Author: Kelly Jensen

In 1506 Joseon, it was a dictatorship. King Yeonsan is a tyrant, stealing land, burning books, and abusing women. Iseul, 17, has mostly been sheltered from the effects of the King’s reign thanks to her privilege, but now, her older sister Suyeon is the King’s next target. Iseul needs to save her.

Prince Daehyun is the half-brother of King Yeonsan and has so much hate and disgust for his brother’s behavior. Daehyun wants to end the reign but he knows a failed coup would mean certain death.

So when Prince Daehyun and Iseul find themselves in one another’s paths, they are tempted to hate each other—and, really, they do. But their hate for the King and desire to overthrow him pulls them together.

Nora O’Malley is finished with high school, and she’s going to enjoy this summer because she’s sure her end is near (her murderous stepfather is now out of jail). Nora’s joining her friends Iris and Wes for a 10-day backpacking trip. Wes’s girlfriend Amanda is joining too.

But when Amanda is mistaken for Nora, she’s kidnapped. Neither Nora, nor Wes, nor Iris have a lot of tools with them, but they need to come up with a way to free Amanda and put an end to the terror being wrought by Raymond.

This is a companion to The Girls I’ve Been but you can read it as a standalone.

Selina DaSilva might be the only person on the Caribbean island of St. Virgil who does not believe in magic. She’s looking forward to leaving the small island to study Pharmacology, but those plans are out the window when an attack kills her father and severely hurts her mom. Selina is staying home to help care for her mom, but she’s far from enjoying the work of selling talismans and protective spells to tourists.

So when a tourist is blamed for a series of murders, Selina can’t hide behind not believing in magic anymore. There’s something dark going on in the forests. Selina’s going to investigate with the help of—whoops—her ex-boyfriend, a local journalist. Together, they’ll find justice for the tourist and get answers to what happened to Selina’s mom and dad.

Ella Moore is the most popular—err, notorious?—girl at high school. Or was. She was murdered at a party she was hosting, and there are loads of suspects and motives. The police are suspecting a new girl to school, Dawn, as Dawn was the last person to hand Ella a drink before she died. Ella’s friends agree that they think Dawn did it, but Dawn knows she’s innocent. She’s now going to do all she can to prove it.

This is a paperback original, which we need more of in YA.

It’s the summer after her senior year of high school, and Jade is preparing to go to the University of Pennsylvania. The hitch is the cost; she doesn’t want to take out loans to pay for school and her mother certainly can’t help out. Despite being estranged from her father who left the family years ago, Jade agrees to visit him for five weeks and help restore the French colonial house he’s working on in Vietnam. It’s going to be a lot of work and take a lot of Jade’s patience to make it, but that money and future are important to her. University is her opportunity to be the fully queer Vietnamese American girl she’s had to keep under wraps. 

When Jade arrives, things are bad from the start. She’s informed she’ll be spending her time working with Florence on building the website for the house being restored. See, Ba’s not just going to live in the house he’s restoring; he’s going to be using it as a vacation destination for wealthy folks to stay in. 

Every night, though, Jade finds herself further and further disturbed by the house. She’s seeing things—ghosts—and she’s heeding the warnings of one ghost dressed as a bride who warns Jade not to eat anything. There are bugs everywhere, and there are remnants of Jade’s ancestors throughout the estate. Ba doesn’t believe there is anything weird going on, and neither does Jade’s sister. But Jade knows something isn’t right and this house is out to kill them all.

How can she convince her dad and sister that the house is no good? She’ll have to team up with Florence and do something big. They may need to create their own series of hauntings to get others to pay attention. But by the time Ba and her sister notice, will it be too late? Will the house have taken complete control?

Barclay is a killer basketball player and that helps him become a legend in his small Georgia town. But when Barclay decides at the biggest pep rally in the town’s history to come out, he’s swiftly outcast. He doesn’t know how to be himself without basketball and now the hostility of the community that once loved him is only making it worse.

