The Ghost of Us, by James L. Sutter

Cara has spent years trying to live down the infamy of a sexting mistake by hosting a YouTube channel about ghost hunting.  Accompanied by her Christian friend Holly, she's searching for evidence of the existence of ghosts.  So, when she stumbles across a real one -- Aiden, a kid in her school who was killed in an accident last year -- she finally has something that can make her famous and get her out of her deadend town.  

Aiden's ghost, however, has goals of his own.  He wants Cara to ask his sister Meredith to the Senior Prom to raise her out of a year of depression and mourning.  Cara agrees to help out and (against the advice of her friend Holly) starts romancing Meredith.  While initially she does this as part of a deal to be able to use Aiden for her channel, she finds herself falling for Meredith for real.  But what will happen when Meredith learns the truth?

A rather clever supernatural romance that has a lot to say about self-acceptance, as well as some wise words about friendships and familial bonds.  The pacing is off and things get compressed at the end, but Sutton has created very full characters who interact nicely.  Sutton manages the rare feat of being a male author who can cross the gender divide and create authentic female characters.  The writing is witty and the story is lively and fun.

Unbecoming, by Seema Yasmin

In this nearly-fictional YA dystopian novel, Texas is imagined as a place that has outlawed and criminalized all abortions.  Even hormonal drugs and basic medical supplies (like the gel for ultrasounds) are carefully monitored and regulated.  Some activity is even a capital offense, creating a state of fear.  But in the midst of all that danger, a system of undercover mobile clinics still struggle to make OB-GYN services available, including birth control, IVF, and abortion.  Working against them are not only the police, but gangs of armed vigilantes trying to track down the renegades at all cost.  Nearly fiction or maybe not fictional enough?

Laylah and Noor are two Muslim teens who have taken it upon themselves to produce a guide for their fellow Texas teens about what to do if you find out that you're pregnant and want to terminate it.  Noor is a diehard journalist with a conviction to getting her facts right and keeping the guide relevant and up-to-date.  That's a particular challenge when the people who are providing services are constantly on the move and trying to stay hidden.  Laylah is the scientific mind with plans to enter a pre-med program and become an OB-GYN.  So when she discovers that she is pregnant, she is afraid of what the pregnancy will do to her career plans.  Suddenly, the guide is even more important to her and her fact checking work takes on a personal urgency.

For a book vying for Most Likely to Be Banned From Your School Library, the novel disappoints.  A great premise and a strong start get quickly bogged down in a series of poorly paced adventures as Laylah struggles to find a source for medications for her abortion.  Whether it's to create dramatic tension or to simply pad out the story, everything is s t r e t c h e d out and made entirely more complicated than it needs to be.  As the story progressed, I great more and more annoyed at the digressions.  This is topped off towards the end by a very powerful but largely unrelated story that packs a punch but serves to suck the energy out of the climax.  We get feels and a lot of deep thoughts but no decent release of the dramatic tension of the main plot.  

It's a gutsy book with a lot to say and occasional laugh-out-loud moments, but overall poor storytelling.

Six More Months of June, by Daisy Garrison

Caplan and Mina have been next door neighbors and best friends through their school years.  Mina is shy and withdrawn, an outcast at school.  Caplan is popular and dating the school's Queen Bee Hollis.  But there has always been some sort of connection between Caplan and Mina that no one can explain (but people assume that it is some sort of crush).  But now, approaching the end of high school, Caplan is forced to face some uncomfortable truths about his feelings for Mina when she starts dating his best friend Quinn.  And as things explode emotionally around them and the curtain closes on their childhoods, a reckoning comes to all.

A beautifully written story that has all of the tropes but none of the expected endings.  The biggest surprise is Hollis who, far from being some uber-popular bitch, ends up being the nicest person of all.  Yet each of the other main characters (Caplan, Mina, and Quinn) manage to surprise with their independent non-stereotypical actions.  The book is littered with favorite scenes and fulls of brilliant quotes and one suspects that Garrison has spent her lifetime collecting favorite anecdotes to stuff into this first novel.

Anecdote packing, unfortunately, is also the weakness of the book.  For while the book is an exquisitely exposition upon the cusp of adulthood, it is bereft of an actual story.  The plot boils down to "four kids graduate and realize that they love each other in ways that transcend romantic or sexual feelings" and that's basically it.  You'll want to read it very slowly and carefully to suck out all the goodness, but in the end there isn't much substance here -- no deep meaning, no emotional climax -- just a sense of young people (through the author) making fantastic observations about life and growing up.

On the Bright Side, by Anna Sortino

For Ellie, living at a boarding school for deaf students was a godsend, helping her come out and thrive.  So, when the school closes and she's forced to come home and finish her senior year at home, it's hard to adjust to being the only deaf student at the public high school. And it's never been easy with her family.  Her parents are less than understanding about her needs and subconsciously favor her (hearing) older sister.  She can't wait until she graduates so she can get away from everything and everybody.

