Category Archives: Young Adult/Teen 12-18

Most-Anticipated Books Out November 2020

Lists, News and Fun, Young Adult/Teen 12-18
8 Most-Anticipated YA Books Coming November 2020

Most-Anticipated YA Books Coming This Month

Whether you’re looking for a book to escape reality, make you laugh out loud, or reimagine a familiar story, you’re in for a great month, because there are some fantastic YA books coming out this November. Here are some of the ones I am most excited to read.

Instant Karma by Marissa Meyer

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

What you need to know: A fun rom-com featuring a coastal town, overachieving girl who wakes with the ability to cast instant karma on those around her, and her least favorite person who causes her powers to consistently backfire. Sounds too cute!

Available November 3, 2020

Fortune’s Fall by Katherine Barger

Amazon | Goodreads

What you need to know: Inspired by the biblical stories of Nehemiah and Daniel and set in America’s future.

Available November 3, 2020 | Author Q&A

The Lemon Tree by Sandy Tolan (Young Readers’ Edition)

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

What you need to know: A Palestinian and an Israeli sit on the steps of the home where each grew up and begin a surprising friendship. Based on Tolan’s extensive research and reporting.

Available November 3, 2020

Love & Olives by Jenna Evans Welch

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

What you need to know: Love & Gelato #3. Mama Mia-inspired tale about a girl searching for her estranged father in Greece.

Available November 10, 2020

The Camelot Betrayal by Kiersten White

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

What you need to know: Camelot Rising #2. A King Arthur legend-inspired series centered around Guinevere.

Available November 10, 2020

Malcolm and Me by Robin Farmer

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

What you need to know: Set against Watergate and the post-civil rights era. A coming-of-age tale of truth-telling, faith, family, forgiveness, and social activism featuring a 13-year-old Philly native with the soul of a poet.

Available November 17, 2020

Most-Anticipated Middle Grade Books Coming This Month

I missed a few middle grade books coming this month when I did my fall round-up, so I wanted to add a couple more here.

Aster’s Good, Right Things by Kate Gordon

Book Depository | Goodreads

What you need to know: A girl compelled to do secret good deeds. A boy in princess pajamas who helps her.

Available November 1, 2020

Clifton Chase on Castle Rock by Jaimie Engle

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

What you need to know: Clifton Chase Adventures #2. A new 11th century adventure. Magic arrows. A chance to warn a dear friend so he can avoid his death. More Clifton Chase?! Yes!

Available November 24, 2020

What’s on your November reading list?

Have you read or ordered any of the books on my list already? Which books are you looking forward to reading this November?

Review: Broken Wish by Julie C. Dao

Book Review and Content, Fantasy, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , ,

Broken Wish (The Mirror #1)
Julie C. Dao
Disney-Hyperion
Published October 6, 2020

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

About Broken Wish

1865
Hanau, Germany

Sixteen-year-old Elva has a secret. She has visions and strange powers that she will do anything to hide. She knows the warnings about what happens to witches in their small village of Hanau. She’s heard the terrible things people say about the Witch of the North Woods, and the malicious hunts that follow. But when Elva accidentally witnesses a devastating vision of the future, she decides she has to do everything she can to prevent it.

Tapping into her powers for the first time, Elva discovers a magical mirror and its owner—none other than the Witch of the North Woods herself. As Elva learns more about her burgeoning magic, and the lines between hero and villain start to blur, she must find a way to right past wrongs before it’s too late.

My Review

BROKEN WISH was not the book I expected it to be. (Not in a bad way!) I thought it might be dark, the way that FOREST OF A THOUSAND LANTERNS is. I thought it would be strictly from Elva’s point-of-view.

It’s not nearly as dark as Dao’s debut novel, which didn’t bother me at all. I liked the sort of quaint, small town feel of Hanau, where the story is set. There are a few references to Grimm’s fairy tales, and the setting of the story definitely felt like a place where those tales would happen.

The story isn’t limited to one point-of-view. The early chapters are told from the perspective of Elva’s mother, who befriends a solitary neighbor and later learns that she’s a witch with the power to give her the one thing she desperately wants– the ability to have a child– in exchange for her friendship.

BROKEN WISH then shifts to Elva’s point-of-view, and we learn about her special gift and the struggle she faces: she must either hide her gift forever or risk being exiled, or worse. She’s a sweet girl who wants to believe the best of everyone. I loved her courage and her unwavering commitment to the people she loved.

