The No-Girlfriend Rule, by Christen Randall

In the six years that Hollis and Chris have been dating, Hollis has been shut out of Chris's Friday night Secrets and Sorcery games.  That's because his group has a strict "no girlfriends allowed" rule -- a rule that Hollis is determined to chip away at.  It's not that Hollis particularly likes the misogynistic and homophobic group that Chris plays with, but she wants to be in Chris's life.  So, Hollis has been studying how to play and she's found a group of her own to play with to get better.

The new group is made up solely of young women, racially diverse, and representative of a variety of gender and sexual identities. The woman who runs the group is all about building a supportive and safe environment.   In a nutshell, it's everything Chris's group is not.  And when Hollis finds that she not only likes them better but also, for the first time in her life feels she has real friends, it causes her to question why she cares so much for Chris.  And while breaking up seems unthinkable, there's no denying that she is discovering that there's so much more to life than being some guy's girlfriend.

I was initially going to write this off as a fluffy romance set amidst table-top gamers, but it has a surprising amount of substance.  Dungeons and Dragons (and gamer culture as a whole) is notoriously misogynistic.  Randall takes some pretty easy shots at that at the start, but then she imagines what a campaign would be like if it wasn't and Hollis's group is a wonderful exploration of how one could play the game without succumbing to toxic masculinity.  I'm sure the discussion has been had in the gamersphere but I've never seen it in fiction before and it's eye-opening.

Beyond that is a really strong story of Hollis's growth from an anxious and dependent girlfriend, unable to see her own self-worth, to a young woman with contributions to make and a right to be loved.  It's hardly smooth sailing and she has a lot of very relatable struggles with doubt and insecurity, but the honesty of the portrayal makes the payoff at the end so much more moving.  She also has a very authentic struggle with her sexual identity when her heart leads her towards a girl in the group -- a search which is never fully resolved and feels very satisfactory being left as such.

Throw in a couple other topics like body images, clinical anxiety, and abusive relationships, and you get a lot of value for a story about girls and gaming.

Such Charming Liars, by Karen M. McManus

After years of life as a jewelry thief, Kat's mother has finally decided to go clean.  She just needs one more job to make a new life possible.  It ought to be pretty straightforward: under the cover of being a caterer for a rich guy's 80th birthday run off with a valuable ruby necklace that belongs to his daughter while everyone is distracted blowing out the candles.  But things go wrong from the start:  on the way to site, their car gets a flat tire and the person who stops to help them is hardly a stranger.

Years ago, Kat's Mom married a man in Vegas and his son Liam was friends with Kat for 48 hrs.  But after a series of best-left-forgotten adventures, Mom and Dad split up non-amicably.  And now by strange fate they've suddenly been reunited, but it's not random chance: Liam's father is catfishing the same rich guy's daughter.  So, we have two con artists targetting the same person for very different reasons and their children are thrown into the middle of it all.

The story's a LOT more complicated than this, of course (especially when we start stacking up dead bodies), and there are layers upon layers of crosses and double crosses.  In the midst of all that story, it's easy to lose track of the characters and forget who is what to whom.  The characters are not particularly memorable and the plausibility of the plot wanes as things get complicated, but none of that really matters.  This is a well thought-out story and it's great fun to take a ride on the adventure, but it wasn't much to my taste. I had to wonder in the end if any of this made much sense.

Leila and the Blue Fox, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (ill by Tom de Freston)

It's been six years since Leila has been with her mother.  They've spoken on the phone and on the computer, but there's never been a provate moment.  A climate scientist working above the Arctic Circle in Norway, Mom's work has been a convenient way to keep her and Leila from talking about their time in Syria and their forced emigration to the West.  But now during a summer visit to a land where the sun doesn't set and land easily becomes ice and melts to water, Leila finally has that time to talk.

Mom is tracking an Arctic Blue Fox, who they have named Miso to learn more about the impact of climate change.  Searching for a new home, Miso is undertaking an epic migration of her own, traveling what will eventually be a 2700 mile trek from Norway to Canada.  

Beautifully illustrated, this short and quick read deftly merges two very different stories (the reconciliation of mother and daughter and Miso's instinctive fight for survival) into a seemless story about the travels we take and what we hold on to.

The Final Curse of Ophelia Cray, by Christine Calella

When your mother is a feared and hated pirate and reputed witch, it's hard to keep a low profile.  Raised by her father, Ophelia has borne not only her mother's name, but the weight of her mother's notoriety.  Hated by the townspeople, Ophelia longs to run away from her small island and sail the seas -- not as a pirate like her mother, but as a sailor in the Royal Navy.  When her bloodline prevents her from enlisting, she presents herself as her half-sister Betsy and joins on.  Her sister is a helpless homebody and unlikely to be noticed by anyone, or so Ophelia thinks.  But when Ophelia slips away, Betsy surprises everyone by racing off to sea after her.