Enter Amy. She’s Barclay’s best friend and convinced that if he gets involved in a local cause, he’ll not only find purpose but he’ll get to meet likeminded people. Now he’s going to a voting rights meeting to find that bigger purpose…and it turns out, so, too, is Christopher, one of Barclay’s biggest rivals. But—you know where this is going—the longer they get to know each other over a budding passion, their former status as enemies is no longer. Could it be they’re falling in love?

Malik’s life was upended 10 years ago: his mother disappeared and he discovered he had magical powers. But because mom was gone, Malik’s role was now making sure he and his younger foster brother survived. Malik’s 17 now and ready for his own life to start—and start it does when he discovers his magic has him connected to a long-lost grandmother who was not only a conjurer but has ties to a magical university. One that his own mother went to.

Now at Caiman University, Malik is excited to learn about his family’s history and the power of his own magic. He might even be able to reconnect with the first love of his life, Alexis. But it takes little time before Malik sees how dark and secretive the underbelly of the magic world could be.

Andres and his family live in São Paulo, and Andres is a tighter. But one wrong move and he nearly drowns. Andres is alive only because he made a deal with Death for a new life. Now, he and his family are in Miami for a restart.

It’s here Andres quickly finds himself in a relationship with two other people: Liora and Renee. They’re a perfect triad, even if from the outside, people simply do not understand them.

So when Liora is in a car accident and lands in a coma, Renee suggests to Andres they do something radical. They’re going to travel to the underworld, retrieve Liora’s spirit, and reconnect it with her body. It’s too bad that there’s still a piece of Andres there, too, and it’s a piece he’s not eager to see again so soon.

Sink your teeth into a clever take on “Orpheus and Eurydice.”

Family upheaval leaves Noor to start the last part of her senior year of high school at a brand-new school. She plans to just plow through and not make a scene. Besides, it’s bad enough she’s had to move and her parents’ relationship is not great.

But then Noor discovers that more and more books in her new school are disappearing. They’ve been labeled “obscene” or “pornographic.” Noor cannot let it stand by. She needs to speak up and demand the books be returned and that student rights be respected. Of course, most of the books being banned are by or about LGBTQ+ people and people of color.

Except if she speaks up, she’ll no longer be able to simply plow through.

This is an exceptionally timely and relevant work of fiction that, I’m sure, is going to see itself banned by the same bigots doing this outside the covers of a book. Too bad they don’t realize how many Noors there are in the world.

Clark has lived the same Monday for 309 days. Same boring math class, same meals, same everything. But on day 310, that math class has a new guy. One that Clark has never seen before.

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.

Adina Walker knows she’s got to work twice as hard to get half as much, especially at her elite New England school, where she attends on scholarship. She makes one slip, though, and she finds herself on the blacklist of her top Ivy League college.

She is disappointed but plans to see if she can redeem herself. The opportunity to do so lies in Finish, a high-intensity contest held by the founders of her high school. The three-part challenge asks 12 women to compete, and the winner is able to become part of the institution’s family. This recognition? It’ll be the key to anything the winner wants.

Just as Adina prepares for the Finish, she feels something is off. The deeper she is into the games, the more off they become, and soon this is no longer about getting into her dream school. It’s about staying alive.

Natalie and Imogen are best friends and are about as different as they can be. Natalie is a brave adventurer while Imogen is far more quiet and reserved. One thing the two of them have in common is their love of everything supernatural. The two of them spend every summer at the Harlow Hotel, one of the most famously haunted hotels around, and they enjoy the ride. Imogen believes it’s truly haunted while Natalie believes it’s all fun and games.

Then Imogen dies suddenly. It rips apart Natalie’s life, but she’s determined to still spend the summer at Harlow and use it as an opportunity to work on her senior project of creating a teen ghost hunting show. Annoyingly, Leander is also working on his senior project at the hotel, and Natalie cannot stand him.

But as much as she’s annoyed by Leander, he’s not only not hard on the eyes, but Natalie realizes he could be helpful for her project. She asks him to team up to help and he’s game.

The problem? The hotel ghosts might not be figments of either of their imaginations. The Harlow Hotel has secrets that it wants to share with Natalie and Leander—and it might help Natalie work through some of the grief related to losing Imogen.

