Author: Kelly Jensen

Carpenter and Callen have pulled together a wide array of YA writers, all of whom are sharing fictional stories of people living with mental health challenges. The stories cross genres and experiences, offering everything from a vampire with social anxiety to a teen girl coming to understand her challenges with PMDD. There’s hard stuff here, but there’s also plenty of hope for those who will relate to these experiences.

Shelbi is starting her senior year of high school at a new place in Georgia, Windward Academy. She isn’t really interested in making a lot of friends since she doesn’t plan to be there long and because of her history. She’d rather just…forget about what brought her to this place. But the night the story begins, she gets a text from a wrong number, and while she engages with the texter and learns they’ve been drinking at a party, Shelbi warns them not to drive home.

So when Shelbi is being driven home and goes past a car which has crashed, she begins to think about the texter. And, as we’ll learn, she goes back to the scene of the accident, tying her to the person who was involved in a life-changing way.

Andy Criddle, who is dealing with a host of changes in his family, is drinking again. After his little sister’s death — one he blames himself for — and the loss of his grandfather shortly before, he’s dealing with tremendous grief. Oh, and his mom is running for a political role, wherein she’s pretending to be the biggest right-wing politician out there, on a pro-family, anti-abortion platform. One which she is a hypocrite for advocating, for reasons that will become clear as the story unfolds. 

Soon Shelbi and Andy are connected…and connecting. They’ve been texting each other, mysterious to one another no more. But Shelbi, who has become privy to Andy’s struggle with alcohol, thanks to her learning he was the person behind the accident she saw, is scared to open up to him. To tell him that she, too, struggles with her mental health. That it was her mental health that led her to leaving her life in California for one here in Georgia. When she finally feels ready to tell him, she does so with a list of rules that outline what he can — and cannot — expect from a friendship with her. One of those rules? They cannot fall in love. At all.

This is a story of two very challenged teens who are doing their best to move through their respective days. Both Shelbi and Andy are teens of color, and both struggle with mental illnesses too often underrepresented by people like them in pop culture. Shelbi has bipolar disorder and Andy struggles with substance use. Though both know they could make one another’s issues worse, they also know that when they’re together, they click in untold ways. It is, as Shelbi would describe, something as magical and mysterious as the cosmos. So, too, is their inevitable falling for one another romantically. 

Valerie Chu is a quiet, studious girl, who is obedient to her mother and her father, as well as a dedicated and loyal friend to Jordan, her bestie. The other thing Valerie is — and the thing she is extremely proud of — is thin. Since her earliest recollections, being thin has been prized by her mother, and her mother has monitored her food intake. The book begins with a scene from a birthday party in her youth where Valerie was allowed to blow out the candles on her cake, but she was not allowed to eat a piece herself. The story flashes forward to high school, and while Valerie does eat socially, she follows that up by purging in the bathroom immediately after. Her head is a running calculator on calories. While it’s clear she has a problem, it’s even clearer that her struggles emerged thanks to the toxic culture her mother developed at home.

Now, Valerie is going on a class trip to Paris. She’s thrilled to be there with her best friend Jordan and her crush, Allan. Val tells herself that she’s going to ignore the voices in her head and will instead enjoy the food on the trip. But early in the trip, not only does she give into the voices, but she gets news that utterly rattles her world. Within hours, she’s on a plane back to her home. The food obsession becomes even harder to manage. 

When everyone from school returns back home, Jordan comes to see Val and Val, wrestling with both her eating disorder and grief, learns Jordan and Allan shared a kiss. She’s seething, thinking that Jordan stole her crush — even though Val never once told Jordan about the crush. In her rage and grief, Val tells Jordan she cannot believe someone like her could ever get a boy to pay attention to her.

Jordan, Val’s best friend, is fat. And now, Val has given Jordan one of the cruelest comments imaginable. 

This book is VERY hard to read, but it is a powerful and moving portrayal of bulimia, grief, and the unique pressures that can come from immigrant parents onto their children. The art in this comic is outstanding, with beautiful color work from Lynette Wong in shades of pastel pink, purple, and green.

Meadowlark, Long Island is a place of wealth, luxury, and sophistication. It’s the home of both Chase and Lia, best friends for life, despite being about as different in personality as can be. Chase overachieves and has future CEO all over her. She’s also extremely depressed. Lia is a free spirit, a wanderer, and Chase’s ex-girlfriend. When Lia disappears, Chase is in the spotlight and Chase is determined to find out what happened.

