Author: Tirzah Price

Content warning: disordered eating, cancer

Jayne and June couldn’t be more different, despite the fact that they’re only a few years apart and each escaped their small Texas town for New York City as soon as they both graduated. Jayne is in college, struggling with disordered eating, ignoring phone calls from her family, and rooming with a guy who isn’t treating her well. June is a hedge fund manager, a high achiever making gobs of money who still calls their mom regularly. When June shows up one day and reveals that she’s got cancer, the sisters find their entire lives overturned as they’re forced to confront a complicated history.

This is Choi’s third novel, and what I like about her writing is that it’s very interior, intelligent, snarky, and a bit of a gut punch. She writes lost characters, characters trying their best, characters hurting and persevering, and characters just fumbling about as they figure things out so well. Although technically YA, this book features a 20 and a 23-year-old, so it’s solidly in that crossover range and I think it’ll appeal to fans of books about millennial angst (although these characters might be more Gen Z, I don’t know, generations are confusing).

This book is so great because even when the sisters are being extremely antagonistic towards one another, you can tell how much they still care for each other…even though they might have a hard time expressing it. One big selling point of this book is that things get seriously complicated when Jayne learns that despite being wealthy, June doesn’t have health insurance and has to use Jayne’s in order to get surgery. But the insurance fraud is just a tiny part of this messy and beautiful story as Jayne sorts through her anger and fear, and both sisters work through how they were shaped by a complicated childhood in order to learn how to best care for each other.

I think that this is a great book to read if you ever feel like life is too lonely or too complicated to figure out, and it’s heartbreakingly real and just a bit romantic!

Bonus: Get this hardcover. Trust me, the book’s design is worth it!

Galadriel, El for short, is a student at the Scholomance, a high school for magical teens from all over the world that exists in a liminal space controlled by magic, without any human teachers, that no one can escape…except through the graduation hall once they’ve completed their education. But the graduation hall is also full of monsters, so commencement is a literal fight to the death in order to get out, and those monsters are constantly attacking the school and trying to find a way inside. Sounds like a nightmare? Well, it’s actually marginally safer for teens inside than it is outside, and at least in the Scholomance they have access to an education that will help them survive.

I immediately was drawn to El, a prickly junior of Welsh-Indian descent who is better equipped than most to survive this particular high school experience–but no one else is aware of that. She’s got some major power, but the consequence of using that power is that she can’t stop. She’d literally destroy everyone and anyone around her if she unleashed her true force. But El has no desire to go all evil villain on anyone and she’s been fostering a plan to make it through to graduation that includes not making friends unless she can help it. But when Orion Lake, the junior class golden boy, inadvertently saves her life one too many times, El has had enough. She tells him to knock it off, and that prompts him to try and befriend her. But Orion Lake making friends with the weird girl no one talks to seriously upsets the delicate social balance at the Scholomance, and soon people are asking questions about the effect of Orion’s savior complex…like what does it mean for the very hungry monsters who haven’t had a good meal in a long time?

I loved the snarky, sarcastic tone of this book, and how it dumps the reader headfirst into the action and the story. I will be the first to admit that technique might not be every reader’s favorite, but it reminded me a lot of Robin McKinley’s Sunshine (one of my favorite vampire stories ever), and of course, Gideon the Ninth. This book isn’t a tome, but it’s full of action, fascinating world building, and really amazing character growth. Novik also tackles the idea of a chosen one in an interesting way: Orion Lake is doing a great thing by saving so many people…but it has some pretty dark unintended consequences that force everyone in the book to pay attention and step up. I loved El’s commentary, her frustration with Orion’s lack of self-preservation, and prickly realization that she’s going to have to open up to people if everyone’s going to make it out alive. I won’t say too much more because the joy in this book is discovering what’s happening for yourself, but suffice to say I’m eagerly awaiting the sequel, The Last Graduate, which drops in May!