After a pretty rough introduction on her first day of school, the counselor arranges for chronic overachiever Jackson to help show Ellie around.  Ellie resents Jackson's enthusiasm despite his earnest (albeit awkward) attempts to ingratiate himself to her.  However, being a romance, it just takes some time and few more awkward incidents for the two of them to find each other and connect.  And along the way, we explore the many difficulties of building a relationship between a hearing person and a deaf one.

But there's more to the story.  Jackson has been experiencing random loss of motor control and sensation, and bouts of vertigo and nausea.  After some misdignosis and a harrowing scene where Ellie has to rescue him, the doctors eventually determine that Jackson has Multiple Sclerosis.  Faced with such a complex and terrifying condition, Jackson has to work through his shock, grief, and anger.  Ellie tries to help him, but it's a lot for a young love to take on.  Never mind that she has her own issues with her family to deal with.

It's a busy story with lots of issues (disability, prejudice, abuse, amongst others) that works surprisingly well and manages to bring up a lot about the experience of being hearing disabled.  It helps that the author is deaf and she draws heavily on her own life to bring in fascinating details (like the mistakes that beginners at ASL tend to make or the need to provide good lighting at parties where deaf people are attending) to fill out the story.  I enjoyed those little bits while appreciating a satisfying romance that, while not straying too far from form, still delivered an above average novel about two young people struggling with some major difficulties and overcoming them.  Eschewing an overly rosy ending, the story's issues and problems are addressed and we are left with a hopeful future for the two protagonists.

Unstuck, by Barbara Dee

Lyla has plans for a major fantasy novel.  The story's so complicated that she has trouble explaining it and it's going to take several books to cover the whole tale.  In other words, it will be truly epic!  At least, the story will be when she can get around to start writing it!  But there is background to research, geography to sort out (maybe she should draft out a map?), and a whole genealogy to draft out; to say nothing about coming up with names for all of the characters and places.  With all those distractions to figure out, it's understandable that she's struggled to put even a single sentence to paper.  And while she has a very supportive creative writing teacher, she really needs to get started!

Back home, her older sister seems to be suffering from a form of writer's block of her own.  She's supposed to be writing her application essays for college but hasn't gotten started.  Mom and Dad are going crazy nagging her and homelife has become unbearably tense.  Lyla wonders if any of the advice her teacher is giving her about writing could help her sister as well?  But Lyla is also confused by her sister's unwillingness to try.

Dee is really one of the best contemporary writers at capturing middle school mindsets.  Lyla has all of the awkward tween-ness of the age -- negotiating new school, new friends, and new avocations.  Rebelling against things she judges to be "babyish" while still struggling to understand the world to come, Lyla bravely experiments.

Dee's description of writer's block and real advice on how to work through it is a clever topic for a book, suitable for all writers, young and old.

The Wonderful Wishes of B, by Katherin Nolte

Ten year-old Bea has experienced a lot of pain lately and she has five wishes connected with those losses. She wishes her grandmother had not died, that her best friend had not moved away, that her Mom could keep her business afloat, that her Dad would visit, and that her grandma's old doll would come alive and become her little sister.  And, if nothing else, she wishes she could become like Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz and lose her heart so it would stop aching.

A new boy moves to town and convinces her that his own grandmother is a witch and can perform magic.  For the price of doing some things for the witch that Bea grows to regret, the woman is willing to grant Bea's wishes.  And while grandmother can't manage to grant all of the wishes, Bea's father does reappear with promises of his own to grant Bea's remaining wishes.  But in the end, Bea discovers that there is no magic fix for the losses we feel and that a heart is made for feeling the bad and the good.

A folksy middle reader featuring small bits of magic, adorable kitties, and plenty of friendly and quirky side characters.  While a few bad things happen, this is a light and safe story that manages to reach a predictable conclusion with a few  unexpected surprises along the way!

Emmett, by L C Rosen

Emmett is popular -- a fact that he attributes immodestly to how nice he is.  He's always thinking of other people's needs.  He's even taken it upon himself to help all of his friends find partners and he's overjoyed with planning ways in which his single friends can find each other.

He has no interest in finding a guy for himself.  He doesn't mind hooking up for sex, but getting into a committed relationship will inevitably lead to heartache and Emmett has no intention of getting hurt!  The human brain doesn't physically stop growing until you're twenty-five and so that's the earliest he'll be ready to find his life partner.

It's all very neat, but Emmett's perfect world is starting to come apart.  A string of matchmaking failures make Emmett question his skills.  And when he hurts some of his friends in the process, he doubts whether he is really as nice as he likes to to think he is.  But most grievous of all is the nagging doubt in his mind that maybe (just maybe) he would like to have a romance of his own.