This is a twisty psychological thriller and explores the realities of grief, trauma, and depression.

Love a timeloop story, a la Groundhog Day? You know I do if you’ve been here a minute. Couch delivers that with a mental health focus in his latest.

Clark keeps waking up and reliving the same Monday. This has happened 309 times…but on day 310, suddenly, there is a new boy in his math class. Things are different.

Given this change, Clark decides he’s going to follow Beau on an adventure through their city of Chicago. If he’s not going to have a different day tomorrow, why wouldn’t he try?

What Clark does not account for is starting to fall for the new guy.

This is a book that follows Clark and his experiences of loneliness and what happens when that’s (temporarily?) interrupted.

Whimsy is back in inpatient care after an attempted suicide. This time, she meets Faery, a boy who, too, is in treatment. She is instantly drawn to him for reasons she can’t quite put her finger on. So when she’s released and learns that Faery and his family have moved to her town and they’ll be attending school together, she’s glad to have someone who “gets” her.

What the two of them share, though, beyond their mental challenges is a fear of the Forest near town. But when they enter and realize there is no way out but through, they encounter a host of Sorrows, as well as characters from global fairy and folk tales, who give them guidance on the path toward understanding Sorrow and trauma. 

This is a complex and magical fantasy in verse about mental illness and trauma. McBride offers a rich and challenging world, while trusting readers to understand that the magic will all make sense.

One of my favorite illustrators, Gemma Correll — who did work in my book, including the cover — illustrates this nonfiction resource for teens about mental health. The book is meant to help offer insight into some of the most common mental health challenges, along with basic self-assessments, to help teens figure out where and how to get help.

A screwball comedy set at a queer summer camp, Rosen’s books follows Jewish Randy Kapplehoff as he prepares for another fun summer. He’s eager to reinvent himself this year, though, in order to catch the attention of the cute boy who only seems to be into straight-acting guys. So what happens when Randy — now Del — starts to get that guy’s attention? How much of changing himself is worth it for love? Is it worth it at all?

Sixteen-year-old Nevaeh Levitz has always lived in an affluent NYC suburb and as such, has never had to exactly confront her heritage as a biracial Jewish girl. But once her parents split and she’s moving with her mother to Harlem, things change. Suddenly, as a white passing girl, she’s being told by her cousins she doesn’t understand what they experience on a daily basis when it comes to prejudice and discrimination.

Rather than fight injustice with them, though, Nevaeh stays quiet. That is, until she discovers a secret from her mom’s past and finds herself falling in love. Suddenly, the silence she’s selected is no longer an option and she has to come face-to-face with who she is and what that means in the world.

A Sapphic Jewish romance at Christmas? Yes, please!

Shari runs into May with her Subaru, and that was not the plan. Shari’s got a month long internship she’s excited about but in addition to dealing with the accident, she’s also struggling to get over the big breakup she just experienced.

Then Shari’s taken up a dog walking gig. And guess who is there? It’s May. Now the two of them are thrown together again, and it might upend everything. Especially as they’re snowed in together on Christmas Eve…

What better way to dig into a ton of new-to-you and beloved-to-you voices than to pick up an anthology? This collection features a wide range of Jewish teens navigating everything from summer camp to pranks at a Hanukkah party and more. It includes Jewish characters of diverse backgrounds, including those who are queer and disabled.

Contributors include Adi Alsaid, Nova Ren Suma, David Levithan, and more.

An incredible story about mental illness and the tolls it can take on a family — even one that’s close and open with one another. Colbert renders Lion(el) through both his highs and his lows of bipolar, and she creates a likable-but-flawed character in his sister Suzette (Little). Little is a bisexual Jewish black girl, struggling with how much of herself to show in her boarding school in Massachusetts, but this summer back in California has taught her the importance of being true to herself in every capacity and owning it, rather than hiding it.

Quinn Berkowitz’s family are wedding planners and and Tarek Mansour’s are caterers. They’ve been together their whole loves as their parents work various weddings, and last year, Quinn finally admitted her feelings for Tarek in a rambling email. He left for college without a response.

Now it’s summer again and Quinn worries what it’s going to be like when they see each other again. It’s…not great! They’re fighting and bickering, and now Quinn can see nothing but Tarek’s faults.

So why does she still have such feelings for him? How can she break down his silence and get to the heart of how he feels?

One of my favorite reads this year is Goo’s story of time travel and family.

