In Cynthia Hand’s The How and the Why, delving into the past is a difficult journey.

Eighteen years ago, a teenage girl placed her baby for adoption. That girl grew up to be Cass. Although her wonderful parents adore her, Cass still wonders where she came from. As she considers whether to search for her past, Cass learns that her first mother wrote a series of letters to her years ago—letters that will hold many clues, but could also spark new questions or concerns. Should she dig into her past? What will her parents think? Does her first mother even want to be found?

Cass’s dilemma is set against the backdrop of her preparations for college—which in itself provides plenty of challenges for Cass, her father (who is pushing her to attend his alma mater) and her best friend, Nyla (who wins the coveted drama scholarship Cass wanted). Cass’s story is interwoven with letters from S, Cass’s first mother, reflecting on her life at the home and struggling to write words for her daughter to read many years from now.

The How and the Why presents an honest and accurate view of how many adopted teens must feel—wanting to plan their futures while still wondering about their pasts. A well-rounded cast of characters and fully developed story make this an absorbing read.

Zuhra has never known anything but life in the citadel. Her mother forbids her to enter secret rooms or read books in the abandoned library. Images of magical beings with glowing blue eyes, riding flying gryphons in pursuit of long-gone monsters line the citadel walls. Most mysterious of all is Zuhra’s younger sister, Inara, whose eyes glow like those in the paintings and who silently tends their garden in between her rare moments of lucidity. Something happened the night Inara was born that caused their father to leave, their mother to withdraw into herself and a poisonous, sentient hedge to grow around the edges of the citadel, keeping the family in and strangers out.

When the hedge permits a young scholar seeking to know more about the magical blue-eyed Paladins to enter, Zuhra sees a chance to escape. Intrigued by Halvor—the only boy she’s ever met—Zuhra sneaks out of her bedroom one night to explore the forbidden part of her home. Inara is curious too, and together the three explorers unlock secrets that will change their lives forever. As romances bloom, family history is revealed, political intrigue mounts and vicious monsters are poised to attack, will the sisters’ love for one another be enough to draw them home?

Writing in the tradition of folktales like Rapunzel, contemporary fantasy authors like Laini Taylor and classic worlds like Anne McCaffrey’s Pern and Piers Anthony’s Xanth, Sara B. Larson weaves a Gothic tale of sisters emerging from shadow into light.

It could be the end of Earth as they know it. A newly discovered alien planet that calls itself Alma has sent humanity a message: In seven days, it will decide whether or not to destroy Earth. But three teens have more pressing problems in Farah Naz Rishi’s dynamic debut, I Hope You Get This Message.

Since his dad died, Jesse has been trying to ensure he and his mom don’t lose their home in Roswell, New Mexico. Although the Latino teen dates other guys, he never gets too close to them. Cate, on the other hand, has a bucket list of actions she wants to check off in San Francisco, but finds it hard to take care of herself while also caring for her schizophrenic single mom. Finally, Adeem, an amateur radio enthusiast in Carson City, Nevada, is still grieving the loss of his older sister, Leyla, who ran away from their Muslim family after coming out. As the possible apocalypse motivates Cate to search for her long-lost father and Adeem to search for Leyla, Jesse uses his dad’s abandoned computer in a scheme to charge gullible travelers to send their final wishes to Alma.

This nuanced and realistic story (with a twist of science fiction) is driven not merely by Jesse, Cate and Adeem’s journeys, but by the moments where those journeys intersect. The novel aptly culminates in Roswell, a town at the heart of alien lore. Along with the three protagonists’ points of view, Rishi also includes excerpts from the aliens’ deliberations on Alma; the alien perspective provides an enlightening, external look at the harsh realities and endless potential of human beings. For Adeem, Cate, Jesse and readers alike, the end of the world might turn out to be the beginning of hope.

Meet Morgan Parker—or the semiautobiographical version of her. She’s an amazingly smart student, a punk-rock aficionado and a black kid who doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere. The white kids she grew up with have never known what to think of her. The kids at her church are put off by her atheism. She has a love-hate relationship with therapy. But Morgan is tired of trying to fit in and be anyone other than who she’s always been. When she begins to put herself and her needs ahead of everyone she’s always been told she must appease, she discovers a life-changing bravery that is uniquely her own.

Despite being set in sunny, suburban California, Who Put This Song On? prefers to shy away from the light. The novel exposes Morgan’s depression and anxiety, her resultant inability to get along with her parents and her experiences of being told by people who barely know her that she’s “not really black”—all while dealing with the awkwardness of finding herself and where she fits in amid the emotional battlefield of the American high school.

In this novel based on her own teenage life and diaries, Parker offers a hilariously honest and heart-opening experience. It’s a wholly necessary debut by an award-winning poet.