Another thing that I enjoyed is that BROKEN WISH is mainly a story of female friendships. Agnes (Elva’s mother) and her relationship with Mathilde (the solitary neighbor with magical abilities), and then Elva’s relationship with Mathilde, both as mentor and friend.

On the whole, I really enjoyed reading this book, and I’m really excited to read the rest of the series, which looks like it’ll be four books, each written by a different author. The next book in the series will be SHATTERED MIDNIGHT by Dhonielle Clayton and will be set in New Orleans in 1928.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Representation
Major characters are white and German. Mathilde grew up with an aunt and her female partner.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
No profanity. In one scene, a woman makes reference to a group of men saying awful things about her, some of them sexual.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl.

Spiritual Content
Mathilde and Elva both have magical abilities. Performing magic requires a kind of exchange, and if the exchange is not met, the magic can take an unexpected price.

Violent Content
Children sicken after eating poisoned candy. A group of angry men say cruel things to a woman and call for her to be hanged.

Drug Content
Elva’s parents drink alcohol at a party.

Note: I received a free copy of BROKEN WISH in exchange for my honest review. This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support the costs of running this blog.

Review: Mary Underwater by Shannon Doleski

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Mary Underwater
Shannon Doleski
Amulet
Published April 7, 2020

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

About Mary Underwater

Mary Murphy feels like she’s drowning. Her violent father is home from prison, and the social worker is suspicious of her new bruises. An aunt she’s never met keeps calling. And if she can’t get a good grade on her science project, she’ll fail her favorite class.

But Mary doesn’t want to be a victim anymore. She has a plan: build a real submarine, like the model she’s been making with Kip Dwyer, the secretly sweet class clown.

Gaining courage from her heroine, Joan of Arc, Mary vows to pilot a sub across the Chesapeake Bay, risking her life in a modern crusade to save herself.

Mary Underwater is an empowering tale of persistence, heroism, and hope from a luminous new voice in middle-grade fiction.

My Review

Special thanks to Dahlia Adler from LGBTQReads for inviting authors to list their debut novels in a thread on her Twitter account, which I think is how I learned about this book.

The cover and description of MARY UNDERWATER totally had me hooked. I am super interested in stories that show young women and STEM, and a girl building a submarine seemed too cool to pass up.

This book has so many things I love. I love Mary’s character. The way her timidity blossoms into confidence. The celebration of St. Joan of Arc both in her narrative and in biographical snippets between chapters. I love the relationships between Mary and her teachers, Sister Eu and Mr. Fen, and her mentor, Ford. I love the way her aunt steps into her life, building a safe relationship, and encouraging Mary, but also talking straight.

I read MARY UNDERWATER in one sitting because I couldn’t stop. Without meaning to, I pretty much one-more-chaptered myself all the way to the end and I have zero regrets about that. It’s a heartwarming, inspiring story, with a strong, positive representation of both women and faith. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that combination done so well before, and I really, truly loved it.

I think readers who enjoyed THE QUEEN BEE AND ME by Gillian McDunn or CHIRP by Kate Messner absolutely need to read this one.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 10 to 14.

Representation
Mary’s aunt has a female partner.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
References to cursing.

Romance/Sexual Content
Brief kissing between boy and girl.

Spiritual Content
Mary attends a Catholic school and makes lots of references to the nuns praying. She also takes courage from the story of St. Joan of Arc and imagines herself being brave as she was. Mary prays the Hail Mary prayer while distressed.

Violent Content – Possible trigger warning for domestic violence
Mary and her mother have bruises from her father abusing them. The abuse happens off-scene. Her father also breaks something important to Mary and attacks one of her friends. (Both these incidents happen off-scene.)

Drug Content
Mary’s dad drinks a lot of alcohol.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support running this blog.

Review: The Gifted, the Talented, and Me by William Sutcliffe

Book Review and Content, Contemporary, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , , ,

The Gifted, the Talented, and Me
William Sutcliffe
Bloomsbury YA
Published October 13, 2020

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

About The Gifted, the Talented, and Me

Fifteen-year-old Sam isn’t special. He’s not a famous vlogger, he’s never gone viral, and he doesn’t want to be the Next Big Thing. What he likes most is chatting to his friends and having a bit of a kick about.