Ruby Santos is an 18-year-old Filipina American living in San Francisco. Her mother just died, and she’s been grieving—and not just grieving, she and her father are deeply behind on their bills and in debt from mom’s medical treatment. They’ve had to move out of the top floor of their home and into the basement in order to rent out the top floor and bring in some money.

Then Ruby discovers a secret about her father and a secret about her city. Dad has been working as a delivery person for the underworld. He “jumps” train lines and gets packages to a wealthy family of the underworld. But because of his grief and increased alcohol use, he’s fallen behind, and if he doesn’t catch up, the family house might be taken from them.

So Ruby does what any good daughter would do. She offers to help. But it’s not a fun place of magic and romance in the underworld. That exists, sure. But the underground is a world of rivalry, of trafficking illegal goods, and where she realizes she might be creating more trouble for her family than she could have ever imagined.

Magical San Francisco underground? Let’s go!

I really need to do a roundup of YA books featuring teen chefs/teen cooking competitions. This one would fit right in perfectly—and they are not only abundant, but they are so expansive in the types of cuisine featured (which is good for reading but less good when you want to sample that cuisine as you’re reading).

Jackie Oh is tired of being the perfect Korean American daughter. There is so much pressure on her to live up to her parents’ exacting standards. All she wants to do is be a chef, but she knows that expressing that would be rough on Mom and Dad.

But still, Jackie manages to work at her grandparents’ deli after school and at night, she practices her French cooking. She knows she should be studying, but being in the kitchen is a balm to the stress of school, studying, rising anti-Asian violence in New York, and more.

So when Jackie is given the shocking opportunity to compete on one of her favorite teen television cooking competitions, Burn Off!, she takes it. She thinks escaping into the world of privileged kids will be fun and more, she’ll get to hone and show off her skills in the kitchen. Yeah, the gimmicky challenges are just that, but this is her time to shine.

This book dives into identity and culture with both humor and heart.

Described as The Breakfast Club meets Stranger Things, this book is told on more than one timeline and travels more than one dimension.

In 1986, at the height of the AIDS crisis, which filled the country with homophobia (more blatantly so), Tommy knows he’s falling in love with his best friend Renaldo. He knows he can’t share this. But one night Renaldo is hit by lightning and is no longer the person he once was.

It’s now 2044 and Pris Devree wakes up from a nightmare involving a boy named Tommy and a house in her neighborhood that has earned the reputation of “Murder House.” Pris needs to understand, so she goes to the house and stumbles upon a self-help book.

But it’s not what you might think. It’s a guide to trans dimensional travel, and now Pris and Tommy are working together to save Renaldo from a demon.

Deep space exploration is a reality in 2199, but Jessica finds herself on a lander that has crashed into a post-extinction planet 14 light years from Earth. She was only supposed to be viewing this planet from afar, but now, she’s here. Alone.

The lander she is in is covered in bloody handprints. The machines are all malfunctioning. When the 17-year-old steps outside the lander, she discovers a graveyard of fresh graves.

What happened? Why is she here? Those are the questions at heart in this space-set mystery.

This is an excellently plotted historical mystery set in Chinatown, Los Angeles, in the 1930s. Following sisters Gemma and May, who discover the dead body of friend and Hollywood actress Lulu Wong, they work to unearth the truth of who—and what—killed her.

This is a character-driven, multiple point of view story, with a very satisfying conclusion to the mystery. The attention to historical detail is great, as is the rendering of a specific community within Los Angeles.

This book is being pitched as a Korean-inspired, surrealist Alice in Wonderland.

Caro Rabbit and Iccadora Alice Sickle were banished five years ago. The young witches were in love with one another. Four years ago, then, their relationship ended as they needed to seek their individual chances at freedom.

Caro has since become a successful Saint-harvester for the royals. She pretends she doesn’t know what the Red Queen does, the evil she perpetrates. Icca, however, does not forget the betrayal she felt by Caro and is out for revenge. She’ll enact that revenge on the Red Queen and on Caro.

