In their latest novel, If I’m Being Honest, Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka (Always Never Yours) bring The Taming of the Shrew (and, with it, Ten Things I Hate About You) into present-day context as high school senior Cameron Bright grapples with what it means to change yourself in order to please others.

Beautiful, smart and brutally honest Cameron has been called a b*tch more times than she can count. But it never bothers her. The people who know her well love her, so why should she care about anyone else? But when her crush, Andrew, calls her out on her behavior, she decides it’s time for a change. Inspired by her English class assignment, The Taming of the Shrew, she decides to “tame herself.” But as one attempt after the next goes awry, Cameron learns that being nice doesn’t mean being soft. And, more importantly, nobody’s approval is worth losing who you are.

Wibberley and Siegemund-Broka’s punchy prose and deft (mis)handling of Shakespeare make for an entertaining read on their own, but the authors’ real strength lies in their treatment of Cameron and her friends, both new and old. While most of these characters aren’t exactly likable, they are all so complex and thoroughly developed that we can’t help but root for them—and see ourselves in them—as they work through the drama and the expectations that come with senior year.

For 41 cycles over thousands of years, the wizard Merlin has had the same agenda: Find Arthur, train Arthur, and nudge him onto the nearest throne. Then Arthur is supposed to defeat the greatest evil in the universe and unite all of humankind. Every cycle so far, Arthur has died and Merlin has aged backward—until this 42nd reincarnation of the once and future monarch.

This time, Arthur is a teenage Arab interplanetary refugee who was taken in by an adoptive brother named Kay and his two moms. Arthur is also a girl named Ari. And, like nearly everyone else in this futuristic world, Ari is queer.

Familiar characters and places from the legend are here in new guises. Gweneviere is the multi-racial leader of a rebel planet, Lamarack is gender-fluid, and Camelot is a combination of a run-down spacecraft and a world where medieval entertainment takes center stage. The greatest evil in the universe is a mega-corporation known as Mercer that’s led by an unforgiving Administrator. When a quest to reveal Mercer’s dark side—and to rescue Kay and Ari’s moms—goes awry, Ari and her friends must draw on previously unrecognized strengths to save themselves and the universe, and the stunning conclusion leaves room for future stories.

Authors Amy Rose Capetta and Cori McCarthy, best known for their Rainbow Boxes project to stock libraries and shelters with fiction featuring LGBTQ+ characters, bring the King Arthur story to life in an entirely new way, complete with space battles, steamy romance and high adventure.

Author Natasha Deen, whose Guyanese family moved to Canada when she was a young girl, mines her own immigration experience for her newest YA novel, In the Key of Nira Ghani.

Fitting in as a teen is anxiety provoking, but it’s even more difficult when you’re an immigrant and one of only two people of color in your whole school. Nira’s parents want the best for her, and the family recently fled Guyana with just their belongings in order to make a better life in Canada. They want her to become a doctor and to live a comfortable life. Since Nira is a dutiful daughter, she studies faithfully, but she has a love in her life that she hides from them—jazz trumpet.

For Nira, playing her instrument provides a welcome escape from the mean girl at school who makes ignorant, racist comments and asks rude questions about Nira’s identity. Nira’s best friend, Emily, also helps until she becomes good friends with the mean girl. To further complicate things in her life, Nira is forced to spend time with a cousin whom she can’t stand.

Guyanese cultural references add to the richness of this tale. A possible romance is on the horizon for Nina, but familial conflicts abound, with Nira’s wise grandmother often smoothing out rough patches until something happens that even she can’t fix.

This layered story ripples with jazz-like rhythms, and Deen gracefully shows what it’s like to be an outsider and how a true conviction of spirit is sometimes all the improvising one needs.

In Australian author Helena Fox’s debut, How It Feels to Float, 17-year-old Elizabeth’s father still appears to her 10 years after his death. Biz, as she’s called by friends and family, finds comfort in his ghostly presence and indulges in his stories about her childhood and his love for her mother. But Biz also feels at home among her self-described “Posse” of classmates and with her best friend, Grace.

During Biz’s junior year, her life starts to unravel. She discovers that she may be attracted to Grace, but her sexual orientation is still a conundrum. And when rumors about her sexuality start to spread around school, the Posse officially shuns her. Worst of all, her father disappears one night while she’s at the beach. As she finds herself alone, Biz may start to understand what it’s like for her father to float, “to watch and not be seen.”

