It’s summer in Echo, Maine, and 17-year-old Violet White and her brother are wondering how they are going to manage their crumbling seaside mansion. Violet’s beloved grandmother is dead, and her artist parents are spending what little remains of the family fortune in Europe. And so Violet decides to rent out the guesthouse to River West, a stranger who brings money and intrigue, but also lies. Violet is immediately drawn to River and finds herself trying to understand the strange boy who stirs in her both passion and contempt.

Don't trust the handsome stranger in Tucholke's Gothic debut.

Just when River arrives in town, strange things start happening: Children claim to see the devil; a man kills himself in the town square; and a woman is murdered nearby. Violet's grandmother always said to believe in the devil, and now Violet knows such evil exists. River isn't as innocent as he claims to be, but Violet doesn’t care, and that's the problem.

April Genevieve Tucholke's debut is a Gothic horror with a contemporary setting, although a major element of the story’s appeal is the sense that it could take place at any time in the past. There is no mention of cell phones or the Internet. Violet's neighbor never calls or texts; she just shows up at Violet’s door. Violet dresses up in her grandmother’s vintage clothes, and River drives a classic car.

There is also a sensual undercurrent throughout the book. Violet often catches her brother and pretty neighbor with their hands all over each other. Violet, too, is feeling uncontrollable passion for the first time, even though her affections are directed at a romantic lead who is not at all charming.

Atmospheric and sultry with phenomenal cover art, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is as frightening as it is alluring.

Vee Crawford-Wong has a mouthful of a name that says a lot about him. His Chinese father gave him a first name with no Chinese translation because, as he tells his frustrated son, “We wanted to unburden you from a commitment to artificial meaning that comes with a family name.” Gee, thanks, Dad. He gets “Crawford” from his Texan mother, but she won’t say a thing about her life before Vee was born. The three of them have a fine home life, but their attempts to avoid talking about extended family explode when Vee’s history teacher asks the class to trace their genealogical backgrounds. Hence, The Counterfeit Family Tree of Vee Crawford-Wong.

A biracial teen's search yields hilarious results.

Author L. Tam Holland’s first novel is long and a bit gangly, not unlike Vee himself, but the side stories into high school ring true, often to a painful degree. Why is it that when life is flying by so quickly, an hour spent in class with a sworn enemy can feel like hard time, or a moment’s attention from an unreachable crush can pull two weeks along in its wake? Holland gets the highs and lows right, along with the regrettable degree to which kids suddenly feel smarter than their parents and emboldened to act on it, often with disastrous results.

Don’t despair, though—Holland mines comic gold from those darker moments. A racist insult fabricated to win Vee sympathy instead sends his parents into hysterical laughter (you’ll laugh, too, the next time you need ibuprofen). And while Vee’s pain is real, his actions in response to it consistently lead to farcical results, and sometimes lead him halfway around the world. The Counterfeit Family Tree of Vee Crawford-Wong is a frank look at growing up biracial and feeling neither/nor, then discovering that wholeness was there all along, just waiting to be found.

All Danielle wanted was a quiet, peaceful summer, and her babysitting job provided her with just that. Five-year-old Humphrey was adorable, funny and better company than the friends from whom she seemed to be growing apart. And then came the accident, a split second during their walk home from the park: Humphrey ran into the road and was hit and killed by a passing car, and Danielle can’t help but feel responsible.

A devastating accident leaves a girl scrambling for answers.

Guilt and grief consume Danielle as she tries to remember the good times with Humphrey, the afternoons of make-believe and nights of Popsicles, but in the aftermath of the accident, her sleepy neighborhood buzzes with controversy. Some members of the community think a lack of streetlights caused the crash and lobby for improvement, while others are hung up on the fact that the driver of the car was an illegal immigrant. What no one wants to talk about, Danielle realizes, is the smart little boy who was lost that night.

When her parents put her in therapy to deal with the loss, Danielle begins to realize that she was having problems long before the accident, and if she wants to get past them and honor Humphrey's memory, she's going to have to speak her mind in the neighborhood’s debates.