None of which was a problem until Dad got rich and Mum made the whole family move to London. Now Sam is being made to go to the North London Academy for the Gifted and Talented, where every student is too busy planning Hollywood domination or starting alt-metal psychedelica crossover bands or making clothes out of bathmats to give someone as normal as him the time of day. Can Sam navigate his way through the weirdness and find a way to be himself?

Laugh-out-loud funny and instantly recognisable – not since The Inbetweeners has a coming of age story been so irreverent and relatable.

My Review

I really, really struggled with this book. Some of it is super funny. I laughed out loud more than once. There are a lot of references to penises, and I get that it’s a thing that does occupy the mind. It was just a lot, sort of the same joke over and over.

If you’ve read many other reviews of this book, you’ve probably come across some discussion of the queerbaiting content, so I want to talk about that first. Basically, what happens is this: Sam’s brother, Ethan, joins a queer band (every band has to have a “thing,” he tells Sam), so he tells everyone he’s bisexual in order to be in the band. It becomes increasingly clear that Ethan is not bisexual, but he continues to use the label so he can continue with the band. Which is pretty clearly queerbaiting, and totally wrong.

In the story, Sam continually tells Ethan that what he’s doing is wrong and is going to catch up with him. Ethan does eventually face some consequences for his actions, though we don’t get a firsthand response from any queer characters. He does eventually have to own up to his identity and is pretty miserable about how things end up. It’s not great, and I would still say that there isn’t really a moment when he gets called out on the behavior by queer characters or anyone putting into perspective how harmful the behavior can be. But it is strongly condemned in the story as wrong and deceitful.

During Sam’s callback for the school play audition, he relates the performances of other students in a pretty derogatory way. I felt gross reading that section because he was both unkind in the way he described the other actors competing for the part he wanted, but he was also kind of superior and snobby, and none of that was ever called out as wrong.

For the most part, I really liked the dynamics of Sam’s family, especially in the scenes where they’re kind of all having snappy conversations that kind of run over each other. That felt really true to the experience of a big family with lots of funny people in it. I wish that his mom hadn’t been quite so over-the-top and such a largely negative portrayal of feminism.

On the whole, there were lots of funny things in this book, but readers may find the constant penis joke/awareness to be too much and may be troubled by the presence of queerbaiting, even though it’s condemned.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Representation
Most characters are white. A couple minor characters identify as queer. Sam’s brother falsely identifies as queer.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Strong profanity used infrequently. Crude humor used frequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Kissing between boy and girl. Two references to sexual touching. Some vague references to hoping not to be a virgin until age 30.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
Two boys appear to be about to have a fight.

Drug Content
One student has a house party with alcohol.

Note: I received a free copy of THE GIFTED, THE TALENTED, AND ME in exchange for my honest review. This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support the costs of running this blog.

Review: A Golden Fury by Samantha Cohoe

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A Golden Fury
Samantha Cohoe
Wednesday Books
Published October 13, 2020

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

About A Golden Fury

Thea Hope longs to be an alchemist out of the shadow of her famous mother. The two of them are close to creating the legendary Philosopher’s Stone—whose properties include immortality and can turn any metal into gold—but just when the promise of the Stone’s riches is in their grasp, Thea’s mother destroys the Stone in a sudden fit of violent madness.

While combing through her mother’s notes, Thea learns that there’s a curse on the Stone that causes anyone who tries to make it to lose their sanity. With the threat of the French Revolution looming, Thea is sent to Oxford for her safety, to live with the father who doesn’t know she exists.

But in Oxford, there are alchemists after the Stone who don’t believe Thea’s warning about the curse—instead, they’ll stop at nothing to steal Thea’s knowledge of how to create the Stone. But Thea can only run for so long, and soon she will have to choose: create the Stone and sacrifice her sanity, or let the people she loves die.

My Review

I loved all the twisty, turning elements of this story. The quest to create the Stone. The evolving relationships, especially between Thea and her parents and Will and Valentin. I love that she faces things her mother taught her about relationships, and about men in particular and has to decide for herself if they are true. There’s a lot of exploration on trust and how much someone deserves, and some about what forgiveness looks like, and the nature of power.

Thea is a complicated character who struggles with a desire to please her mother and also resents her mother’s control over her. She desperately wants to find her own way, but also desperately wants to save her mother, too. I felt like she was so relatable in all of that, and I felt her anxiety about being on her own and her butterflies about meeting her father for the first time.