In this lyrical story, we follow Biz as she sets out to find her lost father. As she connects with a new boy at school named Jasper (whose sexual orientation is also undefined) and an older female mentor, Biz’s narration occasionally turns from prose to poetry. In order to connect with her father, she will have to do the hard work of confronting her PTSD and unresolved grief. 

This is a frank story of mental illness, loss and sexual identity, and Fox responsibly concludes her story with information and support services for readers facing similar issues. How It Feels to Float is a beautifully crafted story of finding hope and love when both appear to be gone forever.

In Sarah Henstra’s We Contain Multitudes, an unlikely duo are paired up as pen pals for a weekly writing assignment, an arrangement that leads to friendship and even love.

Senior Adam “Kurl” Kurlansky and sophomore Jonathan “Jo” Hopkirk couldn’t be more mismatched: Kurl plays football and works for his family’s roofing business, while Jo plays the mandolin and loves Walt Whitman so much he dresses like him.

Telling the story solely via their exchanged letters, Henstra pulls off an especially neat trick: Jo and Kurl start off as different as night and day in both voice and temperament, but over time they begin to sound more like one another as they discover common ground and learn a bit more about each other’s lives. Jo is bullied mercilessly at school but is also grieving a loss from early childhood; Kurl is obsessed with his brother’s military service in Afghanistan, yet he fails to make the connection between combat trauma and his own perilous home life. Henstra doesn’t sugarcoat any of these challenges, which makes the teens’ love story a hard-won treasure. Throughout the Minneapolis-set novel runs a sad and lovely thread about Prince, which encourages playlist creation while reading.

There’s something about seeing the world through these boys’ separate points of view that brings the story to life in a visceral way. We Contain Multitudes is a heartbreaker in many ways, but it’s ultimately a beautiful story about how love (and poetry) are sometimes enough to carry the day. 

Sixteen-year-old Tiger Tolliver never wanted to learn how to make friends with the dark. But that’s what happens when her mom dies unexpectedly and her ensuing grief becomes overwhelming.

“If you looked at yourself in a mirror right now, could you see pieces of bone close to the surface?” Tiger wonders. “Is this how it will feel every day from now on?” Tiger may be strong, but she’s genuinely scared of what’s to come. 

She initially channels her “Grand Canyon of grief” by wearing the same ugly dress for days on end—the same dress that Tiger and her mom argued about. During that argument, they exchanged their last words.

In these early days of grieving, Tiger feels like she is surrounded by the dark. All she feels is fear, sadness and uncertainty as she takes on the responsibilities of organizing her mother’s funeral and end-of-life documents. She never knew her father, and she doesn’t have any extended family that she knows of, so she becomes a ward of the state of Arizona, and she’s soon shuttled from foster home to foster home.

When a previously unknown half-sister is discovered, Tiger becomes her charge, and together they reach out to their incarcerated father and try to navigate an uncertain (but hopefully forward-looking) future as a family. Secondary characters feed the narrative and provide balance to Tiger in her journey, which she measures in minutes since her mother’s death.

Bestselling author Kathleen Glasgow’s second novel, How to Make Friends With the Dark, is an honest and extremely harrowing read. As young readers take this journey with Tiger, they will learn that grief takes all forms and that life, somehow, does go on—even amid the surrounding dark.

Printz Honor-winning author A.S. King’s novels (Please Ignore Vera Dietz, Still Life With Tornado) are in another solar system entirely, so it can be hard to give readers a taste of what her stories are like without just handing them the books.

In Dig, her latest work of surrealist fiction, she follows five teenagers. A boy throws himself into snow shoveling and house painting in an attempt to save for a car that will help him find his dad. A girl works the drive-thru at an Arby’s and deals drugs from the window. The Freak—but what exactly is she?—moves between worlds and tries to tie a family together. These are just three threads in this tangled root ball of a story. There’s also First-Class Malcolm, who’s taking care of his terminally ill dad, and Loretta the Flea-Circus Ring Mistress.

These teens are the grandchildren of Gottfried and Marla, a couple who made their wealth developing subdivisions and are now pretty miserable. They cut off their kids and left them to their own devices, and now a traditional family gathering threatens to finally expose the extent to which their legacy of harm has eaten away at them all. 

King brings an intense surrealism to Dig’s discussion of racism and respectability politics. Plot points like the grotesque flea circus and the Freak’s magical ability to “flicker” from place to place don’t seem so exotic when placed next to scenes in which a suburban mom polishes her antebellum souvenir. Each generation hopes the next will improve; in Dig, that hope feels more urgently needed than ever.

