up in it completely, with no sense of pretense or feeling that we’re stuck on the outside, looking in.

Lou’s relationships with the Cardew siblings—Lou and Caitlin quickly form a fast friendship, while she and Robert develop the best kind of budding attraction, masked by constant barbs and banter—bring these larger-than-life characters into sharp focus, making them just as grounded and human as Lou herself.

Tinted with an undercurrent of magic, A Sky Painted Gold will resonate with readers who love the glamour of The Great Gatsby or Jane Austen’s sharp, will-they-won’t-they romances and fierce female friendships, or with any reader who has ever longed to step into a life grander than their own, even just for a moment.

The last thing Andromeda remembers is entering her cryo’tank, ready to sleep through the hundred-year journey across the stars to a new planet. Along with her mother, a prominent scientist, Andra is part of a small group making the journey. But when Andra wakes up, she slowly puts together the horrifying truth: She’s been asleep for a thousand years, not a hundred.

What’s more, she’s stranded in a society that worships her as a goddess and has completely lost her society’s deep understanding of technology. It’s clear to Andra that Zhade, the young man who woke her, has his own agenda, but Andra hopes that if she follows him, she can scrounge up enough still-functioning tech to get back to Earth. For lack of any better option, Andra accompanies Zhade to the crumbling city of Erensed, where her precarious divine status and Zhade’s complicated relationship with the leader of Erensed make it difficult for her to move freely and collect the parts she needs. More disturbing discoveries will force Andra to reckon with her past, change her assumptions about the present and rethink her future.

Lora Beth Johnson’s ambitious debut novel, Goddess in the Machine, showcases a thrilling plot, colorful side characters and a world constructed with remarkable attention to detail. Johnson’s vision of how society, technology and language could be transformed in the next century and a millennia from now is thoughtful and inventive, yet the urgency of Andra’s plight never gets lost in the tech.

Sci-fi fans familiar with authors such as Christopher Priest and Isaac Asimov may see a few of the plot’s twists and turns coming, but Johnson’s pacing is perfection, and the payoffs of various reveals are satisfying. Andra is a smart and sensitive heroine who’ll leave readers eager to see what awaits her in the next volume of Johnson’s epic science fiction saga.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Lora Beth Johnson discusses the futuristic English in Goddess in the Machine.

Malik is a refugee. Karina is a princess. Both long to escape the circumstances of their lives. They’re set on a collision course when Malik makes a deal with the power-hungry spectre that kidnaps his little sister: He must kill Princess Karina to ensure his sister’s safe return.

Unbeknownst to Malik, however, Karina is also on a deadly mission. Her relationship with her mother, the queen, hasn’t been the same since the deaths of her father and beloved sister in a fire; now her mother’s only remaining heir, Karina finds the pressure to live up to her sister’s example, to be the perfect future queen, unbearable.

When the queen is assassinated on the eve of the empire’s Solastasia festival, Karina embarks on a dark quest to resurrect her, but in order to complete the spell, she must obtain the heart of a king. With no other surviving members of the royal family, Karina sets her sights on the winner of a series of competitions held during the festival—competitions from which an unlikely champion, a refugee named Malik, is emerging.

A Song of Wraiths and Ruin is the lush debut novel from author Roseanne A. Brown, who was born in Ghana and immigrated to the United States as a child. It’s a supernatural love story inspired by West African folklore and dripping in political commentary and modern parallels. Border wall? Check. Police raids? Check. Class warfare and dishonest governments? Check and double check.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Roseanne A. Brown shares how she felt when she learned her book was going to be published.

Brown places Karina and Malik front and center, each chapter alternating between their perspectives. As they uncover long buried secrets and reveal hidden cruelties in their world, Brown raises the stakes of her storytelling far beyond the typical YA fantasy-romance, exploring the ways in which we all have a responsibility to right the wrongs of injustice—and the tools to do so.

In this first book of a planned duology, Brown digs in to world building right away. Ancient sorcerers, shadowy spirit creatures and venerable deities doesn’t even begin to cover it. Every page is packed with cinematic detail and symbols that evoke the Pan-African diaspora, from a mischievous griot who mesmerizes passersby with clever storytelling to decorative masks depicting patron deities that adorn the palace walls. Brown effortlessly transports readers to the vibrant world of the Ziranian empire.