I'm not sure that we need yet another adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma for the YA market (even if this version is the most flaming gay boy version to date), but my primary complaint is that I found it hard to really engage with the story.  Perhaps, because the characters really didn't seem like high schoolers, but rather more like college students.  You don't really get the feeling that Emmett and his friends live at home with their parents.  Their lives seem to mostly center around parties and flirting.  That's very Jane Austen, but it's not very American high school.  There's a fair amount of emortional drama, but not really any emotional depth and the result is more satire than romance.

Hunger, by Donna Jo Napoli

Life in the Irish countryside has alwatys been a bit precarious.  Lorraine and her family lease land from an English lord and subsist on the potatoes they grow, selling their grain harvest for income.  But when the crop fails in 1846, things start to look dire.  And in the year that follows, mass starvation leads to societal collapse.  

In the midst of the suffering, Lorraine befriends the naive but kind-hearted daughter of their lord named Susanna.  Miss Susannais a complicated character: arrogant, ignorant, and rude, but she nonetheless performs important acts oif charity that ultimately keep Lorraine alive.

Based entirely on historical fact, this is a story that won't exactly qualify as a pleasure read.  So while Napoli writes excellent historical fiction, but it's hard to imagine too many young people who would pick this book to read on the beach.  That's a shame as the book doesn't just serve as a historical account, but raises significant questions about how racism and ignorance affect the topic of immigration and of charity.

The Color of Sound, by Emily Barth Isler

Feeling burdened by her mother's expectations, violin prodigy Rosie declares that she's "on strike" for the forseeable future and not going to play.  Her furious mother punishes her by taking away her internet privileges but still holds out hope that Rosie will return to practicing.  Steaming at each other over the impasse, mother and daughter are forced have to cohabit as they visit Rosie's dying grandmother.

To get away from her family Rosie explores the property and runs across a peculiar girl her age.  Through some time travel magic, the girl turns out to be Rosie's own mother.  While Rosie frets a bit about impacting the future by interacting with her past-Mom, she is able to use the experience to learn why her mother is so controlling.  At a pivotal moment, she is also able to repair their relationship by solving a crisis in her young Mom's life.

A touching story of family regrets and legacies that is laser focused on being a Mother-Daughter Bookclub read (there are even discussion questions at the end of the book!).  I found myself getting annoyed by the way that mom's anxiety is portrayed and excused.  I also bristled at the or the heavy handed discussion about social interactions between children of different ages.  It felt like a kind of story that someone let Rosie's overbearing mother edit for appropriate content.  That made things safe, but not necessarily fun.

Those objections aside, I loved the magical time travel angle and the device of daughter teaching mother in the past (which of course was more famously done in Back to the Future).  I also enjoyed the fact that both Rosie and her mother have synthesia and hear music as color, an idea that has been explored in nother middle readers.

Break To You, by Neil Shusterman, Debra Young, and Michelle Knowlden

A series of bad choices in friends hands Adriana a seven month stretch in the Compass juvenile detention facility.  Allegedly based on novel approaches to rehabilitate young adults and avoid recidivism, Compass is really a morass of selfish and embittered adults who manipulate the children under their control for their own ends.  So much for the social critique element of this team-written novel.

The meat of the story though is an unusual romance.  Strictly segregated, boys and girls don't interact.  But when Adriana accidentally leaves her journal at the jail library, it is discovered by Jon, who reads and writes in it before leaving it for her.  The two develop a correspondance, clandestinely writing entries and leaving the book hidden on the shelves for the other to find later.  Soon, simply writing to each other is not enough and Adriana and Jon hatch a plan to find a way to meet face to face.  Doing so sets in motion a series of events with tragic consequences.

The story is gripping and briskly paced.  The characters are well developed and diverse, illustrating a variety of different incarceration experiences.  The adults are far less interesting, but do a good job of moving things forward.  The end, while unexpected, is satisfyingly open-ended.  I enjoyed the book, but I doubt it will do much more than entertain.  The authors bring up a number of flaws in the justice and corrections systems, but it is unlikely readers will make much of a connection between these one-dimensional baddies and the real world issues that exist.

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.

In the Orbit of You, by Ashley Schumacher

When they were little, Nova and Sam were inseparable playmates.  They played with snails in the backyard and styled themselves as the King and Queen of Snailopolis.  They planned to be friends forever, but Sam's father was hurting him and Sam got taken away.  And then Nova and her Mom moved away as well.

Moving is a big constant in Nova's life.  Thanks to her Mom's job as a consultant, they have to pull up stakes every few months.  When she was younger, Nova liked the excitement of going to a new place and having a new beginning, but as she grows older it has begun to wear on her.  Not only has she been unable to form any lasting friendships, but also she has struggled to develop any sense of herself and who she wants to become.