And soon, the best laid plans go astray as a set of curses cast by Ophelia's mother at the gallows come to pass.  Pirates, sword fights, sunken ships, gold, betrayals and doublecrosses, and endless adventure unfurl over the next 300+ pages of this frenetic adventure.  The cast is huge (although so is the body count) and keeping track of who is on whose side at any point in time is an ordeal, but if you let the story just take you along you are guaranteed a good ride.  It's not every YA novel that lets the heroine duel and get whipped in the first hundred pages so don't imagine that this is much of a "feelings" book or particularly focused on character development. But if pirates are your thing, there's plenty of that to go round here.

The Luminous Life of Lucy Landry, by Anna Rose Johnson

Orphan Lucy Landry comes to live with the Martin family at a lighthouse on Lake Superior.  Life on an island in the middle of the Lake is harsh and isolated, and the Martins are a large family.  Lucy, who has never spent much time with other children, struggles with learning how to get along with her new step-siblings.  

Lucy is her own worst enemy as she weaves wild imaginations about herself as a queen, a fairy, or the daughter of a famous actress and tries to lord over the other children.  More troublesome is the way that her active imagination leads her into a series of mishaps -- some amusing, some cruel.  Key amongst these fantasies is a legend of a ruby necklace lost at sea nearby which Lucy feels compelled to locate, ultimately putting herself and the Martins in danger.

The story makes for an interesting peek at the history of the lighthouses on the Great Lakes.  But while the whimsical romanticism of Lucy Landry evokes the beloved melodrama of Anne from Anne of Green Gables),  Lucy's behavior is more selfish and thoughtless (and her caregivers overly indulgent) to really become a sympathetic character.  Lucy's willing to put her adopted family at risk out of greed and then her stubborn refusal to accept responsibility turned me off so sharply that I didn't care that, in the end, she gets a chance to become a heroine and save the day.  The damage was done.

Salt and Sugar, by Rebecca Carvalho

Lari's family owns Salt, a bakery in Olinda, Brazil.  Pedro lives across the street from them at Sugar, their culinary competition.  For generations, Lari's family and Pedro's family have been locked in a feud, convinced of the treachery of their neighbor.  Both of the kids have been raised to distrust each other.

But the two families have acquired a much greater enemy:  a grocery store chain called Deals Deals, which threatens to run both family bakeries out of business.  Divided, they are easy pickings for the megastore, but Lari and Pedro realize that teaming up might give them a chance.  After generations of hatred and accusations, can the two young people form an alliance and can they learn to trust each other?  And when their plans end up sparking romance, can they open their hearts to learn to love their enemy?

A loving tribute to Brazilian food and the melodramatic stylings of Brazilian telenovellas!  There's a rather tiresome amount of feuding and talking past each other, but the story is saved by its mouth-watering depictions of cuisine, strong supporting characters, and Lari's iron will.  True to its inspiration, the ending is also amazingly over-the-top and you can't take much of it seriously, but everything resolves in a surprisingly satisfactory and believable fashion.  Formulaic, but I enjoyed it like a good cake!

The Word, by Mary G. Thompson

Caught in a custody battle between her parents that also pits her between the harshly patriarchal (but safely predicatble) world of the Word and the frightening freedom of the outside world, Lisa struggles to figure out where she fits in.

Stolen from her mother at the age of seven, Lisa's been raised in her father's religious community and taught to obey men without question.  Even after her father is expelled, she follows him nearly unerringly as they end up on the streets.  And when she is finally rescued and returned to her mother, she must perform one final act of loyalty for the man.  But having tasted a world of freedom in which she can make her own choices, is she still obligated to obey her father's last order?

A suspenseful thriller that follows a well-worn path.  But while it uses familiar tropes, Thompson avoids spending inordinate time on them.  Yes, the reclusive messianic cult that Lisa and her parents are involved in has lots of abuse, hypocrisy, and shaky theology, but we spend little time on it (and the focus is mostly on how incompatible her Dad is with the faith). Lisa has plenty of symptoms of PTSD, but we skim over the events that caused them. In place of gratuitous scenes of physical jeopardy, there a strong drive to race to the end.  The plot's notable feature is its focus on its goal.  Strong characters and some unusual supporting rules (like Lisa's homeschooled boyfriend) also give this novel some originality amidst the familiar.