Even more impressive, however, are Brown’s characters, who serve as grounding forces that keep her tale from getting bogged down in its own arcana, no matter how fantastical. Malik is a refugee, but not just a refugee. He’s self-conscious around the other competitors, who hail from far more privileged backgrounds, and worries constantly that his status as a refugee will be revealed, endangering him and his family. But he’s also a skilled storyteller who’ll do anything to protect his family. Similarly, Karina is a princess, but not just a princess. She’s a musician who longs to escape the confines and expectations of royal life and is still processing the traumatic loss of her father and sister.

A Song of Wraiths and Ruin is an ambitious epic of political justice cleverly wrapped in the trappings of a love story. It’s so skillful and effortlessly accomplished that it’s hard to believe it’s Brown’s first book.

It’s summer, and Sydney Reilly is on the verge of turning 16. She’s also certain that she’s on the verge of some indefinable “IT,” something big that will help her cross the mysterious bridge from girlhood to womanhood. As she says, “I didn’t know what IT was exactly, just something large, something that would change everything.” But Sydney isn’t sure how she’s going to find or experience “IT,” now that she’s being forced to spend her summer away from all her friends in Seattle.

Instead, she has to spend the summer with her mother, the once-famous movie star, Lila Shore, at her sumptuous mansion in San Francisco’s exclusive Sea Cliff neighborhood. Sydney is exhausted by Lila’s drama-laden life and over-the-top lifestyle; she’s especially irked when she meets creepy Jake, the latest in Lila’s seemingly endless string of beaus.

But Sydney falls in love with San Francisco, and if there’s one thing to be said for Lila’s mercurial brand of motherhood, it’s that Sydney has a lot of freedom to explore the city on her own—which is how she meets Nicco and begins a relationship that will unexpectedly change all of their lives forever.

In some ways, Girl, Unframed reads like a true crime novel, with excerpts from an a criminal trial evidence list that open each chapter. Sydney’s first-person narration also seems to suggest that the book itself is her testimony about the lead-up to a terrible crime. There is, in fact, a crime (actually more than one) at the novel’s center, but the most interesting elements of Sydney’s story are more cerebral and emotional.

Sydney’s experiences in San Francisco—with Jake, with the builder next door to the mansion, with her best friend from back home, even with the elderly frequenters of the nearby nude beach—help her construct a new and sometimes disturbing sense of what it means to be a woman in the world: It often means being looked at but not seen. This introspective novel offers a perceptive examination of a young woman’s journey, not to the life-changing “IT” she imagined, but to a hard-won understanding of the persistant contradictions that still govern how women are perceived, particularly when it feels like the eyes of the world are upon them.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Girl, Unframed author Deb Caletti explains the true crime that inspired her new book—and introduces the real-life role models for the dog who plays a critical role in Sydney’s story.

Sasha Bloom never really fit in at school, preferring to interact with her classmates from behind the safety of her camera lens. Mostly, Sasha spent time with her single mom; it had been just the two of them for a long time. But then came the massive earthquake and her mom’s death. With nowhere else to go, Sasha is taken in by grandparents she barely knows and brought home to their wealthy town of Bayport.

After spending her summer in a blur of grief, Sasha starts junior year at Baycrest High and feels like she’s in a new world. For one thing, the popular kids are also great students, loading up their schedules with honors classes and tightly focused on the college application process. The school has tons of extracurriculars, like Art Club, that her old school didn’t—never mind that Sasha hasn’t picked up her camera since the earthquake. Her classmates seem eager to befriend her, but is that just because their families belong to the same country club as her grandparents? Despite her new surroundings, Sasha still feels pressure, judgment and insecurity as she navigates her conflicted emotions about her seemingly ready-made friends, her grandparents’ determination to set her on a more conventional path in life than her mother’s and her intense interest in a beautiful classmate, Lily. But how much of Sasha’s difficult feelings are the result of external influence, and how much are they the result of pressure she puts on herself?

YA author Robyn Schneider’s fourth novel is anchored by Sasha’s experiences of loss and confusion, but the wry wit and artistic sensibility of Sasha’s narrative voice make You Don’t Live Here shine. Schneider absolutely nails the way that making new friends can be full of awkward hopefulness and fear. Some of the assumptions that Sasha makes about other people, particularly with regard to her grandparents, are unfounded, while others, including her anxiety about revealing her bisexuality to her conservative family, will ring true for teen readers. You Don’t Live Here is at its most affecting when Sasha gains the courage to put her feelings about her sexuality into words, even if just to herself. Sasha’s journey to understand who she is and express it to others makes for a moving and authentic read.

