Witchy Vibes, New Releases, and More YA Book Talk: October 3, 2022

This takes place nearly 60 years after Lo’s award-winning Last Night at the Telegraph Club (and shows a little of what happened with the characters after the book finished). This one is still set in California, but this time we’re following Aria Tang West, who gets banished from Martha’s Vineyard to California by her parents. She’s made to stay with her artist grandmother, and is surprised that what she thought would be a boring summer is made anything but by her grandmother’s gardener Steph Nichols. Steph has her questioning her identity and introduces her to a whole new world full of new experiences and community.

This is the prequel to the mega popular They Both Die at the End. In it, we follow two new strangers who both sign up for Death-Cast. Even though there is still some doubt concerning whether this thing called “Death-Cast” can really predict when someone will die, Orion Pagan and Valentino Price both sign up, anyway. Orion has a heart condition and just wants to know when his final day will be, while Valentino became more cautious because of a near fatal accident his twin sister was in. The two of them meet in Times Square and immediately click, but then the first End Day calls go out and one of them is told they will die but the other isn’t. Neither of them knows what will really happen in the end, but they both know they want to spend whatever remaining time together.