Laila Piedra is a senior in high school, facing down the final weeks before graduation, when everything in her life goes sideways. For years, she has enjoyed the encouragement of her creative writing teacher, Mr. Madison, who is the only person with whom she shares her sci-fi stories. Writing and being with her three best friends is the entirety of Laila’s world. She doesn’t cause problems and she’s never been on a date, much less in love. But Laila is (mostly) happy.

When Mr. Madison gets in an accident and is replaced by a prize-winning novelist, Laila isn’t prepared for the avalanche of changes. Readers will think they already know the trajectory of Laila’s path: new teacher helps protagonist become a better writer. The reader would be correct, but only to a point, as author Riley Redgate (Noteworthy) surprises us with a heart-wrenching twist.

Final Draft may be filled with the high school angst and self-discovery that’s expected of young adult novels, but the story is deliciously elevated by its emotional depth and Redgate’s snarky prose. With the book’s explorations of sex and some adult language, the publisher’s age recommendation of 13 and up may not be true for all, but Final Draft should be a must-have for high school libraries.

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In Driving by Starlight, Anat Deracine’s noteworthy debut, 16-year-old Leena is the top student in her Saudi Arabian high school, but with her father in jail for sedition and no money in the bank, her future looks bleak. Just when she thinks she’s found her ticket out—Saudi Arabia’s first-ever all-girls debate competition, with a grand prize of a full ride to college—Leena’s blacklisted from the debate team. Unable to escape her father’s shadow, Leena is crestfallen. Heartbreak follows heartbreak when Leena’s crush tricks her into betraying the confidence of her best friend, Mishail, and posts scandalous photos of Mishail online in an attempt to embarrass her high-level bureaucrat father. Realizing how much she and her friends need one another, Leena orchestrates an escape from Saudi Arabia for both Mishail and herself.

The Saudi Arabia of Driving by Starlight is a haunting land of morality police, hyper-surveillance and hypocrisy. Against this background, it is no surprise that social commentary threads throughout Deracine’s novel. It is one thing to document the desperation of the hard-pressed, but Deracine also captures the hope and joy that nourish Saudi people in desperate straits.

With a keen sense of drama and a gift for understated exposition, Deracine has blessed readers with an intriguing window into a part of the world most of us know very little about.

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Meet Mila, a fat Mexican-American teen witch in a small, boring town. Well, technically she’s a Wiccan. If you hadn’t already guessed, her life isn’t exactly easy at Fairmont Academy, and her best (and only) friend is a fellow Wiccan weird girl, Riley. But Mila has a pretty huge problem: Riley was just found dead in a creek around the same time the bodies of two infamous mean girls from their school were found hanging in the trees near the bank.

Although the local police have ruled Riley’s death as a suicide, Mila is convinced that Riley was murdered. Naturally, Mila decides to get some magic involved in her investigation, and when a mysterious grimoire shows up that contains a spell called “The Seven-Day Breath of Life,” she knows the best way to find the identity of Riley’s killer is to bring her back to life and ask Riley herself. Of course, a local coven of older witches warn her of the dangerous consequences that come with dabbling in dark spells, and Mila soon discovers that having Riley back comes with a price.

Don’t miss Lily Anderson’s smart debut that combines a witchy mystery with a tender tale of friendship. With a singular and hilariously cutting teen voice, Undead Girl Gang is sure to be one of the most talked-about YA novels of the year.

Ah, summer: a time for long days hanging out at the pool with friends, culminating in a vacation to an exotic locale. Or, at least that's what Clara Shin has in mind. But what Clara actually gets is a summer working in her father’s Korean-Brazilian fusion food truck, the KoBra, beside her mortal enemy, Rose Carver. This is bad news for Clara, but great news for readers of this bubbly and fun summer read. As Clara reluctantly learns to tolerate Rose, a boy named Hamlet who works at a coffee shop near one of the KoBra’s regular stops catches Clara’s eye. Hamlet is cute, nice and sincere—exactly the things that prank-loving Clara isn’t. In fact, Clara’s built her identity on never taking anything seriously and never getting attached for long—just like her mother, a professional social media influencer who left for a jet-setting life when Clara was 4.

Clara expects she’ll join her mother for their planned trip to the resort town of Tulum in Mexico at the end of the summer, but she doesn’t expect to be a different person by the time the summer ends. As Clara and Rose become friends, Clara and Hamlet become more-than-friends and she begins to rethink her assumptions about both the present and the future.

