Hey, YA Readers!
I hope your spring is settling in well and you’re feeling the promise of longer days, warmer weather, and a certain energy in the air. I know I am and it is definitely making me excited to read more. My TBR is overflowing, my library holds list is growing, and I’m itching to take advantage of the light at night while I read.
But less about me. What you’re here for is all things YA books, and it’s time to deliver.
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Bookish Goods
Colorful Bookshelf Mug by FlyPaperProducts
If you’re in the market for a new bookish mug to sip your tea or coffee, this one is fun. It’s a set of bookshelves filled with colorful books about cats, travel, poetry, and more. $17 for 11 ounces.
New Releases
It is a bit of a weird week in new release world. There are only a small number of hardcover YA books hitting shelves, though, on Thursday, you’ll read about how there are so many paperbacks hitting shelves this week. Find below two of this week’s new hardcovers—one is nonfiction, and one is fiction, but both have a common word in the title—and know you can peruse the whole list over here.
The mega roundups of spring YA books in hardcover, paperback, and in comic format will begin to hit the site in April. Y’all, it’s going to be an amazing season of reading, I tell you what!
Dead Girls Walking by Sami Ellis
Temple Baker’s father is an infamous serial killer. People love to talk about his crimes on podcasts, in the media, wherever talk of such things keeps a captive audience. But one thing Temple never believed was that her father killed her mother. That is, until he confesses to killing his wife and Temple’s mother on death row.
Temple won’t rest until she finds the body, though. So when she returns to the farm where she once lived and where her father committed many of his crimes, she’s surprised to find it transformed into a camp for horror-loving queer teens.
Obviously, Temple has to fit in. So she cosplays a counselor, and while she’s feeling a way about fitting in with the girls who are like her, their obsession with true crime is off-putting to her. Then one of those girls ends up dead, and Temple worries that someone is playing a game of imitating her father.
Will she find the murderer? More, will she find the truth about who killed her mother?
Pieces of a Girl by Stephanie Kuehnert
Told through illustration, journal entries, and pages of diaries and zines, this is Kuehnert’s raw, honest, and powerful memoir about growing up and struggling with addiction. It’s also the story of surviving an abusive relationship when it seemed no one else was there for her.
For a more comprehensive list of new releases, check out our New Books newsletter.
Title Twins
There are a lot of things that are fun accidents or purposeful commonalities in the world of books. For example, think about all of those YA book titles that share their names with a song title. This year—and this will be for a future post—the number “Six” is showing up in a ton of book titles.
As I was putting together the spring YA roundup, I started to see a couple of title twins for books. But they’re not title twins in the way you might be thinking. Two YA books publishing do not have the same title this season. Rather, a YA book and an adult book publishing near the same time have the same name.
Let’s look at a couple of fun title twins for your radar. One book will be YA, and one will be adult.
We Shall Be Monsters
Two books this year hitting shelves share the title We Shall Be Monsters, which is the duo that inspired looking at this phenomenon.
We Shall Be Monsters by Tara Sim (June 25)
Starting with our YA book, Kajal is putting her sister’s soul up for bid in order to bring her back to life—she knows it’s not good or right and that she should let Lasya rest. She can’t, though. Kajal cannot live without her.
Kajal is ready for the resurrection. But it isn’t what she expected at all. Lasya’s soul resurrects as a murderous spirit, and now, Kajal is being given a death sentence for trying to bring her sister back to life.
This is part Indian mythology and part Frankenstein and sounds fabulous. The cover is also just perfect.
We Shall Be Monsters by Alyssa Wees (November 12)
This adult novel will definitely have YA appeal. It follows Gemma Cassata, who lives with her mother in an antiques shop in Michigan. The shop is near mysterious woods into which Gemma is forbidden for ever stepping. But when you know there is a portal into fairyland, how could she resist the temptation?
Gemma’s mom is not mad about her daughter’s defiance. Indeed, Virginia herself had defied her mother and visited the woods. But the decision to do that was not one she could forget: her true love was cursed just before Gemma’s birth.
Now, Virginia will go to the ends of the world to protect Gemma from such a similar fate. It might even mean wiping every memory Gemma’s ever made to keep her safe.
Note the gorgeous cover here, too. Full disclosure: Alyssa is a local writer pal to me, and I am so excited for this book.
The Cartographers
The Cartographers by Amy Zhang
Released in paperback in January, this is our YA book for this title twin.
Ocean had a difficult senior year of high school and put tremendous pressure on herself to be everything she could. So she sees getting into a prestigious school in New York for college as a way out. But turns out, it’s not. Ocean’s decided to drop out of school and live off her savings in the city. She’s just choosing not to tell her mother about the decision.
Ocean moves into an apartment and then starts a tutoring job. Soon enough, she meets Constantine Brave, and they begin an intense, close relationship.
But when Ocean goes home for Thanksgiving, her entire world threatens to explore.
The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd
Art, science, magic, and mystery all collide in this adult novel about Nell Young, who is obsessed with cartography. She got the passion from her father, who taught her everything she knew.
But Nell and her father have no relationship. He fired her and harmed her reputation, creating a huge rift between them.
Then Nell’s dad is found dead in his New York Public Library office—with the gas station map in his desk that caused their falling out—and she’s bound and determined to figure out what happened.
That map, it turns out, is extremely rare. Is it possible that Nell’s father was killed by an obsessive collector?
As always, thanks for hanging out. We’ll see you later this week with your YA paperback release news and your YA book news.
Until then, happy reading!
–Kelly Jensen