Author Debbie Levy’s depiction of loss in Imperfect Spiral is powerful, and equally as compelling are her frequent flashbacks of Danielle and Humphrey’s time together. Levy has created an incredibly nuanced relationship between the two, showing that the most important relationships can form outside traditional boundaries like age groups and family ties. Within these memories she also explores Humphrey’s family and the complicated mix of a parent’s love and expectations.

The novel sometimes lags under the weight of all the issues it attempts to address. Danielle deals not only with her panic attacks and feelings of loss, but also her feelings on illegal immigration and the strain between her parents and brother, and the story becomes exhausting for both her and the reader. Likewise, the addition of a love interest feels squeezed in, and while the relationship’s development is genuine, it also feels rushed.

Despite its flaws, Imperfect Spiral is a powerful book that stays with you long after you’ve read the final page. It’s a story of love and loss that distinguishes itself from the flood of YA books tackling those topics by challenging how we define family and who you can count among your friends.

On the day that his beloved grandmother, Mem, dies, Billy “Brother” Grace dreams of the sea. While he’s never been to the ocean in his 18 years, Brother has grown up hearing his grandmother’s stories from her childhood.

Brother holds a single memory of his mother, who dumped him with Mem and then was killed in a car crash. After the loss of Mem, he believes he is alone in the world—well, at least as far as family goes, since he still has his loyal dog Trooper—but all that changes in a flash. First, his buddy Cole, who’s been struggling to raise his 5-year-old brother Jack on his own, disappears, leaving Jack with Brother. Then Brother discovers the newspaper his grandmother had been reading before her death—a newspaper with his own picture in it. Only it’s not him at all, but his spitting image: a senator’s son named Gabriel, who nearly died of a drug overdose.

Brother sets out for an island off the coast of North Carolina to find the truth about himself, his twin brother and his family. It’s not your typical solo adventure, though, as Brother has an Australian shepherd and a pesky kid in tow, as well as a car that doesn’t quite make it.

Thanks to some help from a girl named Kit, Brother arrives on the island, but his hopes of finding a loving family are dashed as he becomes embroiled in a web of old secrets and lies.

Brother, Brother tackles a number of hard issues, including drug addiction, PTSD and class conflict. With a strong sense of mystery, an unusual setting and engaging teen characters—both male and female—Brother, Brother is a perfect page-turner for summer reading, whether readers are on the beach or just dreaming of one.

Five hundred years ago, Terra’s ancestors left a dying Earth for life aboard the Asherah, a spaceship bound for the distant planet Zehava. Over time, their well-intended plan to preserve their society—and their secular Jewish heritage—has hardened into a set of authoritarian rules: Everyone must marry and raise a family, and occupations and corresponding class structures are determined by an elite Council. Obedience is a mitzvah—part good deed, part commandment—and deviances are not tolerated.

As the Asherah approaches Zehava, Terra is almost 16—the age at which she must choose a mate or risk being assigned one. Her father has never recovered from her mother’s unusual early death; her older brother is distant; and her longtime best friend has concerns of her own. Terra’s passion is drawing, but her new career placement seems not to involve art at all. And at night, Terra dreams of an unseen lover—her bashert, Hebrew for “heart’s twin.”

When Terra accidentally stumbles on an underground anti-Council resistance movement, the certainties in her world begin to disappear. Readers familiar with the structure of YA dystopias may think they know what to expect next, but author Phoebe North demonstrates that a futuristic tale of love, rebellion and the search for identity can still offer some surprises. Life on the spaceship is meticulously described, and journal entries from an original passenger—a lesbian grieving her own lost lover—add context from the early days of the voyage. Hebrew and Yiddish phrases sprinkled throughout the text are clearly defined in context, but subtly altered definitions hint at the intriguing ways that words can change over time. In the end, many questions are answered . . . but many new ones take their place, to be pursued in a follow-up novel, Starbreak, in 2014.