Shaun David Hutchinson’s The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried is a weird, surreal ride—one that might be bumpy in the hands of a less adept writer. But Hutchinson (We Are the Ants) has become known for his unique and offbeat takes on the young adult experience, and in his latest, he pairs a quirky premise with vitally alive—or, in one case, half-alive—teen characters. 

Dino’s parents own a funeral home, so he’s no stranger to death. But he’s not expecting his best friend, July, to die suddenly. Their relationship was, like many teen friendships, challenged when Dino started dating. It’s clear the two had unfinished business, so it’s lucky that just days before her funeral, July comes back to life—as an animated corpse. July and Dino try to come to terms with this supernatural occurrence while revisiting their friendship and trying to find out how Dino’s relationship with his new boyfriend will be impacted. 

Could Dino and July really have done things differently to stay friends while July was alive? And what does this mean for the future? Does July even have a future? This quirky novel has just enough surrealism to keep teens wanting more.

High school students Jordan and Max couldn’t be more different. Jordan writes poetry and hangs out with his two female best friends while Max chills with the jocks on the baseball team. When Max stumbles into a summer job helping out at Jordan’s late father’s food truck, the boys are awkward coworkers at first and the truck is looking like it’s a miserable failure. Max isn’t getting paid and Jordan isn’t earning the money he needs to help his mother pay the mortgage. But once the boys redesign the truck and its menu (nevermind some bumpy false starts), their unique spicy chicken and frozen lemonade recipes start attracting customers. As sales begin to boom and the hot Phoenix summer blazes around them, the two boys begin to bond and share their vulnerabilities: Jordan is scared by his mother’s mental illness, and Max is dealing with the trauma of being assaulted by an older boy at a party. Before long, they’ve moved from being friendly coworkers to being boyfriends. But will their feelings for each other be enough to sustain them as things begin to turn sour?

Like all of Konigsberg’s previous young adult books, The Music of What Happens isn’t afraid to tackle complex personal and social issues like race and gender, but thankfully and Max and Jordan’s sexual orientations are portrayed as completely normal. This is an utterly contemporary take on the age-old summer love story.

As part of the DC Icons series, where blockbuster authors reexplore and reimagine iconic superheroes for a new, young audience, Newberry Medal-winning author Matt de la Peña’s Superman: Dawnbreaker explores Clark Kent’s early years as a teenager in his small hometown. And just as Clark is learning his true identity and extraordinary abilities, he is simultaneously balancing the risks and responsibilities that accompany such power and exploring what it means to belong in today’s America.

Set against the backdrop of a fictional, modern-day Smallville, Kansas, readers meet a cast of familiar characters, including Clark’s parents, Lana Lang and Lex Luthor, but de la Peña also introduces readers to a bevy of new characters who are involved with the powerful Mankins Corporation. The multi-millionaire Mankins family, including Clark’s fellow high school student Bryan, have moved into Smallville to supposedly bring new jobs into the farming town. But as Clark and Lana befriend Bryan and do some digging into his father’s company, they soon learn that the corporation is not as kindhearted as the bosses would like the town to believe. All the while, Smallville’s Mexican-American residents have started suddenly disappearing, and it’s up to Clark and his friends to get to the bottom of it all before it tears the town apart.

De la Peña writes in an introductory note that “Superman belongs to all of us . . . he is an outsider who longs to make the world a kinder, safer place,” and the author does a phenomenal job of humanizing this powerful superhero in a way that makes him more relatable than he’s ever been before.

Each season, for 327 years, Prince Rhen of Emberfell faces a curse. The terms? Find a girl to fall in love with him, or turn into a ferocious beast who destroys everything in its path. And every season his devoted guard commander Grey—the only member of the Royal Guard to escape the murderous beast—travels to a parallel world to bring back a romantic prospect for Rhen. Every year, Rhen fails, which brings endless amusement of the enchantress who cursed him. Every time the beast is killed, his enchanted castle resets and a new season begins. But in this final season, Rhen’s death will be permanent.

Harper lives in Washington D.C. Cerebral palsy has twisted her muscles, her mother is dying, her father is absent and her brother has violent debt collectors at his heels. When an accidental encounter with Grey transports her to his magical world of Emberfell, her first goal is to find a way back home. Soon, though, she comes to care for Emberfell, and she and Rhen concoct a plan to protect the land from an invading foreign power. She’ll pretend to be Princess Harper of “Disi,” an ally with an army ready to push back the invaders.

As politics swirl and violence erupts, Harper also finds herself slowly falling for Rhen. But will her love be enough to break the spell in time? A great choice for readers who swoon at Beauty and the Beast narratives and who relish a story that ends in the thick of the action.