The latest move seems like all the others until she stumbles upon Sam at school.  At first, he doesn't recognize her, but thanks to a gimmicky personality test the students take, he is drawn to her when they are matched as "99% compatible" (much to the chagrin of Sam's girlfriend Abigail).  After the initial shock of the reunion, they agree that they will just be friends.  Nova will be moving on in two months.  Sam has a good thing going with Abigail.  They agree it is better to stay "on course." But of course that isn't what ends up happening.

While the idea of destiny and fate can seem very romantic, there is the hanging dread of eventual discovery as Nova and Sam start fooling around that weighs heavily on any of the fun.  And with Abigail portrayed as unusually nice and understanding, their betrayal seems cruel and selfish.  In the end, Abigail herself rightly calls them on their immaturity and I was left without much sympathy (and even less empathy) for Nova and Sam's angst.  It doesn't help that the story gets dragged out far longer than it needs to be.  The subplots about Nova and Sam's individual struggles with their futures would have been far more interesting with less of the secret forbidden romance (maybe without any of it).

The Wilderness of Girls, by Madeline Claire Franklin

With her father arrested and her stepmother on the lam, Rhi is left trying to find her footing living with her uncle, a forest ranger.  Hiking in the woods one day, she comes upon a pack of four feral girls dressed in furs and animal skins, guarded by two wolves.  

From where did they come and how did they survive for so many years?  The girls believe that they are enchanted princesses, who have been raised by a man named Mother, in an old collapsed tree that they call a "castle." Mother's magic protected them, helped them find food, and healed them when they grew sick.  It was Mother who explained to them that they were four of five and when they met the fifth princess they would be ready to fight to free the people of a kingdom in another dimension.  Through all their hardships, the girls believed in Mother.  But when he died, the magic went away and the girls sought out help.

Who was Mother?  Was he magical or some sort of psychopath who kidnapped the girls.  Are the girls princesses or victims? Finding the answer to that question will tell the girls as much about themselves as it will explain about the man.  Now thrust into the modern world, they are pressured by the authorities, the media, and the people who are caring for them to define themselves so they can be properly categorized.

For Rhi, their struggle to understand and explain themselves feels like her own and it soon becomes apparent that she might share their destiny.  But what is the fate for young women raised in the woods and totally unprepared for the brutal wilderness of the larger world?  Their instincts are to fight for their survival and they are unversed in the subtleties and duplicities now around them.  They don't understand the behaviors that are expected of them as young women and, while they desire to integrate into society and uncertain that they can compromise themselves to do so.

This complex and multi-layered novel explores female friendship and companionship.  While Franklin brings in some pretty horrific abuse and violence (including a brief scene of cannibalism), the story is less about pointing out the brutality of the world for women and more about the way women connect and communicate in the face of such abuse and violence.  This can occasionally grow preachy for the benefit of young readers who may struggle with the nuanced reading of feminine negotiations with patriarchy that Franklin employs, but this is all good Feminism 101 stuff.

Written in more of the style of a legend or an extended parable, as if Franklin is recounting an epic journey, there's not a lot of depth to the characters or examinations of their personal feelings.  Instead, the girls are largely symbolic from their backstories (which are a catalog of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse).  Even their names (Verity, Sunder, Oblivienne, Grace, and Eden)`suggest meaning.  

Overall, the writing is gorgeous, the thoughts profound, and the story memorable.  Definitely one of the best YA books of 2024. 

Flyboy, by Kasey LeBlanc

In his daily life as a senior, Asher can't find the courage to tell people he's a boy.  All that anyone sees is him wearing the stupid plaid skirt that the girls have to wear.  But in his dreams, Asher is an acrobat in the Midnight Circus, a magical place where everyone sees him for who he actually is -- a boy.  And for months, that is how it is:  daytime spent dealing with controlling prejudiced grandparents and a largely absent mother, nightime sailing through the air. The two worlds never meet, until the day Asher discovers that his trapeeze partner walking the halls of his school.

The discovery corresponds with troubles befalling both worlds and Asher must take drastic measures to save the Circus.  These steps will involve coming clear in the daytime world about who he is and accepting what that will cost him.

The novel is a peculiar mix of a realistic coming out story with a fantasy element.  It's clever and allows for a steady comparison of the brave hopes that Asher has in his dreams conflicting with the reality of the way fear paralyzes him.  But while Asher has some nice depth, the other characters seemed more like caricatures (especially, the odious grandparents).  And the story, which  builds towards a nice climax with Asher finding strength in his fantasies to take action in the real world, gets sidetracked with an ending that pulls out lots of unnecessary drama involving his mother's unrelated backstory and a similarly out-of-the-blue disaster.