If you ask Bea, she’d tell you that she’s in therapy because she has a little trouble managing her anxiety. She doesn’t really need a therapist, and she certainly doesn’t need to attend group therapy with a bunch of other teens who—let’s face it—look like freaks compared to Bea. Of course, Beck—who has a habit of constantly washing his hands and doing things in sets of eight—is kind of a cute freak. But still, Bea doesn’t belong with these other kids and their compulsions . . . or does she?

Ever since Bea’s bad breakup with her last boyfriend, she has had a tendency to fixate on people—mostly guys—whom she needs to “check on” in order to keep them safe. Her latest obsession is handsome Austin, who attends couples therapy with his wife and whose sessions Bea just happens to overhear. But when Bea starts following the couple from the therapist’s office in the suburbs to their home in downtown Boston, it’s clear to everyone but Bea that her interest has gone too far.

OCD Love Story is one of those novels that sneaks up on you—what seems to start off as a humorous account of one girl’s adventures in therapy turns into something much darker and more intense, as readers gradually realize the extent of Bea’s illness. In her debut, Corey Ann Haydu raises important questions about recognizing, enabling and recovering from mental illness—all explored in Bea’s funny, loveable, vulnerable voice.

The Gregorys are one of those families that can do no wrong—literally. Rulers of their community, this wealthy family presides over local institutions like the Hawthorne Lake Country Club, and if family members sometimes run afoul of the law, then the law has a tendency to look the other way. But when the body of popular Willa Ames-Rowan (a champion swimmer) is pulled from the lake at the country club, and when golden boy James Gregory is likely the last person to see her alive, four of Willa’s friends and acquaintances can’t look the other way any longer.

Willa’s friends Sloane and Lina, Willa’s intense sister Madge and Club newcomer (and outsider) Rose each have their own motives for trying to solve Willa’s death and unseat the Gregory dynasty. But this well-funded group (whose relationships with each other range from tense to barely tolerant) will stop at nothing to get their revenge. The novel, divided into four sections—each one from the point of view of one of the girls—unfolds at a rapid clip, leaving readers feeling at times disoriented, unsettled, swept up in the girls’ mission just as they are. As the pieces of the puzzle come together, however, readers will start to understand not only what happened that fateful night but also what compels each girl to declare “war” on the Gregory family—and perhaps to start a new trend in vigilante justice elsewhere, too.

This Is W.A.R. illustrates what can happen when four girls with enough motivation (and enough money) unite behind a common cause: uncovering the truth.

Sixteen-year-old Katie Green is a displaced American orphan who moves in with her aunt in Japan. Homesick and grief-stricken, Katie struggles to adjust to a foreign culture and language while trying to navigate the social hierarchy of a Japanese high school. Then Katie meets Yuu Tomohiro, an enigmatic senior boy with a bad reputation. Tomo warns her to keep away, but she can’t resist him, especially when she begins to suspect that makes drawings that move.

Tomo reveals to Katie that he is descended from the Kami, Japanese gods with great supernatural powers, and this allows his drawings to come to life and cause destruction. And somehow Katie is connected to the Kami as well. When she’s around Tomo, the ink reacts to her in unimaginable ways. The power to create moving illustrations can have disastrous consequences in the wrong hands, and Katie and Tomo soon find themselves running from the Japanese mob. As they fall passionately in love, their relationship seems doomed. When Katie has an opportunity to return home, she questions whether to return to safety or to stay in Japan with Tomo and face the dark world of the Kami.

At first, Ink reads a lot like Twilight. Katie, like Bella Swan, is a girl far from home who meets a brooding boy who warns her that he’s dangerous and she should stay away from him. However, the Japanese setting and intriguing mythology make this novel a standout. Amanda Sun, who lived in Japan as an exchange student, grounds her readers in an authentic Japan and even uses Japanese vocabulary in context. Katie doesn’t just have a cell phone—she has a keitai. The first in a series, Ink will draw in fans for its setting first, romance second.