The townspeople of Fir Haven all say the Walker family mysteriously emerged from the forest surrounding the town countless generations ago. Every Walker woman has possessed a unique power: healing, influencing nature or interpreting dreams. Every Walker woman, that is, except Nora.

But then Nora discovers Oliver Huntsman, a boy who went missing from the nearby camp for wayward boys during the worst snowstorm in years. She finds him frozen in the woods with no memory of how he got there. Their connection triggers a series of events that prompts Nora to dig deep and activate her own abilities, magical or otherwise.

With Winterwood, bestselling author Shea Ernshaw returns with a sophomore novel as satisfyingly haunting as her debut, The Wicked Deep. Although readers will be captivated by the chemistry that grows between Nora and Oliver as they work together, the book’s most appealing element is the woods where the novel’s mysteries seem to originate. As she did in The Wicked Deep, Ernshaw has created a setting that is as critical to the story as any of the human characters. She envelopes readers in the dark and ancient magic of winter among the trees.

Readers who loved A Discovery of Witches, Practical Magic, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane and other books featuring long lineages of magical women, doomed romances and quests to embrace and master supernatural powers will find much to enjoy here. Ernshaw’s deeply atmospheric prose makes Winterwood the perfect read for a cold and gloomy day.

“I tell this story because I can,” writes Saundra Mitchell in the author’s note of her new novel, All the Things We Do in the Dark. Seeking to avoid “adding one more fictional rape to a world that uses it far too often for entertainment,” Mitchell retells a traumatic event from her childhood, adding elements of fabulism to create All the Things We Do in the Dark.

The first thing everyone notices about Ava is the scar on her face. When she was 9 years old, a man lured her into the dark and raped her. But Ava’s a junior in high school now, and she knows what to do: She avoids strangers, follows her mother’s rule of never going out by herself and, most of all, keeps her emotional baggage neatly folded in mental boxes with strong, secure locks—until she finds a dead body in the woods, that is.

Ava instantly connects with the dead teenager, whom she calls Jane. Jane haunts Ava at every turn, leading Ava to take impulsive chances as she begins to break all of her own rules. But even as Jane appears to Ava in increasingly disturbing guises, Ava’s regular life goes on. Her best friend, Syd, becomes distant, and she finds herself falling for her classmate Hailey. Soon Jane’s secret can no longer stay hidden, and Ava must make a choice. Will she claim her buried past or let it claim her?

Like the worms in the soil of Ava’s visions, All the Things We Do in the Dark will crawl into readers’ viscera and stay under their skin.

Rico Danger has a name straight out of an explosive action movie, but her life is hurtling off a cliff in ways that are all too ordinary. Overstretched at her job at a gas station to try and keep a roof over her family’s heads, she’s perpetually one crisis away from the edge. The “good” school her mom insists she attend is unlikely to lead to college afterward, and friends are in short supply because she’s hard-wired to keep people at arm’s length. So when a customer at the gas station buys what might be a winning lottery ticket, it sets a whole new life in motion for Rico. But is a Jackpot really the answer to all her problems?

Nic Stone (Dear Martin) structures Jackpot like a romance with a twist of mystery—Rico enlists rich kid Zan to help her track down the ticket holder, and their shared quest leads to mutual attraction—but it has so much more going on underneath its surface. Although Rico’s circumstances are difficult, her attitude doesn’t help; she isolates potential allies by assuming the worst about them as a defense mechanism. Stone writes some chapters from the perspectives of inanimate objects (the winning ticket, a wood stove, some high thread count sheets, etc.), which offers a glimpse beyond Rico’s tight focus and also adds some surreal charm.

When a medical crisis sends her family into deeper debt than they could have imagined, Rico throws her already flexible morals aside and makes a risky final attempt to get the winning ticket, but fate has a twist in store. There’s a happy ending of sorts, but it’s not one readers will see coming.

Jackpot is a high school romance (senior prom receives its due) and also a kind of fairy tale (for all her complaining about thrift-store clothes, Rico still manages to end up in the perfect dress for any occasion). But Jackpot tells other stories, too, about how we judge one another based on race and class, and the ways those most in need sometimes cut themselves off from help that’s hiding in plain sight.

Ali Chu is the only Asian student in her rural Indiana high school. Accustomed to her teacher’s blatantly racist remarks and her friends’ constant misunderstandings of her Taiwanese culture, Ali has learned to survive in a small town by not standing out. She is thrown for a loop however, when Chase, another Taiwanese American student, moves to town. Everyone at school thinks that because Ali and Chase are both Asian, they should become a couple.

