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The writing life is one focus for Francisco X. Stork in his recent novel One Last Chance to Live. It tells the story of Nico Kardos who wishes to be a great writer. However, Stork’s book is also a murder mystery that explores the purpose of life. Seventeen-year-old Nico is finishing his senior year at Stonebridge Charter School in Hunts Point, New York, and his writing teacher Mr. Cortazar has assigned the class the task of writing 500 words per day in their journals. The practice is intended to teach self-knowledge, which “will make you a better person and a better writer” (18), according 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 →

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 →

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Lamar Giles, author of Ruin Road, takes the idea of selling one’s soul to the devil to a whole new level. His novel further reinforces the moral: Be careful what you wish for, and even suggests that sometimes fear can be a good thing. Playing wide receiver, Kincade (Cade) Webster attends Neeson Preparatory School on an athletic scholarship and dreams of playing football for Ohio State. When he makes it into the pros, he plans to take his best friends out of Jacob’s Court with him: Gabby and Booker Payne. One night, while escaping an altercation on the bus, Cade walks into Skinner’s Pawn andRead More →

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Eloise Parrish is the picture of sunshine and optimism while her sister Oli is “shadows and hesitation, with a hard shell” (3). The duo are avid birders, and their favorite place is the Braided Woods in Connecticut.  Because their parents died when the girls were quite young, they live with their grandmother Ida Gibson who is faced with the challenge of Alzheimer’s. The pair jokingly call themselves The Sisters With Too Much Responsibility. In September, Oli will be a junior, and Eloise would have been one year behind, but she shockingly is found dead in a shallow grave in the Braided Woods. Although the caseRead More →

Cover image for the book Please Be My Star

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Please Be My Star by Victoria Grace Elliot captures the uncertainty of first love and the awkwardness of being a teenager in a beautifully illustrated graphic novel.  Erika’s status as a new student at school is awkward enough without her awareness that she is a ‘creep.’ Erika is aware that her tendency to draw cute boys she doesn’t know and to fantasize about boys that she does makes her more than a little weird. Something that is constantly being told to her by her imaginary inner self who looks like a vampiric alter ego. This alter ego is Erika’s most opinionated critic, verbalizing all ofRead More →

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Set largely in Helena, Alabama, Blood at the Root tells the story of Malik Baron who has pain, anger and magic in his DNA. At age seven on the night his magic manifests, Malik’s mama disappears. Believing his magic is responsible for this loss and that he killed his mama, Malik buries his talent because he can’t always control it and because it reminds him of pain. Inspired by Toni Morrison, Ladarrion Williams sets out to cultivate a new era of Black fantasy with this book, one that celebrates Black boys and their magic, one that shouts, “Blackness is magic!” Given his mother’s disappearance andRead 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 →