Priscilla is a first generation Korean American, and she expects her daughter Sam to follow in her footsteps. But Sam isn’t interested in cheerleading or becoming homecoming queen. They have a big blowup about this and Sam needs to get away from her mom ASAP.

What Sam did not anticipate was calling for a ride share that turned out to be a car that would send her back to when her mom was in high school. Now Sam is right alongside her mom as she navigates being a Korean American teen in the ’90s.

This is a funny and heartening story of the immigrant experience, both that of first and second generation immigrants, and it savvily marries with that the ways in which the ’90s and 2020s were very different experiences for Korean Americans…and the ways in which they weren’t.

There is a sweet love story, an incredible grandmother character, and a powerful mother-daughter arc. Watching Sam navigate having one charge left on her phone in the ’90s and needing to keep it a secret because no one would know what the heck a cell phone was was…well, it made me feel old because I was in high school at the end of the ’90s (but it’s funny, for sure!).

This one is pitched as To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before meets Jane Austen, so prepare for a delightful romcom.

Zahra Khan might be from a line of Bangladeshi royalty but that means nothing, really, in Patterson, New Jersey. She’s going to spend the summer working. Her mom, however, thinks that there is something else Zahra needs to work on this summer: finding a suitable match.

Where her parents think Harun is the one, immediately Zahra knows he’s not it. She’s got her eyes on a guy at her work named Nayim. So when Zahra learns that Harun is also not interested in their match, she breathes a sigh of relief…and hatches a new plan that involves fake dating Harun (with his full consent) in order to develop a real relationship with Nayim.

Of course, it won’t be that easy.

Looking for an intergenerational story? You’ll love this one about three generations of Iranian boys that has comps to Last Night at the Telegraph Club and Darius the Great Is Not Okay.

In 2019, Moud lives in Los Angeles with his father, who is quite distant. Moud is openly queer. When he and his dad Saeed get a phone call that his grandfather — his father’s dad — is dying, he’ll soon be on a flight to Tehran, where they’ll be faced with a whole box of family stories and secrets.

In 1978, Saeed has a bright future as an engineer ahead of himself. The problem is Tehran; he’s gotten involved in a budding revolution, and his parents worry that involvement is going to cost him that future. They send him to America and now, he’s living with an American grandmother he’s never met before, let alone knew existed at all.

In 1939, Bobby lands a huge MGM studio contract, thanks to a precise and calculating stage mother. But Hollywood isn’t all glitz and glamor, not by a long shot.

What happens when someone you look up to lets you down by declaring people like you are less than human? That’s a big part of this story, which follows a queer teen named Bobby who wants nothing more than to graduate high school safely.

Bobby’s school is notoriously violent, and he knows that being openly queer would make him the perfect target. This is made more true by the fact is Filipino community does not easily accept people like him. But when he’s outed without permission, Bobby realizes being quiet and unprepared is no longer an option. He turns to take up boxing in order to prepare himself were he to be in a fight.

Bobby looks up to champion Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao. Pacquiao is his inspiration in all ways: he helps Bobby keep going when things get too hard. But then Pacquiao publicly declares that he does not support queer people, leaving Bobby wounded beyond words.

So where does he turn now?

Imogen is a perfect capital-A Ally, and she is 100% straight. This is true even though she knows so many queer people and works to keep as active in LGBTQ+ activities and events as possible.

Will Imogen ever wake up to the fact that, um, her feelings for Tessa are not exactly straight? Perhaps a tiny lie told by a queer friend about her and Imogen’s past relationship sets the entire story — and what Imogen has always believed of herself — on fire.

I’m so ready for more books where queer characters come to understand their sexuality and recognize that indeed, sexuality is a fluid spectrum and not a rigid binary.

Firekeeper’s Daughter was a major success, so it is no doubt Boulley’s sophomore effort is super anticipated.

Perry knows who she is: she’s the twin who is both laidback and a little bit of a troublemaker. She’s the best fisher on Sugar Island, and she plans on spending the rest of her life in this small community, surrounded by her Anishinaabe family.

Things change, though, as the ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women starts to hit closer to home. Perry’s own family is now embroiled in a murder investigation, and in order to clear their name — as well as retain the artifacts of significant importance to her tribe — she’ll need to team up with her twin sister and a new boy in town to stop both the accusers and the abusers.

It’s part foiled heist story, part murder mystery, and wholly about finding out just how much more you are than you believe yourself to be.