Hey YA Readers!
Let’s kick off another new week with a look at some new YA hardcovers hitting shelves, as well as two books tackling environmental activism.
Bookish Goods
Do you have a favorite dinosaur? I sure do, and I would not only choose that dinosaur reader enamel pin, but I’d spring for this entire set. $4 each.
New Releases
The full roundup of new YA books hitting shelves this summer (the non-paperback list!) will be up later this week. In the mean time, here are 2 for your radar right now.
How Maya Got Fierce by Sona Charaipotra
Want a story based on a series of lies? This is it.
Maya is the daughter of garlic farmers in small town California. Her life’s trajectory includes finishing up school, inheriting the business, earning an MBA, and marrying a nice Sikh boy. It’s a huge deal when she lands a spot in a summer camp for future farmers in New Jersey. But……then she gets kicked out. She can’t let her parents find out, and now she owes the camp a lot of money. It makes perfect sense she’d take an assistant job at a magazine in New York stealth-like.
The magazine, though, thinks she’s in her 20s, and now they can’t find out her truth, and neither can her parents. Oops.
Wake The Bones by Elizabeth Kilcoyne
This newsletter’s theme is small towns (and figures on covers with their arms above their heads).
After dropping out of college, Laurel heads back to her family’s farm and hopes to just resume work as a tobacco hand and a taxidermist. Too bad a devil has shown up from her past and threatens to court her in the same way he did her mother before she died.
This is a stand alone horror about family secrets and doomed love.
For a more comprehensive list, check out our New Books newsletter.
Riot Recommendations
Let’s highlight two books exploring environmental justice, told in two very different communities.
Don’t Call Me A Hurricane by Ellen Hagan
Five years ago, a hurricane completely ravaged the island Eliza and her family call home. Now, new developers have emerged, eager to create an island paradise for vacationers. Eliza and her friends, though, won’t stand for it — especially as a development threatens to destroy one of their treasured Reserves.
There is a romance here, and it’s with a boy who ultimately has a bigger role than love interest in Eliza’s story. Told in verse, this one is about fighting for what’s right while also untangling trauma and grief. If you liked the gentrification elements of Samantha Mabry’s A Fierce and Subtle Poison, pick this one up.
Running by Natalia Sylvester
Mari doesn’t mean to start a revolution. Especially with her father running for President. But she knows how important it is to stand up for what you believe, and the fact her best friend is being impacted by water pollution created by a local real estate developer’s new project means she knows she needs to act now. Will it impact her father? Especially as he has a relationship with that developer and isn’t known for his environmental policies? Yes, but she hopes it’ll help him do the right thing.
This book features no romance at all, as well as a politically-wary teen who finds herself beginning a wide-spread protest to bring attention to environmental destruction. Her work runs parallel to her father’s campaign, and her Cuban heritage remains at the center of her story.
Mari isn’t a politically-active teen at the start, and it’s through better understanding someone who is vocal and active that she sees where and why her activism and passion matters, too.
Thanks for hanging out — I appreciate you being here, and I’ll see you again on Thursday.
Until then, happy reading!
— Kelly Jensen, @veronikellymars on Twitter.