Like the fusion cuisine of the KoBra, The Way You Make Me Feel is also a fusion of sorts, with Goo combining the sweet breeziness of a light summer read with the spice of a coming-of-age story that deals with having to leave part of yourself behind and grow into new relationships and new perspectives. Enjoy this book with a cool glass of lime juice for a true summer treat.

Four Long Island teens are obsessed with Fatima Ro, a bestselling YA author, and her book Undertow. When the teens meet Fatima at a book signing, they can’t help but gush, only to be further floored when she takes an interest in them. Miri, confident and self-possessed; Soleil, the ultimate fangirl; Penny, rich, but insecure; and Jonah, the enigmatic, new guy become disciples of Fatima’s philosophy about “precious truths” and “authentic connections.” Fatima encourages the teens to be honest and transparent with her, and in turn, she invites them into her home, doles out dating advice and, in Penny’s case, lets her cat sit. But Fatima has her own agenda—one that lands Jonah in the hospital and uses the other teens to advance her career. As noted on the cover of author Lygia Day Peñaflor’s meta novel, All of This Is True, what happens next will shock you.

This cleverly constructed story uses an atypical narrative structure, resulting in a mystery with a fresh twist. Told entirely through interview transcripts, journal entries, text messages and snippets from Peñaflor’s novel-within-a-novel, All of This Is True is meta without being confusing. What must have been a daunting creative undertaking for the author reads effortlessly. Peñaflor manages to propel her plot and deepen her characterization while tackling complex themes in a compulsively readable package resulting in a fantastic story that’s sure to be a bestseller.

Each of King Henry VIII’s six wives were very different from each other, so what better way to tell their stories than with six different authors? Award-winning and bestselling young adult writers M.T. Anderson, Jennifer Donnelly, Candace Fleming, Stephanie Hemphill, Deborah Hopkinson, Linda Sue Park and Lisa Ann Sandell have joined forces to give the wives a distinctive voice of their own in this unique novel.

As Donnelly points out in a preface to Fatal Throne: The Wives of Henry III Tell All, much has been written about Henry VIII, but the wives have often been reduced to caricatures. We know their lineage, how they came to be noticed by the king and how they ended, and several of their letters are extant, but how they truly felt is left to speculation. These writers have taken on the task of telling the queen’s stories “in their own words.” Though each a work of fiction, the stories are still based on historical research—which is listed in the bibliographic afterword. Anderson weaves his imagined thoughts of the king between the women’s stories and adds a final look at his heir, Queen Elizabeth.

The varying personalities of Henry’s wives can be felt palpably and deeply in this novel. The first-person voice lends an immediacy that allows the reader to connect with each woman. This also means that each wife is a sympathetic character —for who would portray themselves otherwise?—which may or may not be an accurate representation. Still, Fatal Throne is a fun read and great introduction to a turning point in English history.

Jennifer Bruer Kitchel is the librarian for a Pre-K through 8th level Catholic school.

Rufus Holt lives in suburban Vermont, but his life is no ice-cream-and-pie suburban fantasy. It’s more of a nightmare. He’s gay in a small town, house-on-the-brink-of-foreclosure poor and the illegitimate son of a sociopathic lawyer hellbent on his demise. And that’s all before Rufus finds his half-sister passed out in her dead lover’s arms with a bloody butcher knife dangling from her sleepy grip.

Caleb Roehrig’s White Rabbit is a murder mystery set in a suburban enclave so twisted it’s almost dystopian. Rufus lives in a town where the cool kids aren’t just spoiled narcissists, they’re grade-A psychopaths. There are drug dealers, rapists and at least one murderer. While the more sordid details are left to the reader’s imagination, the plot of White Rabbit is violent and twisted enough for a Quentin Tarantino screenplay. But White Rabbit’s not all malice and malcontents. Woven throughout the mystery is the on-again, off-again love story of Rufus and his boyfriend, Sebastian—an endearing thread that highlights the drama of coming to understand and embrace one’s sexuality.

Though Roehrig’s plotting is tight and his handling of the love story deft, his ear for the modern vernacular may be his most subtle gift. In a book with a massive body count, his dialogue is dead on. Though too dark and violent for some, White Rabbit will certainly appeal to teen readers on the more mature end of the spectrum.