The tone in the story has an older feel to it (as in centuries, not the age of the characters), which fits the historical genre. It reads a little bit like a scientist’s journal, in that there are a lot of observations and internal thoughts and long stretches where there isn’t much dialogue.

This didn’t really bother me at all once I got into the story. By about chapter four or five, I felt pretty hooked, and even before that I was enjoying the story and really interested in what happened. But for me, my reading seemed to take off once I was a few chapters in.

I think readers who enjoyed TO BEST THE BOYS by Mary Weber, or GIVE THE DARK MY LOVE by Beth Revis will really enjoy this one.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 14 up.

Representation
Major characters are white. There are some clashes of class, rich versus poor.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
One curse in German.

Romance/Sexual Content
Some clear attraction between a man and woman. References to others having had sex.

Spiritual Content
One character is Catholic and visits a priest to confess sins. The Philosopher’s Stone gives its bearer a great amount of power, but also carries a curse that destroys the sanity of anyone who tries to make it.

Violent Content
Several violent altercations with some brief graphic violence. Some reference to and events leading to torture. Multiple characters are restrained with chains once they’ve gone mad.

Drug Content
Some historically appropriate social drinking.

Note: I received a free copy of A GOLDEN FURY in exchange for my honest review. This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support the costs of running this blog.

About Samantha Cohoe

Website | Goodreads | Instagram | Twitter

Samantha Cohoe writes historically-inspired young adult fantasy. She was raised in San Luis Obispo, California, where she enjoyed an idyllic childhood of beach trips, omnivorous reading, and writing stories brimming with adverbs. She currently lives in Denver with her family and divides her time among teaching Latin, mothering, writing, reading, and deleting adverbs. A Golden Fury is her debut novel.

Review: Blazewrath Games by Amparo Ortiz

Book Review and Content, Fantasy, Young Adult/Teen 12-18, , , , , ,

Blazewrath Games
Amparo Ortiz
Page Street Kids
Published October 6, 2020

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Book Depository | Indiebound | Goodreads

About Blazewrath Games

Lana Torres has always preferred dragons to people. In a few weeks, sixteen countries will compete in the Blazewrath World Cup, a tournament where dragons and their riders fight for glory in a dangerous relay. Lana longs to represent her native Puerto Rico in their first ever World Cup appearance, and when Puerto Rico’s Runner—the only player without a dragon steed—is kicked off the team, she’s given the chance.

But when she discovers that a former Blazewrath superstar has teamed up with the Sire—a legendary dragon who’s cursed into human form—the safety of the Cup is jeopardized. The pair are burning down dragon sanctuaries around the world and refuse to stop unless the Cup gets cancelled. All Lana wanted was to represent her country. Now, to do that, she’ll have to navigate an international conspiracy that’s deadlier than her beloved sport.

How to Train Your Dragon meets Quidditch through the Ages in this debut fantasy, set in an alternate contemporary world, in which dragons and their riders compete in an international sports tournament.

My Review

The comparison to HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON and Quidditch definitely fits this book. Once Lana joins the Blazewrath team, lots of chapters take place on the field, describing the game and her team’s efforts to win.

Because Lana isn’t a dragon rider with a shared bond and closeness to any of the dragons, they are all pretty minor characters. I thought it was cool that different regions had different types of dragons, and that the dragons themselves had lots of varying abilities and behaviors.

I liked Lana– she’s smart and determined. She pursues the truth about the Sire no matter the risk to herself, and she stays bold and committed even in the face of danger.

I liked a LOT of things about the book. It’s a wild adventure, and full of Puerto Rican pride and the love of found family. I think fans of DRAGON WARRIOR by Katie Zhao will like the high adventure and alternate contemporary setting. Readers who are interested in but not quite ready for LOBIZONA by Romina Garber should add THE BLAZEWRATH GAMES to their bookshelves.

Content Notes

Recommended for Ages 10 to 14.

Representation
Lana and her teammates are Puerto Rican. A couple minor characters are gay.

Profanity/Crude Language Content
Moderate profanity used infrequently.

Romance/Sexual Content
Some flirting, but nothing beyond that.

Spiritual Content
None.

Violent Content
Some scenes show brief but graphic violence, including a throat being cut. References to torture and execution. The Blazewrath game includes combat-style play which can result in serious injury.

Drug Content
None.

Note: This post contains affiliate links, which do not cost you anything to use, but which help support the costs of running this blog.