Determined not to succumb to stereotype (or to her parents’ strict rule that she only date Chinese boys), Ali tries to resist her attraction to Chase, but as she gets to know him, their relationship moves quickly from friendship to something more. Just as quickly, however, Ali’s mother finds out and forbids Ali from dating Chase. While the two surreptitiously continue their relationship, they begin to discover long-hidden secrets about their families, forcing them to wonder about the circumstances that brought them together in the first place.

Gloria Chao’s beautifully heartbreaking second novel (after 2018’s American Panda) intersperses Ali and Chase’s contemporary story with the historically set Chinese folktake “The Butterfly Lovers.” Chao develops both primary and secondary characters well, particularly Ali’s friend Yun, who is just beginning to explore his sexuality.

With authentic teen voices that will help readers easily connect with the characters and their stories, Our Wayward Fate is an excellent choice for readers who love a mix of contemporary and historical fiction.

In 2008, Zimbabwe is in transition, and politics permeate the everyday lives of its people. Students attend class without their teachers, who are protesting and striking. Business people face rapid declines in profits. Landowners who benefitted from the land-reform program of 2005 defend the land redistribution.

Fifteen-year-old Shamiso is grieving the loss of her father, a journalist and outspoken critic of Zimbabwean politics, whose recent death in a mysterious car crash turned Shamiso’s world upside down. Gone is her stable life in England; now at a boarding school in Zimbabwe, Shamiso isolates herself socially, nursing her anger and resentment.

But her new roommate, Tanyaradzwa, who is suffering in her own way with a secret cancer diagnosis, draws out Shamiso’s feelings. As her friendship with Tanyaradzwa deepens, Shamiso’s defenses break down. But how will she cope when she discovers that this relationship, too, may end in devastating loss?

The concise chapters in Hope Is Our Only Wing move back and forth in time, focusing mainly on Shamiso’s experiences, but italicized interludes intermittently reveal other characters’ perspectives, so that readers encounter multiple voices and experiences. This unconventional format results in a powerful mosaic of personalities and situations and creates a vivid portrait of a nation and society in flux.

Questions of justice and reform serve as a powerful backdrop to this personal story of a young woman’s growth into hope and connection. Written in spare and evocative prose, this memorable taste of Zimbabwe will leave readers thirsty for more of its kind.

To her family and friends, Kiera Johnson is popular, a good big sister, an honors student, talented at math and likely to attend historically black Spelman College after she graduates from predominantly white Jefferson Academy, where she too often feels singled out as the “voice of Blackness.” But unbeknownst to everyone in her real life, Kiera is also Emerald, the developer of SLAY, one of the hottest new virtual reality role-playing games.

Tired of playing video games in which the only characters of color are villains or dwarves, and weary of encountering racial slurs hurled at her by other players’ avatars, Kiera developed SLAY to create a place where black gamers could play safely online. In the world of her game, black culture is not only respected but is actually the source of players’ power.

But when a black teenager is shot to death over a SLAY-related dispute, Kiera begins to question everything, from the possibility of her own culpability in the player’s murder to whether, as one particularly insidious online troll suggests, the game’s Afrocentric focus and referrals-only membership system discriminate against gamers who are not black.

Debut novelist Brittney Morris admirably melds Kiera’s real-life and online worlds in Slay while illustrating the diversity of experiences and philosophies within the black community. Morris intersperses vignettes that explore the varied experiences of black gamers around the world and what SLAY means to them amid detailed depictions of online gameplay and Kiera’s rapidly escalating real-world crises. 

Readers will cheer for Kiera as she slays her own demons, and they’ll come away from the novel desperately wishing SLAY were more than the product of Morris’ imagination.

When high school senior Clara, who is a longtime volunteer in her private school’s library and the creator of miniature lending libraries all around her Tennessee town, accidentally stumbles onto a memo about a list of newly “prohibited media” at her school, she knows exactly what to do. She pulls all the books listed in the memo off the library’s shelves, wraps them in white construction paper covers, downloads a personal library management app to her phone and starts running an underground lending library out of her locker. 

Students who borrow Clara’s books are invited to spread the word and encouraged to fill up their books’ blank covers with their reactions. They’re also asked to leave the administration in the dark. Before long, Clara’s secret library begins attracting unexpected patrons. Who knew that the star of the football team had a soft side, or that the popular rich kids had problems of their own? 

As word about Clara’s locker library travels rapidly through the hallways, the effects of the ban begin to spread. What will become of her English teacher’s plan to include some of the now-banned books in her syllabus? Will Clara’s undercover activism support or hinder her chances of winning the coveted Founders Scholarship and a full ride to college? What significance will the comments left on the illicit books’ covers turn out to have? And what role do books have in supporting readers when times are tough?

Teen activists and literature lovers alike will cheer for Clara and her friends and classmates as they advocate on behalf of their favorite books. Best of all, Suggested Reading will surely inspire teens to pick up commonly challenged young adult classics, such as Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War.