Blood Gone Cold, by Katy Grant

Abby and her sister Natalie are always fighting.  Abby is the smart one and Natalie is the popular one and they despise each other for their differences. 

During a family ski trip, their mother declares that she and Dad are so tired of the squabbles that they are going out to dinner alone.  That suits the girls just fine and they settle in for an evening alone at their remote ski cabin, alternately ignoring and pranking each other.  But when two threatening strangers show up, Abby and Natalie have to think fast to survive.  Fleeing for their lives, they put aside their differences and rediscover their family bond.

Most verse novels are slow-moving navel-gazing affairs; pages torn out of angsty adolescent diaries.  The format suits reflection.  But it also works surprisingly well for a taut thriller like this.  Stripped of unnecessary text, this novel is a lightning-fast read that turns pages.  It lacks depth but for a visceral and intense thrill it definitely hits the mark.

With or Without You, by Eric Smith

For years, Jordan and Cindy have had one of the most well-known rivalries in South Philly.  Their families run competing food trucks. Jordan's family does traditional cheesesteaks:  meat, onions, cheese, and (if your willing to endure a public shaming) mushrooms.  Cindy's folks do healthy alternative sandwiches.

Throughout the lunch rush, Jordan and Cindy launch insults back and forth.  The videos of their famous spats have gone viral.  But what is less known is that they (and indeed their families) are actually good friends.  The sparring is simply good for business.

Jordan and Cindy have plans.  With school almost over, Jordan is going to buy his own food truck and hit the road.  Cindy, planning to go to school in a year, plans to spend her gap year riding along.  Once they are out of Philadelphia, they can finally be public about their feelings.  But then a local television producer approaches them to turn their famous spat into a reality show.  And with all the attention on them, it seems that it won't be so easy for Jordan and Cindy to shed the pretense of being enemies after all.

Cute rom-com that seemed pitched for a younger audience.  The romance is virtually non-existent. The family drama is more slapstick than scary.  And the fact that it all ends on a happy note just underscore that this isn't a story to take very seriously.

Biology Lessons, by Melissa Kantor

In the wake of the repeal of Roe v Wade, Kantor decided to write this novel which depicts the story of a seventeen year-old Texan girl named Grace who becomes pregnant and has to negotiate her options.  Unwilling to give up her career aspirations and facing a hostile family situation that makes it impossible to reveal her condition, she chooses to have an abortion and then faces the gauntlet of trying to find a means to terminate her pregnancy.  

While vaguely aware of the current state of abortion access in Texas (a.k.a. none at all), she quickly comes up-to-speed.  But she's a smart girl and determined to find a way to get the procedure.  Along the way, she faces the paucity of good resources, falling for a fake crisis center at one point.  But she eventually discovers an underground group that helps her travel to New Mexico where abortion is still legal.  Amidst all of these practical challenges, the story finds time to encompass Grace's emotional journey as well.

Kantor dispenses with any suspenseful moments or dramatics and you won't find some showdown with Grace's parents or the boyfriend.  While Grace has moments of great fear and moments of danger, Kantor has opted for a quiet matter-of-fact story where one things leads to another.  That lack of "action" ought to make the book rather dull, but the simple facts of Grace's circumstances are really interesting enough to keep the reader engaged and the authenticity of Grace's emotions makes her character compelling.  By not dramatizing things, the book is probably more effective as an instructional work.  Regardless of the fictional characters, the story is extensively researched and factual.  It reads as non-fiction, making it a useful resource if it falls into the right hands.  It probably also guarantees that the book will be banned in the places where it would be most helpful.

Stay With My Heart, by Tashie Bhuiyan

Liana Sarkar's father is an A&R man for Ripple Records and a lot of his love for music has rubbed off on her.  She plans to study the music industry and follow in her father's footsteps.  But since her mother died, he doesn't seem to have any room in his life for her anymore.  That doesn't stop her from trying to win his love by proving that she can find and nurture new talent.  

When she discovers the band Third Eye, she knows that this is the group that will get her father's attention and admiration.  But a crucial error in judgment ends up putting Liana in an embarrassing position and hurts the band's prospects.  To save them and correct her mistake, she surreptitiously promotes them, trying to angle a way for the band to succeed.  Along the way, she comes to understand the limits and prospects of love.

A romance without much of an actual love story, The story is really about the bonds of friendship between the members of the band and what that working relationship teaches Liana.  It's not a terribly compelling story and most of the story feels formulaic (down to the playlists that fill the story).  Despite the multiethnic coloring of the cast, the characters are largely stereotypes.  Liana's relationship with her father never develops and her relationship with Sky, the band leader, never builds up any suspense, let alone any heat.  Entertaining, but not terribly exciting.

Someone To Love, by Melissa de la Cruz

Since the day that Liv was rejected by her boyfriend for being too fat, she has struggled to gain control of her weight.  She's fasted and purged, starved herself and used laxatives.  And more than anything, she's hid it from her friends and family.  Life as the daughter of an up and coming gubernatorial candidate is full of pressure and fears of public exposure, but the secrets she is hiding are slowly killing her.

Full of lots of partying and alcohol, just to add to the poor life choices depicted throughout, this turns into something of a slog to get through.  While Liv is described as an exceptional girl, we don't see many of her strengths.  We're told that she does well in school, but she spends far more time obsessing about a useless boyfriend than she does about mastering her classes.

But the greatest disappointment of the story is the last section of the book, where Liv turns her life around.  Her recovery is a straightforward process and mostly consists of people lining up to apologize for being so mean to her.  There's little indication of any struggle towards recovery.  Instead, it seems like an easy road.  That's disappointing as, after having to endure hundreds of pages of her complaints and self-delusion, there's no real confronting her own role in her situation.  She makes some small protests that she played a small part in all of this but the focus is on everyone else behaving better. The book ends with her committing herself to loving herself, but there's rarely been much doubt that that is where her heart is. 

