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A Izenson lives in a world where transgender youth are an unwelcome anomaly. Although assigned female at birth, fourteen-year-old A is nonbinary. Because his parents think he is gender confused, they force him to attend Save our Sons and Daughters (SOSAD) meetings, where a type of conversion therapy takes place through counseling for “temporary emotional issues.”  A’s parents not only want their daughter back, they want to see legislation passed to prevent estrogen or testosterone treatments that might support youth who wish to transition during puberty and to put an end to “this transgender craze.” At SOSAD, he meets Yarrow, an agender teen who doesn’tRead More →

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Readers of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, or the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries will likely find These Deadly Prophecies by Andrea Tang a thrilling “who dun it.”  Under the influence of Tang’s pen, readers will revel in the plot twists as they follow the various leads. The story begins with seventeen-year-old Tabatha Zeng who works for Sorcerer Julian Solomon. Although Tabatha knows that sorcery is a liar’s game and the product of want, that knowledge doesn’t change her passion for predicting fortunes and fates. “Telling the future required clearing your mind of wants, of desires. [A sorcerer’s] job isn’t to change the future—merely toRead More →

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Erica Waters explores intriguing questions in her psychological thriller, The Restless Dark: What is the lure of unknowable darkness? What draws some of us to such topics as horror and true crime? To explore this idea, she creates a trio of young women: Lucy Wilson, Carolina Cassels, and Maggie Rey. All three characters attend a Killer Quest event set in Cloudkiss Canyon, an oppressive and terrifying locale in North Georgia where the fog can disorient a person and where legends swirl: Is this a place where people come to dispose of unwanted shame or “to toss ill-gotten goods, murder weapons, bodies, and anything else theyRead 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 →