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With her book All Alone with You, Amelia Diane Coombs has written an honest account of a seventeen-year-old girl who copes with anxiety and depression because of imbalanced brain chemicals. Carrying around an unshakable sense of dread, Eloise Deane distracts herself by focusing on her dream to attend University of Southern California (USC). She can’t wait to graduate from Evanston High School in Seattle and make her escape. However, when her guidance counsellor tells her that USC will be expecting not just academic expertise but “investment and involvement” in her community, Eloise wavers.  That means that in order for her dream to come true, sheRead More →

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In a similar style as that written by Tom Leveen in his book Party (Random House, 2010), Justin Reynolds edits a book entitled House Party, in which ten authors pen perspectives from ten teens who all attend the party of the year at DeAndre Dixon’s house. Set in Florence Hills, a glitzy, corporate, and commercial suburb of Chicago, this party is one of hook-ups, showmances, dangerous flirtations, and heart break. It’s where the young come to dance with abandon, confess feelings, reveal secrets, make future plans, or have a fashion show down. “The unfiltered life of the party is the perfect backdrop to the highlyRead More →

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Emily Taylor shares her vivid imagination for magical worlds in her recent young adult novel, The Otherwhere Post. Taylor tells the tale of Maeve Abenthy who has lived for the past seven years with the knowledge that she has a murderer’s blood running through her veins.  Believing her father unleashed the Aldervine in Inverly, separating families and causing the deaths of many innocent people, Maeve feels cursed, so she hides behind aliases. Despite his abhorrent legacy, Maeve, a lover of the written word, has always found fascination in her father’s work with scriptomancy, “the art of enchanting any piece of existing handwriting” (8). When sheRead More →

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XiXi Tian’s debut young adult novel, This Place Is Still Beautiful, features the stories of Margaret and Annalie Flanagan. The two sisters face the complicated elements of identity, family dynamics, ugly truths about racism, and growing up as mixed race teens in Illinois.  Tian’s approach challenges the reader’s perspective as she shares insight and invites us to look from various lenses. Annalie’s father left when she was only three, so she has no memory of him. Her Chinese mother is determined to protect her girls from the pain she herself endured in a biracial marriage that ultimately fails when cultural differences intrude. Still, Margaret lovesRead More →

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Set in Manchester, England, All the Hidden Monsters by Amie Jordan tells the story of werewolves and other supernatural characters who live Downside. One of the author’s favored worlds, Downside is patterned after the tunnels where bodies were often piled during the Bubonic Plague. Here, Jordan imagines a supernatural society who lead alternate lives Upside. When one of Sage’s friends, Lucinda Hague (aka Lucy), another werewolf that Sage met in the orphanage, shows up dead, Oren Rinallis of the Arcāmum is called in to investigate. Led by Roderick, the Arcānum is a warlock institution comprised of those with powerful magic who uphold law and orderRead More →

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With her latest YA novel, I Am Made of Death, Kelly Andrew once again drops us into the world of her first books The Whispering Dark and Your Blood, My Bones. Since the moment she fell into a hole at Red Rock Canyon at four years old, the protagonist, Vivienne Farrow, cannot speak without causing imminent death. Broken and terrified, she met a creature that crawled into her bones and made her voice poisonous. Tired of feeling so out of control within her own body, Vivienne decides to risk death by convincing a medical student to perform a theoretical surgical exorcism on her. A bigRead More →

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Set in Boston where LifeCorp promises “everything you’d ever want if you’re willing to work for it” (93), The Dividing Sky by Jill Tew tells the story of the Lowers who toil for the privileged Uppers as mindless zombies hunting for their next fix of Mean. Brainwashed to believe that working hard and increasing their productivity scores will ensure “a world of value,” the Lowers find their escape in the Arcades where their brains are “seduced with oversaturated snippets to distract them from their monotonous realities” (80). Enter eighteen-year-old Liv Newman who serves as an EmoProxy, a technological oddity with the ability to record emotionalRead More →

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S.K. Ali writes a powerful story with her science fiction fantasy Fledgling. Told in eleven parts, this first book in a promised duology is about colonization, oppression, rebellions, and politics. However, it isn’t didactic, as Ali entices readers by sharing just enough to lure them in as they form their own opinions about pervasive attempts to manipulate minds with propaganda and as they form attachments to intriguing characters. Thematically, Ali develops ideas similar to George Orwell’s Thought Police and Aldous Huxley’s class system and lab-controlled intelligence while weaving in tropes from M.T. Anderson’s Feed to reveal how thinking threatens those in power and how technologyRead More →

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The writing life is one focus for Francisco X. Stork in his recent novel One Last Chance to Live. It tells the story of Nico Kardos who wishes to be a great writer. However, Stork’s book is also a murder mystery that explores the purpose of life. Seventeen-year-old Nico is finishing his senior year at Stonebridge Charter School in Hunts Point, New York, and his writing teacher Mr. Cortazar has assigned the class the task of writing 500 words per day in their journals. The practice is intended to teach self-knowledge, which “will make you a better person and a better writer” (18), according toRead More →