Many YA books tackle the topic of teens with eating disorders and body image issues. Some, like Skinny by Donna Cooner, include insistent internal voices that whisper damaging thoughts to their hosts. Others, like Nothing by Robin Friedman and Purge by Sarah Darer Littman, portray teen boys struggling with anorexia and bulimia. But none combine these elements in quite the same way as Lois Metzger’s A Trick of the Light.

Who is this oddly persuasive voice that’s telling Mike to ignore his best friend and hang out with a strange, too-thin girl instead? Why does the voice encourage Mike to set aside his interest in stop-motion animation and focus entirely on the size and shape of his body? And who could ignore a voice that promises a more exciting life than one spent picking up the pieces left by a depressed mother and an absent father?

Speaking in a simple, hypnotic style, this unnamed voice distorts logic and warps perceptions, offering Mike the illusion of strength and discipline while pulling him further and further into the depths of anorexia. Will Mike eventually succumb to the voice’s unattainable goals? Or will he somehow find a way to silence the very speaker who’s been telling—and controlling—the story all along?

The unusual point of view is reminiscent of the otherworldly and disembodied narrators of The Book Thief by Markus Zusak and Every Day by David Levithan. However, unlike those more reliable narrators, the voice in A Trick of the Light is manipulative and deceitful, drawing readers into Mike’s head and forcing them to decide for themselves what’s true and what’s twisted. Don’t be misled by the book’s small size: This slim volume packs a big emotional punch.

“Even to the strangers, I am strange,” remarks 13-year-old Habo, short for Dhahabo, which means “golden” in his home country of Tanzania. The teen never feels the warmth suggested by his special name, given to him for his light appearance due to albinism, but is instead an outcast in his world. With a father who abandoned the family after Habo’s birth, a mother who rarely touches him and an embarrassed brother who encourages taunting, Habo has spent most of his life alone.

When Habo’s family is faced with losing their meager farm, they head to their Auntie’s house in Mwanza. Upon their arrival, Habo quickly learns that this superstitious city is dangerous for a zeruzeru (literally, “zero-zero”) or person with albinism. Witch doctors hunt people like Habo to kill them and sell their body parts to those who believe they bring good luck. If Habo can reach the city of Dar es Salaam, where albino ministers of parliament serve, he may finally find a place to feel at ease. But first he must outrun an evil poacher who will stop at nothing to track and kill him. Their heart-stopping chase across cities leaves readers with Habo’s palpable fear until the final pages.

In a riveting teen novel, a Tanzanian boy with albinism searches for a place to belong.

In Golden Boy, first-time author Tara Sullivan brings to light this lesser-known and growing human rights problem, which occurs in several East African nations where the rate of albinism is higher than in other parts of the world. In telling the story, Sullivan sprinkles in phrases from Habo’s native language and facts about people with albinism, including their poor eyesight and increased susceptibility to skin cancer. She bases the harrowing account on actual events and shows how strange notions of good luck cross all socioeconomic levels.

Sullivan offers hope, too, through a blind sculptor who “sees” Habo’s true spirit and encourages his self-esteem. An author’s note and other resources provide more information on the teen’s plight, in the hope that Habo’s story will move many readers to take action.

Jennifer Bradbury’s ambitious new novel takes place in 1947 in the Indian city of Jalandhar, near the modern border with Pakistan, just before India is divided into two separate religious states. While the time and place may be unfamiliar to many teen readers, the dramatic, intertwining stories of the three young people at the heart of this story are sure to draw them in.

Tariq, a Muslim, would rather not go with his family to start a new life in Pakistan. Instead, he dreams of an education abroad at Oxford. Tariq finds himself increasingly at odds with his old friends, who try to engage him in acts of violent protest against the Sikhs. As Tariq struggles to keep hold of his future, his hopes are fueled when he goes to work for a British cartographer sent to India to establish the new borders. Tariq is sure that with Mr. Darnsley’s help, he can get to England.