Every Time You Go Away, by Abigail Johnson

Ethan has grown up with a mother who has struggled with drug addiction.  She'll periodically hit the bottom and then commit to sorting out her life, but eventually succumb to the drugs after a while.  Each time she's gone into rehab, she's left Ethan with her parents.  But in the intervening years, Ethan has gone through hell trying to keep things together and take care of his Mom.

When he's at his grandparents, his closest friend is Rebecca, the girl next door.  They've confided to each other and the last time they saw each other, those feeling spilled over into a romance of sorts.  But then he went away and he didn't return for four years, without any communication at all..  

In those intervening four years, Rebecca's life came apart.  A car accident took the life of her father and put her permanently in a wheel chair.  Her mother, wracked with grief and unable to forgive her daughter, has distanced herself, abandoning Rebecca.  So, when Ethan returns, it's almost a godsend to her to have her old confidant back.  But the reality of Ethan can't match the fantasies that Rebecca has fostered all of these years.  He has issues of his own to deal with.  When he learns that his Mom has skipped out on rehab and disappeared, he is determined to find her whatever the cost might be to him or to Rebecca.

A powerful story about parental neglect and the process of reconciliation and healing.  Ethan and Rebecca's pain is so visceral and their struggles to cope with their own demons while finding some space to open their hearts to each other so heartbreaking that this is a hard read.  It took for a while to get through the story, but that was no fault of the writing. It's simply a story that slows you down as there is so much going on with these complex characters.

It's difficult to imagine a happy ending for this story that would feel realistic and Johnson doesn't attempt to deliver one.  Instead, the characters get to be honest with each other and make decisions about what that means for their futures.  There's some hope offered in all this, but no joyful reunion or lasting amends.  Sometimes, you're not meant to live happily ever after, just to move forward.

Imagine Us Happy, by Jennifer Yu

Ostensibly a story about the way that depression wrecks relationships, this is a teen romance that isn't.  As the narrator explains in the beginning, "I don't want to disappoint anyone in search of a happy ending. I'll say it from the start: this isn't that kind of story." to prove the point in an original twist, the novel starts off with the end of the romance -- the final fight.  With the matter of whether these two teens will find true love settled before the story even begins, we are left with an extended autopsy instead. 

Stella not only suffers from depression, but also from a neglectful father and a clinging mother.  The parents use Stella as a weapon to launch at each other -- each accusing the other of being the worse parent.  Traumatized by her parents' behavior, Stella seeks comfort where she can and stumbles across moody intellectual Kevin at a party.  When Kevin isn't drowning himself in existential literature or contemplating doom and gloom, he practices self-harm -- a behavior that he too weaponizes against Stella, but claiming that she bears some responsibility for it.  Barely into the relationship, Kevin's nasty side appears as he launches into abusive jealous tirades against Stella's friendships with other boys.  Stella, desperate to keep the one thing she feels is "safe" puts up with Kevin's abuse. You get the picture.  It all ends (at the start of the novel) when Stella accepts that she can't help Kevin and needs to just let him go. 

Like Sarah Dessen's Dreamland, it is pretty obvious from the beginning that Kevin is manipulative and Stella is manipulatable.  Between her depression and low self-esteem and the poor parental exemplars, she's completely unequipped to deal with Kevin's head games.  Any sane person would run far far away from him, but Stella is easily sucked in.

The light in this otherwise grueling story, is the authenticity of the characters and the insights they shed on themselves.  Stella, her mother, and their friends all seem enlightened (not that it halts the corrosiveness of their relationships).  The males are (Kevin and Stella's Dad), however, are pretty useless. Whether those insights would actually make a difference seems unlikely given that the type of people who fall into these toxic relationships generally don't accept advice from others.

Stepping Off, by Jordan Sonnenblick

Fatefully, when Jesse was young, his parents bought a place in Pennsylvania in order to get away from NYC in the summers. In the neighborhood there were two girls of his age as well -- Ava and Chloe -- and they became close summer friends.  They never bothered to stay in touch during the year and they safely knew that they were friends and nothing more. But maintaining the friendship has grown harder as they have grown older.  Jesse fantasizes about going out with Ava, but knows she doesn't care for him in that way.

The summer of 2019 (between their sophomore and junior years) begins fortuitously with the three of them taking a ceremonial leap off of a nearby bridge together as part of a local rite of passage. But it is also a summer when they will take much riskier leaps together.  By the end of the summer, Jesse and Chloe find themselves together, but neither one knows what it means and things are left hanging.

Back home during the fall, Jesse's parents are separating and when he reaches out to Chloe for support, she doesn't answer.  So, he turns to Ava and things start developing between them.  Or do they?  It would seem that the friendships are changing, but the more they do so, they more a sense of dread develops that they are losing each other.  And then in March, everything changes as the world shuts down for Covid.

The arrival of Covid is interesting but not really organic to the story.  And the book loses its focus as Sonnenblick shifts the story to the challenges that the three of them face trying to sort out their feelings in isolation (not that any of it seems to stop them from spending a lot of time in close proximity). For that reason and others, there really isn't anything essential about the Covid Pandemic to the plot and it is actually distracting.  I’ve been waiting for a good historical YA set during the Pandemic.  This might have been it, but the first 2/3 of the novel isn’t about Covid and thus the story isn’t either.
 
I still loved the characters, their near misses and misunderstandings, and the anxieties about the changing nature of their friendships are topics that are all handled well.