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Shea Ernshaw pursues the fairly typical topic of love in her recent novel The Beautiful Maddening, but she does so with an unusual approach. To ask her questions about the strange and beautiful paradox of love, she creates the Goode family. Odd and unordinary, the Goodes are best avoided since they can supposedly bewitch someone into loving them with their magical tulips, which are “responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened in the [Goode] family” (26). Seventeen-year-old Archer is self-assured and lives loudly. His twin sister Lark prefers the shade of invisibility. A talented sketch artist who also believes that “music drowns outRead More →

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Mikki Daughtry explores a philosophical question in her novel Time After Time. As she weaves two stories: that of Elizabeth Post and Patricia Murphy from 1925 and that of Libby Monroe and Tish O’Connell in the present, she asks: Is every life a cycle with no real end, where “time after time,” we come back reincarnated to try again, “to grow, evolve, get new chances . . . to do things better. To do things right” (246)? Daughtry takes readers on her wondering spree, which begins in the past but threads into the present. A Victorian style house on Mulberry Lane is the lynch pinRead 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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Whether you work your fingers to the bone operating a quern, starve yourself until you are skin and bones, or turn to cannibalism and gnaw meat to the bone when the tuckahoe is gone, Alena Bruzas’ book To the Bone captures all of these idioms. Writing in the historical fiction genre, Bruzas retells the harrowing times of 1609-1610 at James Fort when the colonists find themselves suffering. To tell her tale, Bruzas features two teens: Jane Eddowes and Ellis Folk. Jane—full of spark, vitality, wit, and defiance—loves to draw and to pursue adventure. Ellis finds herself drawn to Jane. Because she lost her parents—her motherRead More →

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With her writing and illustrating for the graphic novel The Deep Dark, Molly Knox Ostertag takes readers on a journey into the psychology of dark thoughts and their potential to suck the life from us. Trying to survive senior year, Magdalena Herrera (aka Mags) is stuck in a small Southern California town under a mountain of responsibilities that include coursework, a part-time job, caring for her mostly bed-ridden abuela, and struggling with her gender and sexual identities. When her transgender childhood friend Nessa returns from college, Mags has a kindred spirit to help support her, and together they must make the choice to thrive orRead More →

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Ruby Hale, who avoids confrontation and spiders, hopes to be a travel influencer. Given that interest, she films, edits, and posts content to her YouTube Show, Ruby’s Hidden Gems. Seeing the feats other cultures have achieved and the architecture that they’ve built all speak to Ruby’s soul. So, when her French class schedules a trip to France, Ruby is beyond excited. She wants to soak in as much of the world as she can in order to earn her way to exploring more of it. Once Ruby reaches Paris, her adrenaline junkie friend Valerie Moreau encounters a young man named Julien who offers a tourRead More →

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Readers of Tracy Wolff and Ava Reid will likely appreciate Jennifer Donnelly’s fascinating twist on a fairy tale, Beastly Beauty.  In her version, Donnelly flips the script by creating a handsome man and a beast of a woman. Thrust together by fate or magic, these two young people have complicated pasts, so they carry heavy emotional pain. In a foreword, Donnelly tells readers that her story “isn’t for the heroes, shining knights, and princesses but for the screw-ups, for those who never get it right. The ones who say too much, or not enough. . . . It’s a story of hardship. And heart. AndRead More →

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Enrolled at Riverstone High School (RHS) in Ohio, Jasmine and Jackson Ghasnavi are the mixed race (half White, half Iranian) children of doctors. Jasmine is a senior who loves pottery, and Jackson’s passion is theatre. When their parents divorce, Jackson develops abandonment issues and Jasmine struggles to find a lasting relationship. Jackson helps his sister cope with her breakups by constructing breakup lists. At the recommendation of his therapist, Jackson also uses lists to cope with his own anxiety. These lists and teen relationship drama form the plot for Adib Khorram’s novel The Breakup Lists. As a former “theatre kid” himself, Khorram infuses his novelRead More →

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With By Any Other Name, Erin Cotter writes a historical fiction novel about William Shakespeare’s London, sharing ample allusions to his work and plays. The story opens in 1593 London at the Rose Theater, where young Will Hughes is aging out of the theater because his voice is changing and he will no longer be able to play the female parts. To further complicate his life, the plague is making its way through the city, and theaters will close until it passes. As a result, his patron, Christopher Marlowe (Kit) encourages him to find another home. Home. The word makes Will’s breath catch. At eightRead More →