Also in the cartographer’s household is the beautiful Anupreet, a Sikh, who has already been the victim of the increasing violence brought about by political turmoil. Anupreet and the cartographer’s daughter, Margaret, form a tentative friendship despite their differences. As the political tensions around them escalate, these three young people face intensely personal choices that will affect their lives—and one another.

Today’s teens may hear about disputes between Pakistan and India without having a sense of the historical context. In A Moment Comes, Bradbury shines a light on a complex time in history while telling a riveting story about the choices that sometimes determine our lives. Readers can almost feel the humidity, taste the delicious food and feast their eyes, as Margaret does, on beautiful silks in the marketplace. It’s a journey well worth taking.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Jennifer Bradbury for A Moment Comes.

Half Lives is a smart adventure story, but it’s also perilously full of potential spoilers, so let’s step lightly, shall we? At 17, Icie’s biggest problem in life is that her boyfriend just broke up with her via text message. When she gets a 911 text from her folks, she knows it’s serious—one is highly placed in the federal government and the other is a nuclear physicist—but the crisis that greets her at home changes her life forever. She’s given a crude map, a money belt and instructions to get to an unmarked bunker outside Las Vegas and await further orders.

Icie’s journey and what happens at the bunker are just half of the story. Generations later, a society led by teens lives on the mountain where the bunker was, and it’s clear that Icie has left them a legacy of some sort. The way these stories intertwine and reveal information about what happened—and the consequences—keeps Half Lives suspenseful until the very end.

Author Sara Grant toggles back and forth between the present and the distant future, and while there are complex love stories in each world, the real meat of the novel is in how things change—or fail to change—over time. Much of this comes through in Grant’s use of language: Icie likes to create new compound words in hopes they’ll catch on, and it’s a pleasure and an ongoing surprise to see where they turn up and how definitions evolve. A few songs on an old iPod become a hymnal of sorts, and “Facebook” takes on a whole new meaning.

This isn’t dystopian fiction, but fans of the genre will appreciate the dark humor and complex future created here, which offers up several “a-ha” moments when past and future reveal themselves. Half Lives is tough and scary, but ultimately a story of bravery and hope.

No matter how hard he tries, Danny can’t get over the fact that after years of battling cancer, his mom died mere weeks before his high school graduation, the one date she’d been trying to hold on for. With his dad killed in a car accident when he was a kid, his big sister in China trying to rediscover her roots and the summer between high school and college stretching out before him, Danny almost resigns himself to three months in his big empty house, grieving for his mom and obsessing over the girl that got away.

When a letter comes from the caretaker of his family’s apartment in Japan, asking what he’d like to do with his mom's leftover medication, Danny is puzzled, thinking she should have taken it all on her last trip. Desperate to figure out the meaning of the spare pills, wanting to know more about the last few months his mother spent without him and needing to get some space from his best-friend-turned-ex-girlfriend who’s suddenly dropping by after a year of ignoring him, Danny books a one-way ticket to Japan.

Daisy Whitney’s novel covers many emotional bases—grief, loneliness, betrayal, hope—and she captures them all incredibly well. Even as Danny tries to make sense of his mother’s final visit to Japan, he's always aware there might not be any logic behind it, that cracking the puzzle is a way to distract himself but may not give him peace. At the same time, he holds out hope that he can get back together with the girl that broke his heart when she dumped him the previous summer, but when she reaches out, he can’t bring himself to reach back, protecting his heart from more damage.

The book’s biggest strength is its unpredictability. The bulk of the novel is spent trying to unravel a specific mystery, yet Danny’s most shocking discovery has nothing to do with his mother. Likewise, Danny’s friendship with his apartment's caretaker’s daughter doesn’t rely on the promise of romance, which is refreshing from a YA novel.

When You Were Here is an engrossing book that draws readers in by being a window to a different culture and leaving its big questions unanswered until the last minute.

Molly Horan has her MFA in writing for children and young adults from The New School.