But the Red Queen knows more than she’s ever let on and now a volatile magic may destroy Caro and Icca before either ever get the chance to reconnect (even if that reunion was not going to be for good).

If you like stories set in the summer between high school and college and the types of stories set over one epic night, look no further.

Brandy’s been accepted into the best nursing school in the country. She should be excited, but she’s not. It’s her mom’s dream, not her dream, as Brandy wants to be an artist.

She’s a little (lot) envious of Ben Nolan, one of her classmates, who will be pursuing his dream of acting. So when Ben attaches himself to Brandy at the town’s summer carnival, she could not be more annoyed.

But her feelings about everything—her future, nursing school, Ben—will be tested over the course of the evening.

Vale’s life is soccer. She loves the game, but it’s more than just a game. She’s good, her future depends on the game, and she’s got expectations to exceed from her father. But then Vale incites a fight with long-time rival Leticia Ortiz, and everything becomes chaotic.

Vale decides she’ll find solace over the summer by working at her old youth soccer camp. It sounds like the right chance to reignite a love for the game and get back to the heart of what it means to be an athlete.

But then she discovers that she’ll be co-captaining the youth team this summer with none other than Leticia. Will fists fly? Or will it be sparks?

This is an exciting and engaging sports enemies-to-lovers queer romance.

Hanalei of Tamarind comes from a well-respected and revered family. But a choice made by her father to steal a seadragon egg that was meant for a sick princess means that she and her family have been forced into exile. It’s not what she saw for her future. So a chance meeting with a female dragon who offers her a chance to return home to Tamarind is Hanalei’s opportunity to find happiness and undo the wrong that led to her family’s exile.

Samahtitamahenele, aka Sam, is in a tough spot. He’s the last prince of Tamarind, but he’ll never inherit the throne. Tamarind is a matriarchy. He’s in a tough spot because his grandma is about to end her reign, and his mother is very ill. Sam knows he can do only two things: get married or cure his mother’s illness. So when Hanalei, his childhood friend, returns, he turns to her for help. Together, they’re going to hunt down the dragonfruit that could cure Sam’s mom…but it won’t be easy, and they won’t be the only ones on this very mission.

If you’re looking for a queer revenge tale, here you go. Punk-boy Phil has a reputation as a troublemaker, so it’s a surprise to everyone when he and Cameron start dating. Cameron’s reputation is solid, and he gained a lot of fans when he made a coming-out video that went viral.

Jackson has been on the straight and narrow for years. He’s a good kid and he’s doing everything right in high school. But he feels lost despite his successes, especially when it comes to missing his former best friend Phil.

So when Cameron dumps Phil and sullies his reputation further, Phil wants revenge—mostly to expose some of the secrets and lies and phoniness that Cameron’s kept under wraps. Phil reconnects with Jackson, who he suspects can infiltrate Cameron’s friend group and get the dirt.

The problem is that coming together to get revenge on Cameron might not solve either Phil’s nor Jackson’s problems. Though coming together might kindle something more between the former besties.

Joan works as the person who makes and keeps up with the swords for Shakespeare’s acting company. As a member of the Orisha, she’s been given the gift of controlling metal. Her family, all Orisha, are also tasked with keeping an eye on London’s Fae population; usually, there’s nothing to worry about, but there has been more and more Fae activity recently, including some attacks. So when Joan hurts a powerful member of the Fae, she finds herself in the middle of a battle between the human world and the world of the Fae.

This is the first in a duology, and the sequel, Saint-Seducing Gold, hits shelves on April 23, Billy Shakespeare’s birthday.

Stevie and Nora loved one another and had a plan to make their love something they didn’t need to hide. It involved moving away from their conservative hometown and out to California after high school.

Stevie, though, has a terrible fall that leaves her unable to remember much of her life. This includes the plan to leave down and worse, how much she and Nora are in love. Stevie cannot remember anything about the last two years, and her life has become messy, inconsistent, not what she would have wanted before the fall.

As for Nora, she’s unsure how to handle no longer being remembered nor what happens as a result of Stevie no longer wanting the future they had planned.