Category: What’s Up in YA

Sage is a volleyball player on track to becoming a college athlete when a devastating health diagnosis leaves her sidelined–for good. Len is a loner photographer who is reeling from a traumatic event. When the two girls connect, a tentative friendship blossoms between them. But when Len’s trauma gets serious and Sage doesn’t seem to take her health seriously, the girls have to look out for one another and discover the power of friendship.

Solomon has agoraphobia and hasn’t left his house in three years. Lisa wants to get into a great college, so she thinks if she can befriend Solomon, cure his agoraphobia, and then write about it in her admissions essay, she’ll be a shoo-in. She drags along her boyfriend Clark to help earn Solomon’s trust, but when all three develop a genuine friendship, exposing the truth about how they all met becomes more important than ever.

Grace’s mom has schizophrenia and she struggled for years before disappearing altogether, afraid she’d hurt her family. Now, Grace and her father are devoted to the lab that is researching a cure. Grace interns with the genome sequencing team, and one day she thinks that she might have found a vital discovery…but is the discovery really significant, or a sign that she’s inherited her mother’s illness?

Malaysian teen Melati Ahmad considers herself fairly normal, except for the djinn that lives inside her, convincing her that her mother will die unless she satisfies him with elaborate rituals. But then a night out to the movies turns deadly when a race riot breaks out in Kuala Lumpur and suddenly it takes all of Mel’s strength and the help of a few surprising strangers if she’s to survive the night and reunite with her mother.

Darius is an Iranian American teen living with depression, and he struggles to fit in and make friends at home, where he’s considered too Iranian. When an illness in his family means he and his parents and sister must travel to Iran unexpectedly, Darius meets his Iranian family for the first time and finds a true friend in his grandparents’ neighbor…but in Iran, his depression isn’t understood, and he is considered “too American.” Darius must find a way to reconcile his multiple identities, and make peace with who he is.

Like she did with His Hideous Heart, Adler has again collected a top notch bunch of YA authors to retell various Shakespeare plays and sonnets! Contributors include Dahlia Adler (reimagining The Merchant of Venice), Kayla Ancrum (The Taming of the Shrew), Lily Anderson (As You Like It), Melissa Bashardoust (A Winter’s Tale), Patrice Caldwell (Hamlet), A. R. Capetta and Cori McCarthy (Much Ado About Nothing), Brittany Cavallaro (Sonnet 147), Joy McCullough (King Lear), Anna-Marie McLemore (Midsummer Night’s Dream), Samantha Mabry (Macbeth), Tochi Onyebuchi (Coriolanus), Mark Oshiro (Twelfth Night), Lindsay Smith (Julius Caesar), Kiersten White (Romeo and Juliet), and Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka (The Tempest).

Fat is not a bad word, and in this diverse and intersectional collection, fat teens get a chance to shine as the exciting and nuanced individuals they are! Contributors include Nafiza Azad, Chris Baron, Sheena Boekweg, Linda Camacho, Kelly deVos, Alex Gino, Claire Kann, amanda lovelace, Hillary Monahan, Cassandra Newbould, Francina Simone, Rebecca Sky, Monique Gray Smith, Renée Watson, Catherine Adel West, and Jennifer Yen.

If you love love, and you love all of the deliciously fun and angsty romantic tropes that come in the romance genre, this anthology is for you! Contributors include Rebecca Barrow, Ashley Herring Blake, Gloria Chao, Mason Deaver, Sara Farizan, Claire Kann, Malinda Lo, Hannah Moskowitz, Natasha Ngan, Rebecca Podos, Lilliam Rivera, Laura Silverman, Amy Spalding, Rebecca Kim Wells, and Julian Winters.

Are you a night owl? Do you love it when darkness envelopes the world, most people are asleep, and it feels like anything can happen? These stories are for you! Contributors include Brandy Colbert, Kathleen Glasgow, Maurene Goo, Tiffany D. Jackson, Amanda Joy, Nina LaCour, Karen M. McManus, Anna Meriano, Marieke Nijkamp, Laura Silverman, Kayla Whaley, Julian Winters, and Francesca Zappia.

The Mexican American experience is diverse, and these stories are more important than ever. This anthology includes short stories, essays, and poetry from a range of contributors, including Francisco X. Stork, Guadalupe Garcia McCall, David Bowles, Rubén Degollado, e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, Diana López, Xavier Garza, Trinidad Gonzales, Alex Temblador, Aida Salazar, Guadalupe Ruiz-Flores, Sylvia Sánchez Garza, Dominic Carrillo, Angela Cervantes, Carolyn Dee Flores, René Saldaña Jr., Justine Narro, Daniel García Ordáz, and Anna Meriano. 

The Latinx diaspora is rich and varied, and definitely can’t be contained by stereotypes. In this anthology, some of the most prominent Latinx writers in kidlit and YA today tell stories that challenge and celebrate Latinx myths and ideas of culture and identity. Contributors include Elizabeth Acevedo, Cristina Arreola, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Naima Coster, Natasha Diaz, Saraciea J. Fennell, Kahlil Haywood, Zakiya Jamal, Janel Martinez, Jasminne Mendez, Meg Medina, Mark Oshiro, Julian Randall, Lilliam Rivera, and Ibi Zoboi.

