New YA: September 1-6.
New hardbacks:
The Opposite of Love, by Sarah Lynn Scheerger
Stronger Than You Know, by Jolene Perry:
It’s an issue book, but it’s not an Issue Book. It follows Joy’s progress, chronicles her baby steps forward and her big steps back. We watch her learn to trust people, to interact with her peers, to not flinch every time a man enters the room, to find her voice. While the entire arc of the book focuses on her journey—the nitty-gritty of her panic attacks and nightmares, details about her therapy, etc.—at no time do the issues overshadow the characters.
The Secret Sky: A Novel of Forbidden Love in Afghanistan, by Atia Abawi:
She has so many conflicting emotions and thoughts—love for her family, for the natural beauty of her home; frustration with her lack of choice and lack of agency, she’s angered and betrayed by her father’s hypocrisy and her mother’s viciousness; she has a true and abiding belief in God, but some serious skepticism about whether or not it’s really His will that other people are carrying out—she’s believable, she’s easy to empathize with, and above all, while she chafes at the restrictions placed upon her, it never feels like Fatima is a stand-in for Western reader: She is who she is, a product of her situation and her environment, a Hazara girl who happens to love a Pashtun boy.
Girl Defective, by Simmone Howell:
As Sky puts it in the prologue, Girl Defective is “the story of a wild girl and a ghost girl; a boy who knew nothing and a boy who thought he knew everything. And it’s about life and death and grief and romance. All the good stuff.” That’s a pretty gutsy statement for someone to make about her own story, but Sky (through Howell) delivers the goods. Since finishing it, I’ve been clutching my ARC to my chest, counting the minutes until I can buy a copy of the hardcover.
Feuds: A Novel (The Feuds Series), by Avery Hastings
The Boy I Love, by Nina de Gramont
Beetle Boy, by Margaret Willey
A Different Me, by Deborah Blumenthal
Starry Night, by Isabel Gillies
Destined for Doon (A Doon Novel), by Carey Corp and Lorie Langdon
Shattered (Scorched series), by Mari Mancusi
Don't Touch, by Rachel M. Wilson
Sealed with a Lie, by Kat Carlton
The Winter People (Entangled Teen), by Rebekah L. Purdy
Hider, Seeker, Secret Keeper, by Elizabeth Kiem
Trial by Fire (The Worldwalker Trilogy), by Josephine Angelini
The Jewel (Jewel Series), by Amy Ewing
100 Sideways Miles, by Andrew Smith
A New Darkness, by Joseph Delaney
Zac and Mia, by A. J. Betts
Anatomy of a Misfit, by by Andrea Portes
Always a Catch, by Peter Richmond
New paperbacks (that I've read):
Crown of Midnight (Throne of Glass), by Sarah J. Maas:
Celaena is a combination of sultry, tough-girl badass and homebody bookworm, chocolate-loving, shopping addicted borderline-hoarder. If you can suspend your disbelief about her tendency to go into—and win—major fights after not eating for a week, she's pretty fun. (Also—SPOILER much of the side-eye-inducing physical stuff is explained in this installment. END SPOILER)
Wonderland, by Joanna Nadin:
Due to family complications, 16-year-old Jude has resigned herself to watching her dreams pass on out of sight. Until, that is, her dynamic childhood friend Stella reappears. But is Stella really trustworthy? Whose interests does she really have at heart? Nadin’s prose is spare, distinct and tighter than tight. Although I had the plot twist figured out by literally the second page, that didn’t affect the tension or my curiosity about how the story would unfold. Not to be missed, and Nadin is definitely an author to watch.
Previously: