Author: Kelly Jensen

Taylor is funny. But comedy is a sore subject in her house, as her mother gave up a career in comedy to raise her and her dad, who is a comedian, left mom for another woman. Taylor wants to make it, though, and sneaks out of her house to perform. So now that she’s got a potential internship as a writer for Saturday Night Live…she’s going to have to be honest about it.

Oh, and there’s a very gay storyline here, too, involving a teen who plays the role of Abigail Williams at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft. Comedy + Salem + Queer Characters? Sign me up!

I know I talked about this one last week and how it’s an excellent look at environmental activism.

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.

Told in verse, this one is about fighting for what’s right while also untangling trauma and grief.

It’s been a bloody summer across the midwest. Or, rather, it hasn’t been, though there’s been a lot of death. Each of the murders has been bloodless, victims found with a handful of slashes but without blood remaining in their bodies. Now the killer — or killers — has turned to Michael Jensen’s town in Minnesota, killing a mother, father, and high school student, and standing among them pooled in blood is Marie.

All signs point to Marie as the killer, but she refuses to talk to anyone except Michael. He’s an aspiring journalist and sees this as his opportunity to break a huge story. But the longer he talks with Marie, the less he begins to believe what happened to be clear, true, or easy. She’s convinced him that she worked alongside a vampire — nameless, faceless, long-gone from the crime scene — and she can’t help locate him. But the legal system in Nebraska is hot on the case, pressing for more and more details, hoping to extradite Marie back to Nebraska in order to charge her. The law there allows for conviction for accomplices to murder, not just the murderer, and this would bring peace and closure.

But as the truth….or the supposed truth…unravels, it becomes much more complex. Who is Marie? Where did she come from? What happened to her family and what did her stepfather do to her? And is that story or her relationship to her stepfather the narrative she wants in the news?

This is a clever take on vampires, but it’s also based loosely on two separate murder sprees in the midwest during this time. It’s got Midwest Gothic vibes, wrapped in an In Cold Blood style true fictionalized crime narrative.

It is bad enough that Jake isn’t as popular as his older brother, especially when both of them are among the only Black kids at their prep high school. But worse is that Jake sees dead people. They are mosssstly not harmful. But now, that’s about to change.

Sawyer begins to haunt Jake, and Sawyer’s backstory isn’t a pleasant one. He killed six kids at a high school the previous year, and now he’s out to tell his story. Jake, whether he likes it or not, will be the one to hear it.

This one is for those who like scary stories, and it features a queer Black boy main character.

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.

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.

What does it mean to lose someone you love? What does it mean to lose someone you love who was a very complicated human and kept secrets from you? What if those secrets meant that in that loss, you discover you have a whole new family?

As always, Acevedo writes an emotionally-compelling, engaging, and immersive story of grief and love. Camino and Yahaira each have a distinct voice and we get to hear both sides of the story, of how their shared father kept his dual life a secret from them.

Dave’s last summer before college involves working at a Florida tourist trap called Frightmares House of Horrors, a haunted house attraction on its last limbs. When a shift ends with an employee walkout and Dave takes over one of the roles a friend plays, he discovers a dead body. It’s not part of the set or the attraction. It’s real, and now, the killer may be coming for Dave.

Horror? Check. Ramshackle horror attraction? Check. This gives me all of the 90s Christopher Pike/RL Stine vibes.

No one knows who Ellie really is. That is, no one knows she’s part of a magic community. But the summer before her senior year, she creates an Anti-Wallflower List–13 items she wants to do to take more risks. But when one of the items goes horribly wrong and she finds herself in a car with her enemy traveling to a magic convention . . . she might unintentionally check off the “fall in love” item. This is a fun, magical enemies-to-lovers romance.

A moment to pause for that cover.

This is a remix of the classic Wuthering Heights and is set in Yorkshire, 1786. Heathcliff is the abandoned son of a sailor from India, and Catherine is the youngest daughter of an estate owner who is preparing her for a life in high society. They connect with one another as they escape to the moors, working to build not only their budding romance but their connection to their cultural heritage. If you like broody, reclaimed classics with Gothic undertones, you’ll be into this one.

I grew up south of Chicago, close enough that as kids, we used to climb the tree in the local park and could see the skyline from there. I learned a lot of Chicago history then, as well as in college, when I took an entire class on the city’s history. Though the race riot was addressed, it certainly wasn’t as in-depth or as wide-ranging as Hartfield’s engrossing YA nonfiction about that moment in time.

This is a compelling and essential book about the 5 Black kids who floated onto the “wrong” part of the beach and ignited a period of race-based violence throughout the city. Pair this with Brandy Colbert’s Black Birds in the Sky for another story of race-based violence in the same era (though further south in Tulsa, Oklahoma).

Amity Falls is a remote mountain town, where few come to visit, but it’s where Ellerie calls home. When a supply party goes missing, the town begins to wonder if the monsters which once plagued the town are back — and strange occurrences keep happening. The creatures responsible offer the townspeople a promise to fulfill their desires in exchange for a small favor. And while they agree, the townsfolk are not prepared for the sinister intentions of the creatures.

With horror vibes akin to The Village, Craig’s story is a retelling of the folk classic “Rumpelstiltskin.”

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Beau is an artist and dreams of leaving the projects she’s grown up in. But when her older sister Katia is killed by an off duty police officer, everything changes–now she’s determined to clear her sister’s name and to do that, she needs to find her sister’s boyfriend, the only witness to her murder.

Of course, it won’t be that simple, and Beau has to decide how much of her life she needs to put aside for Katia.

This stand alone dark contemporary fantasy is being compared to The Craft, which means it is on my TBR. It’s a story about suburban witches, told in two timelines, mother-daughter relationships, and all of the thriller vibes.

Dana befriends a girl in her teen years that turns out to be A No Good Person and deals with the fallout of that relationship for a long time. Now, 20 years later, her daughter Ivy is tracking down a similar path.

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If you loved Dear Martin, this’ll be one you need to pick up. 16-year-old Alex tries to be the best person he can be. He’s got a steady part time job, has a girlfriend he adores, and he’s the best big brother he can be to Isaiah. The problem is when Alex touches something, he can see the future. When he sees his little brother’s untimely death coming, it’s up to Alex to do something. Morris’s novel grapples with what it is to be a Black boy in America.

This book originally released quite a while ago (in YA years, that would mean 2016) but now that Lee’s name is even more well known, it’s nice to see it being re-released in a new and gorgeous paperback.

16-year-old Mimosa–Mim–is one of the few remaining aromateurs left in the world, and her ability to mix scents for magical perfume will be useless if she lets herself fall in love. She doesn’t want to miss out on being an ordinary teenager, though, but when she makes a huge mistake and must recruit the help of a (cute, of course) boy to help her fix it, Mim may no longer have the ability to choose what happens to her future.

This takes place in the same world as A Song Below Water and follows super popular and Black siren Naema. Despite once being the It girl, she gets canceled after outing Tavia as a siren in the first book, essentially making her the villain. Things aren’t so cut and dry, though, as Naema’s journey of self-discovery— with its examination of race, gender, and privilege— shows.

**Bonus points for another fire cover**

Lou’s disbelief in magic is shattered once she has to journey to the goblin market to rescue her teenage aunt. The market, which Lou had only read about up until now, is full of every kind of sweet, delectable thing that could tempt humans. She has to learn spells and tricks if she’s to save her aunt and make it out alive. She’s only got three days, though, and then the market disappears– and her aunt along with it.

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