Hey, YA Readers!
It’s Thursday, so you know what that means. Coming fresh to your inbox are your YA paperback releases and your YA book news. Onward we go!
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Bookish Goods
Public Library Lover Tote Bag by angiepea
Did you know February is Library Lovers Month? Now you do, and you can brag about your love for your local library with this tote bag that doubles as a way for you to carry your latest library loot. $21+.
New Releases
Publishing season kicked up earlier this year, it seems, and the releases will be coming faster and more furious over the next two or three months. That’s great news and terrible news, of course—great for more books, terrible for ever catching up.
Find below two of the YA paperback books that hit shelves this week. You can catch the entire list of new paperback releases over here.
10 Hours to Go by Keely Parrack
Wildfires are raging in Oregon, and Lily’s train home to California was canceled. Fortunately—or not—for her, Lily’s ex-best friend Natasha is driving through and offers her a ride. Lily’s desperate and agrees, not knowing that Elke Aziz is also along for the ride.
Elke is the girl Lily got expelled from school several years ago.
It is not a pleasant car ride, but things go from bad to worse when Natasha decides to get off the main road home when smoke starts to grow. That detour seemed okay, until it suddenly Was Not Okay. The three are now trapped in the woods, and Lily’s survival now literally depends on two people who may not especially like her.
A Thousand Steps Into Night by Traci Chee
Miuko is an innkeeper in a world where monsters, gods, and humans all coexist—she, though, is just a normal, average girl.
But then Miuko is cursed. That curse is slowly turning her into the kind of demon whose touch can kill. She needs to rid herself of the curse and that’s not going to be easy.
Despite the challenges, this curse is showing Miuko a type of freedom and magic she could never have imagined before.
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
YA Book News
- Turtles All The Way Down by John Green has been in development for potential adaptation for years, and now there’s an update: it’ll be streaming on MAX sometime this year.
- Speaking of long-overdue updates on YA adaptation projects: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter is in development with America Ferrera attached as director.
- And in more overdue news on YA adaptations, we should get Uglies on Netflix this year.
- Rise: A Feminist Book Project has released the best feminist books for all ages of young people from 2023.
- Hook’s Daughter: The Pirate Princess Chronicles by R. V. Bowman, which is the first book in a trilogy that debuted in 2018, is getting a live-action television adaptation.
- Simon Teen has been revealing their fall YA book covers this week.
- The Rainbow Book List is here, packed with some of the best LGBTQ+ books for teens (and middle graders and children) from 2023.
- Kekla Magoon is always a solid read, whatever category she writes in, and this interview about her ability to write so widely is worth a read, too.
Thanks, as always, for hanging out. We’ll see you again on Saturday with your YA book deals.
Until then, happy reading!
–Kelly Jensen, currently reading the YA lesbian classic Annie On My Mind by Nancy Garden.