Former Hey YA cohost Eric Smith is collaborating with Lauren Gibaldi to bring us an exciting collection of short stories all set at a school’s battle of the bands! I love an anthology that shares a setting and overlaps in characters, and this one is sure to rock–pun intended! Contributors include Brittany Cavallaro, Preeti Chhibber, Jay Coles, Katie Cotugno, Lauren Gibaldi, Shaun David Hutchinson, Ashley Poston, Jenny Torres Sanchez, Sarah Nicole Smetana, Eric Smith, Jenn Marie Thorne, Sarvenaz Taghavian, Jasmine Warga, Ashley Woodfolk, and Jeff Zentner, and featuring Motion City Soundtrack’s Justin Courtney Pierre.

Noreen is grieving the loss of her aunt and deep into a post-high school slump when she decides to head to New Delhi with her mom for a gap year. There, she meets Kabir, who introduces her to all of the wonders the city possesses and starts to get her out of her slump…but then a scandal erupts and Noreen must figure out where they stand and what it means to love someone.

When Bea was 19, her parents died in a car accident and her little sister Lo barely survived. Bea joined The Project, and found solace and family within. But she never spoke to Lo again. Now, Lo is 19 and she’s hoping that she can find her sister. The rumors about The Project being a cult have her on edge, but she’d do anything to track down Bea and find out why her sister abandoned her…even if it means walking right into danger herself.

Pablo is working at a bodega, the overnight shift, when Leanna Smart, worldwide celebrity walks in. At first, he’s kind of stunned, but he plays it cool, and they even banter a bit. When she walks away, he thinks that’s that…but it’s just the start of a strange, electric connection between the two of them that can’t be denied. But she’s Leanna Smart, pop goddess, and he’s just a college dropout who doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life–they can’t possibly make it work, can they?

Mila has been alone for a long time now, and now that she’s aged out of the foster care system, she needs a place to go. So she accepts a job at a farm in Northern California, where she spends her days working with foster kids and her weekends at the farmer’s market at the closest place to a home she’s ever found. But she knows that she doesn’t quite belong here yet, and there are ghosts (literal and figurative) haunting her. Mira has to confront her past if she’s to find a home in her present.

This is a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Casque of Amontillado,” and that’s just the beginning of the Poe Easter eggs in this thriller! Tress Montor lost her parents years earlier when they disappeared driving her best friend Felicity Turnado home. Now, Tress’s entire life is the butt of a joke and she’s miserable…so she decides that she’s going to get answers out of Felicity, who’s always maintained that she has no memory of the night Tress’s parents disappeared. Tress decides to do this by kidnapping Felicity during a party in an abandoned house, and bricking her up in a coal chute in order to get her to talk. This is a dual POV novel that moves throughout time, so the dual narrators work really well for this book and the constant back and forth has you reconsidering just how reliable either girl really is. This is a fantastic dark thriller (content warning for drug abuse and animal harm) with a cliffhanger ending that will have you counting down the days to the second book in this duology releases.

Ellie was just a child in a remote community in Norway when her mother dragged her out of bed one night and onto the frozen fjord, whistled at the northern lights, and disappeared. Now, Ellie is a teenager living on Cape Cod with her dad and missing her mom every day. When the northern lights dip low enough that she can see them, she whistles at them…and they return her mother, but she’s no longer the same. I thought Pressley did such a great job of capturing Ellie’s voice and the magical interludes where readers get the fairy tale background of how and why Ellie’s mom disappeared. This is a beautiful fabulist tale!

Daunis is a biracial eighteen-year-old young woman living in Sault Ste. Marie, MI where she feels torn between her life in town, where her mother’s white family has many connections, and life on the nearby Sugar Island, where her Ojibway father is from. When she witnesses a murder, she’s drawn into an investigation that will force her to confront hard truths about her community and herself. I remember seeing a casting call for a Native/Indigenous voice actor for this audiobook, and the publisher picked Isabella Star LaBland, Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota stage and screen actor. This may be her first audiobook credit, but she did a wonderful job. The emotional depth she brought to this book is just beautiful, and I think this was one of the best audiobooks I’ve listened to all year.

Ada has just caught her boyfriend cheating on her (after they were about to have sex for the first time, no less!) when she’s whisked away on a family vacation to Hawaii. Only, things aren’t quite right. Her step-dad doesn’t come, and her workaholic mom seems more relaxed. Then, Ada walks in on her mom having sex with someone who definitely isn’t her step-dad, turning her vacation in paradise into a complicated mess of secrets, confusion, and misplaced feelings. Ada decides that if everyone else is having sex, she might as well find a fling, too…but things don’t always go perfectly to plan. I admit, when I first started listening my first reaction was that Osmanski sounded a touch too old to be a teen, but the further in I got I was completely hooked and convinced! This is an excellent book about family drama and the struggles that come with communicating with those you love.

When Hwani and her younger sister Maewol were children, they got lost in the woods. When they were found, it was just a stone’s throw away from the body of a murdered woman. Hwani remembers nothing about her time in the forest and shortly after she and Maewol are separated…but then years later, thirteen girls go missing in the same forest. The sisters’ father, a detective, goes to investigate but when he also goes missing, Hwani is forced to return to the place she can’t remember and reconcile with Maewol in order to discover the truth. I was totally immersed into this historical tale, and Kim’s narration definitely capture the unease and the high stakes of this mystery, but also the emotional tension between the two sisters! Bonus: Hur’s first novel The Silence of Bones is also great on audio!