In Zan Romanoff’s young adult novel, Look, Lulu Shapiro has mastered Flash, a Snapchat-like app that shares her perfectly edited life with 10,000 followers. But a racy Flash, meant to be private, accidentally goes public, and now everyone has seen Lulu being intimate with another young woman. Her classmates think she just did it for attention, but Lulu is bisexual and fears what sharing this truth about herself could mean for her popularity.

Then Lulu meets the beguiling Cass and her friend Ryan, a trust-fund kid refurbishing an old hotel. With no phones allowed at the hotel, Lulu experiences a social life less focused on perfectly edited images. For the first time, she feels like she can truly be herself—until an abuse of trust brings it all crashing down.

Like a feminist film studies class in book form, Look poses intriguing questions about agency and self-commodification. Anyone who has engaged in any form of content creation—even just photos on Instagram—will have a lot to chew on regarding the praise and scorn women experience based on how they depict themselves. Most importantly, Look is a timely demonstration of how women can be violated by imagery that is controlled by men.

The cast of characters is almost entirely teens, but older readers will take a lot from Look as well. Self-commodification hardly started with Snapchat, after all.

Adults can be selfish, corrupt and disappointing. In Kelly Yang’s first YA novel, Parachutes, two teens accustomed to fending for themselves gradually discover that even when adults fail them, they can depend on each other.

Claire Wang of Shanghai and Dani De La Cruz of California both go to a private high school near Los Angeles. Claire’s parents’ decision to send her to American Prep reflects the cultural phenomenon for which the book is titled, in which wealthy Chinese students immigrate to attend American high schools in the hopes of better educational and professional prospects. Claire leaves behind her shopaholic mother and arrives in the United States with a platinum American Express card courtesy of her absentee father.

Dani is a gifted debater who dreams of attending Yale. She’s also a scholarship student who spends her afternoons cleaning houses, some of which belong to her rich classmates. Like Claire’s parents, Dani’s single mom is mostly absent from her daughter’s life, because she works so hard to support them; her decision to welcome Claire into a spare bedroom at their house is motivated by the extra cash her boarding fees will yield.

Yang relates the girls’ initial wariness of one another, which stems primarily from how radically different their lives have been, in chapters that alternate between their points of view. But Parachutes goes much deeper than a predictable story of rich girl versus poor girl. Although the book’s title refers to a slang term for international students like Claire, the idea of the parachute also functions as a metaphor for the economic, gender and racial privileges that create differences and inequalities in the lives of some of Yang’s characters. Many readers will likely find this seamlessly integrated introduction to the concept of intersectionality eye-opening.

Yang, who shares in a revealing and powerful author’s note that Parachutes is based partly on some of her own personal experiences in college, incorporates issues of sexual assault and abuse, discrimination, parental infidelity and emotional neglect into an elaborate and twisting narrative. The book has an impressive buoyancy despite these weighty subjects, and Yang never slides into preachiness or lecturing. For many readers, finishing Parachutes will feel like saying goodbye to two beloved friends who’ve helped them survive the emotional battlefield that is high school.

Yang is best known for her debut novel, the middle grade book Front Desk, which won multiple awards and became a bestseller in 2018. Parachutes is sure to establish Yang as one of YA’s most thoughtful and vital new voices.

Adelaide’s life has been turned upside down by her brother’s addiction, her family’s separation and her devastating breakup with Mikey Double L. With an aching heart and an unfinished school project hanging over her head, threatening her final grades, Adelaide chooses to stay at her boarding school for the summer, walking professors’ dogs and falling in and out of love—over and over again. Through it all, she just might learn that what she really needs is herself.

E. Lockhart is no stranger to the complexities of the teenage heart, and Again Again explores them in a poignant and lyrical way. As in her previous novels, such as We Were Liars and Genuine Fraud, Lockhart again plays with perception and time, treating readers to multiple versions of Adelaide’s experiences, from romantic encounters to feedback from teachers. The line between reality and fantasy becomes intentionally and wonderfully ambiguous. Call it an exploration of the multiverse or a glimpse inside a teenage girl’s mind. Either way, the creative format highlights Adelaide’s uncertainty and elevates her summer into a coming-of-age experience that readers will find relatable.

