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Written by Kate Marchant and illustrated by CJ Joaquin, Float is a humorous graphic novel about teen drama. Float’s protagonist is Waverly Lyons, who lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, but is visiting her Aunt Rachel in Florida. According to Waverly, Aunt Rachel is a “weird, colorful, not super put together . . . but charming” artist (15). Waverly, who considers herself “bad at most things,” describes herself as “the anxious offspring of two brilliant scientists who could never agree on anything” (13). Eventually, her parents divorce, and for the past ten years, Waverly has felt like deadweight being tossed between the two. Florida might just provideRead More →

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Written in verse, Under the Neon Lights is Arriel Vinson’s debut young adult novel. Set in a suburb of Indianapolis, the story follows Jaelyn Coleman, her bestie Noelle, and a new boy in town: Trey. Central to the plot is the WestSide Roll skating rink, a place to “shake sorrows loose.” But as the neighborhood changes and Mr. Mike ages, he decides to retire and sell the rink. Although sad about giving up “his baby, a place to get the community together, get young folk off the street [and] old folks out [of] a funk” (71), Mr. Mike accepts that change is inevitable. Sixteen-year-old JaelynRead More →

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The Education of Kia Greer by Alanna Bennett is a story of agency and identity. Although some readers will not be able to relate to Kia’s privilege, fame, and socioeconomic status, they will still be able to relate to the issues of power, pressure, desire for belonging, and search for identity that Kia endures. Bennett’s novel is also a love story, but under the influence of Bennett’s pen, we realize that love isn’t always enough. Although the people we encounter throughout life can transform us, as well as encourage and support us, ultimately, we have to dive headfirst into the life that’s meant for usRead 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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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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An experienced mental health therapist and author, Josh Silver asks some important questions with his debut novel HappyHead. First, he wonders, whether happiness is an illusion or a notion prescribed to us by others. Ultimately, he suggests that we individually define happiness and need to resist many of the systems in place that manipulate our feelings about happiness. A dystopian thriller set in Scotland, HappyHead explores the potential for mental health to have a shady side if those designing therapy wish to use behavior modification to engineer a more nearly perfect society. While not an Aldous Huxley model, Silver does ponder the power that theRead More →

Cover for book Heir

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Fans of Sabaa Tahir’s Ember in the Ashes series will love this spinoff duology. Full of all the elements which Tahir’s fans are used to (stunning prose, enthralling mythology, and deeply relatable characters) this book easily grabs the readers’ attention and holds on to it. Set 20 years after the conclusion of the Ember series, this novel follows Quil (the baby Ember fans saw born in that quartet) now as a grown man ready to take the throne of the Martial Empire. A series of events force Quil and his best friends Arelia and Sufiyan (another descendant of characters from the last series) to travelRead More →

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Seventeen-year-old Sal Amani lives in a haunted house, and everyone at Holden High knows it. However, Sal is keeping secrets, and his sister Asha—who is a talented writer with dreams of attending university and becoming a journalist—has put her life on hold while their mother deals with the loss of her husband. When the house keeps Sal awake, he runs. Sal’s good friend Dirk Madden tries to help, but he’s worried about social capital. Then, there’s Elsie, who has wrongly been labelled a slut.  When Pax Delaney moves to town, he claims he’s good with ghosts. Although weird and unbalanced is Pax’s normal, Sal isRead More →