Note: I know it sounds YA, but the book was actually published as adult. Either way, I think it’s super enjoyable for both adult and teen audiences!

Axton Betz-Hamilton grew up in rural Indiana in the 1990s. After her grandfather died when she was 10, her family began to notice their mail going missing. What started off as annoying but seemingly innocuous became more sinister when their utilities would get shut off for nonpayment…and then the strange bills started showing up. Someone had stolen her parents’ identities, and no one seemed to know who might be at fault, or how the thief kept obtaining personal information. Axton spent the second half of her childhood living in a family clouded by suspicion because the only logical conclusion was that someone close to them must be the thief. As a result, they began to withdraw from friends and family, and became suspicious of everyone. The claustrophobic environment was too much for Axton, but when she escaped to college, she discovered something horrifying–her own identity had also been stolen, and her credit was wrecked, going back to when she was a child. She became determined to find the truth.

I feel like I read this memoir holding my breath. Betz-Hamilton does a brilliant job demonstrating that identity theft is not a victimless crime, starting out with the paranoia that she and her parents experienced, and detailing the financial and emotional effects of a ruined credit score and constant paranoia. She mines the depths of her family’s distress and anxiety and shows how that shaped her childhood and the adult she would become. The events of this book began before identity theft was seen as the threat it is now, and people who found themselves victims of this crime often found themselves helpless, with nowhere to turn. That had a tremendous effect on Axton, and when she realizes the extent of the fraud, she becomes extremely motivated to research the crime. The chapters devoted to her becoming an identity theft expert and investigating her own case are both vindicating and fascinating, but it’s the shocking reveal about who was really behind the theft that readers will remember most from this book. It’s a revelation that leaves Axton shocked and revisiting every moment in her past to see events in a completely different light, and those moments of reckoning are equally powerful. Ultimately, this memoir is engrossing, well-written, and measured, and it demonstrates how a nonviolent crime can have devastating effects on people’s lives.

If you’re intrigued by this story and this is the first time you’re hearing about it, I advise not Googling the author or looking up the author’s episode on Criminal unless you want some major spoilers! If you listened to the podcast, I highly recommend this book for its in-depth and fascinating look at Axton’s life, and the aftermath of her discovery.

Happy reading!
Tirzah

I read Unwind back when I was a teen (it was the first dystopian YA I remember reading and I was enthralled), but hadn’t picked up a new Shusterman book until no fewer than five different teens at my library insisted I read this, and it blew me away. It’s set a couple hundred years into the future, where death has been defeated. Modern technology has not only found a solution to aging (anyone at any time can “reset” themselves to age 25), but they can reliably bring back anyone from death, provided your body and brain aren’t completely destroyed. To compensate for the fact that death no longer controls the population, the Scythedom is founded. Scythes are humans who are revered and feared because they choose people at random to die a humane death. Rowan and Citra are two teens who have just been chosen as Scythe apprentices, but only one of them can ascend to the role of a Scythe. What they don’t know is that they’re about to be sucked into an epic struggle within Scythedom that will change their world forever.

I love a great premise, and not only is Shusterman’s world convincing and fascinating, but the plot he’s come up with for his two teen protagonists is riveting. As teenagers who have never had to comprehend their own mortality, their training mainly consists of lots of philosophy lessons (Scythes take a professional name and always choose from the great thinkers of history), and understanding what it means to be an empathetic human being, which provides plenty of moments for insight, but in a really engaging way. Of course, not all Scythes are noble, as readers see this “perfect” solution becomes inevitably twisted by corrupt Scythes who are grabbing power, unchecked, at an alarming rate. Rowan and Citra start out as competitors, but as forces beyond their control attempt to use them and pit them against their mentor, they find ways to team up and rebel against the system. The writing is smart and darkly funny–the perfect tone for a book about death, honestly–and the plot had some truly amazing twists that kept me hooked. This is a high concept book that will make you think, but in a fun way, I promise.