While every scenario Adelaide imagines (or lives) is honest and heartfelt, the most powerful storyline in every version is her relationship with her brother, Toby. Lockhart depicts his recovery from addiction gently and respectfully, and the siblings’ attempts to find their new normal are beautifully rendered and often eclipse Adelaide’s romance as the most moving relationship in the book.

On the surface, Again Again is relatively simple: Girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, emotional turmoil ensues. But Lockhart’s unique narrative structure and poetic prose stylings transform it into a thought-provoking look at what we expect and what we need from each other—and from ourselves.

Those who remember all too well the tragedy of September 11, 2001, may not recall another tragedy that occurred in its immediate aftermath. On November 12, American Airlines Flight 587, en route from New York City to the Dominican Republic, crashed in Queens, killing all 260 people on board, the vast majority of whom were of Dominican descent.

The tragic stories of the lives lost on board Flight 587 and those of the families left behind, as well as author Elizabeth Acevedo’s own memories of trips to visit relatives in the Dominican Republic, inspired Clap When You Land. The book sees Acevedo return triumphantly to the novel-in-verse format of her multiple award-winning debut, The Poet X.

Sixteen-year-old Camino Rios is meeting her father at the Santo Domingo airport. He lives in the United States much of the year but spends summers in the Dominican Republic. Camino, whose mother died a decade earlier, dreams of moving to New York City for college and then medical school. She can’t wait to finally be closer to her beloved father.

Thousands of miles away in New York City, Yahaira Rios has just said goodbye to her father, who supports her love of competitive chess and always encourages her to follow her dreams. Yahaira misses him when he returns to the Dominican Republic each summer, but this year, her feelings are more complicated. She’s recently learned a secret about her father that she hasn’t admitted to anyone.

Both Yahaira and Camino are on the cusp of a terrible loss—and of a profound discovery about their families and the surprising, sometimes uneasy connection between them.

Clap When You Land explores themes of heredity, class and privilege, as well as the complex, conflicted emotions the girls feel toward their birthplaces and homes. Acevedo handles all of these themes with a lyricism and sensitivity to language that make Camino’s and Yahaira’s struggles and joys, both individual and shared, all the more powerful.

Readers unaccustomed to verse narratives will quickly settle into the book’s generally short stanzas and conversational tone. Passages that are more deliberately poetic in style, such as the description of a burial that uses short lines to make the text resemble a deep hole, or a scene of violence in which the verses—like the narrator’s thoughts—grow increasingly fragmented, encourage readers to read slowly and even pause in order to fully experience both the characters’ powerful emotions and Acevedo’s tremendous skill at conveying them and transforming them into art.

Clap When You Land gets its title from the Dominican tradition of applauding when a plane touches down safely at its destination. By the story’s end, readers will be ready to give Yahaira, Camino and Acevedo herself a standing ovation.

Jenny Torres Sanchez’s fifth young adult novel, We Are Not From Here, is an unforgettable story of three teens forced to leave their homeland in search of safety and the possibility of a better life.

In the town of Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, Pequeña is laboring to give birth to an unplanned baby. Her friends, Pulga and Chico, who consider themselves brothers and have lived together at Pulga’s house ever since Chico’s mother’s violent death, go for a walk as they anxiously await the delivery. While stopping in their favorite convenience store for a snack to tide them over, they become unwilling witnesses to a devastating crime that will change the course of their lives.

Torres Sanchez immerses readers in the teens’ lives in Puerto Barrios, where they are surrounded by loving extended families and a warm sense of community, but a sense of hopelessness subdues any expectations they have for the future. When pressure from the local gang leader to join his enterprise becomes unbearable, Pulga, Chico and Pequeña realize they have no choice but to run for their lives, leaving Pequeña’s baby behind. Together, they make their way toward La Bestia, the crowded network of trains full of desperate people migrating north in search of opportunity.

We Are Not From Here astonishes even as it conveys harsh realities. Torres Sanchez’s prose alternately chills and sings as it brings primal human experiences—life and death, despair and hunger, fear and hope—to the page in brilliant relief. The choice to employ first-person narration, commonplace in young adult literature, is particularly effective here and adds immediacy to the threats that seem to lie in wait around every corner. Elements of magical realism elevate the teens’ journey to epic, mythic heights. It all makes for a stunning, visceral and deeply moving read.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Author Jenny Torres Sanchez explains the personal stakes of We Are Not From Here.