Middle Grade
Sol Goes for Goal! by Julio Anta, illus. by Gabi Mendez
Welcome back to Hillside Valley-this time it’s Game On for Sol!
Twelve-year-old Sol is a great friend, a model student, a beloved daughter and a star soccer player. At least that’s what everyone always expects of her. But when the soccer team captain Lily walks by, Sol starts to lose focus. What’s with this heart fluttering feeling she has around Lily?! And how can she stay the star player–the star everything–that people see her as if she can barely remember her name (much less how to play soccer) around Lily? Is Sol destined to let everyone down, including herself? Or can she figure out how to be the Sol she wants to be…on and off the field.
Young Adult
When We Almost Came Undone by Georgia K. Boone
I just want to enjoy being alive. Can’t that be enough?
Tia doesn’t know how much more she can take. Things have been weird with her best friend Drew, her older sister Mel is in a coma after a mental health crisis, a global pandemic has stolen her senior year, and racial tensions are high across the country following the killing of another unarmed Black man by a police officer.
So when Tia’s oldest sister Alexis invites her to stay at her place, Tia jumps at the chance to get out of the house and away from her daily life, if only for a little while. But getting to know the cute girl she meets while walking her sister’s pandemic puppy is not enough to distract her from the weight of her world. Will Mel finally wake up? Is Alexis also on the edge of breaking? Will her friendship with Drew survive the summer? Is protest and quarantine all Tia can look forward to?
With so much unrest in the world and in her life, Tia will have to figure out how to keep from losing hope and losing her mind.
Her Sharp Embrace by Kate Koenig
In the glittering city of New Soleil, beauty masks danger at every turn. The Nightshades, a crew of magical outlaws, are no different. Their glamorous facades conceal the terror they strike into the hearts of the rich and powerful as they steal from the corrupt and fight for the forgotten.
Noa Toussaint fled her cossetted life as a Saint to join the Nightshades. Infatuated with their ferocious leader, Lennon, Noa aims to capture her heart and keep it. Her talent for alchemy is valuable, but her connection to her family puts all of the Shades in danger.
Now enemies are closer than Lennon knows and Noa must uncover the threat and keep them both alive. Because in a city where lies are lethal and magic is fading, secrets aren’t just costly―they’re deadly.
The Last Death Poet by Stephen Daly
‘I know about the visions. I have your camera. Call me. Please.’
When Michael is uprooted to his mum’s hometown of Belfast, he isn’t just hoping for a fresh start. He’s determined to discover the truth about his dad’s mysterious absence. But from the moment he arrives, he’s plagued with visions of the city’s troubled past.
Michael begins settling into his new life and even meets a boy who helps erase the painful memories of his ex. But as the visions grow stronger and more intense, the only person he can really confide in is his new friend Meg.
As Meg delves into the supernatural source of the visions, Michael begins to question whether events of the past are linked to his dad’s disappearance.
Can he use his powers to find his dad before he’s gone forever?
Devils We Know by L.T. Thompson
This is the sequel to Devils Like Us
We need to find Death.
Cas, Remy, and Finn are on the run from the Order of Lazarus, a secret society that wants to use Cas’s prophetic powers to capture Death and ensure that only the “unworthy” and “immoral” will meet their ends. Which will not only upend nature’s balance but also tear apart the only place the friends have ever felt safe to be themselves: Aboard the Mori, where Cas can live openly as a trans boy, and where Remy and Finn are beginning to fall for each other. No matter what, they can’t let that happen.
To protect their found family of queer sailors, the three teens will need to find Death first and strike a bargain of their own. But the society is hot on their heels-and so is a demon who’s determined to claim the soul he’s owed.
Adult
The Unmagical Life of Briar Jones by Lex Croucher
For as long as they can remember, Briar Jones dreamed of attending the Temple School of Thaumaturgy. Behind its looming ornate gates, the elite prep school—the place that has produced the most CEOs and Prime Ministers in British history—is whispered to be magical.
Briar’s best friend, Sebastian Wolfe, never cared about Temple or believed in the rumors. He just wanted them to stay together forever.
When, at age 11, Seb gets an acceptance letter and Briar doesn’t, their childhood friendship is shattered. Seb vanishes onto Temple’s grounds and Briar resigns themself to a mundane life. But they can’t completely forget their yearning for Temple, for the extraordinary, to be one of the chosen in the ivory tower.
Seven years later, a summer job advert appears: a temp position sorting through the junk in Temple’s attics. Briar takes it. And they discover that quiet, sensitive Seb, the boy they once loved more than anything else in the world, has become Bastian: a beautiful, arrogant villain feared by most of the school. And worse, the secrets Temple is hiding might not be so magical after all, but a dark conspiracy with implications that extend far beyond the gates.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | Blackwell’s
Nymph by Sofia Montrone
To ten-year-old Leo, life is a collection. She spends her mornings tidying the rooms of her Nonna Tina’s timeworn Italian agriturismo, carefully accumulating the curious bits of left-behind detritus from guests—a pearl earring, a lock of hair. Her nights are suffused with gathering the stories that flow from her father’s lips—liquor-spun tales of Odysseus and the Trojans in secret battle. But when an accident rips the gentle membrane of Leo’s childhood, she is left vulnerable to the pains and pleasures of growing up.
Years later, in a sultry summer not unlike the many that came before, the agriturismo is the only thing that remains the same. Nonna Tina has grown older, Leo’s brother Max is intractable and mercurial, and the curiosity Leo so loved to feed as a child has turned into something more confusing. When she meets Dolores, an American girl made brilliant by Leo’s perception of her, she can’t help but gather all the experiences first love promises, while shedding parts of the past she no longer fits into.
Endless Blue Beneath by Shannon K. English
Eppie has never quite understood why the world hates her—all she did was kiss a girl. Must that mean she suffers isolation, with whispers and glares following her at every turn? She tries to focus on her duty to her family, but options are limited for a woman alone, and life in the seaside village of Hwenfirth is agonizingly mundane.
One day, as Eppie walks along the beach, she spies someone drowning in the shallows. Without thinking, she runs to rescue the poor soul—but when she gets up close, instead of a sputtering victim she finds an inhuman creature smiling up at her with rows of sharp, white teeth that snap closed on her arm and drag her beneath the waves.
When Eppie awakes in a deep ocean cave, she finds her own body has changed: she can breathe underwater, her skin is turning scaly, her teeth have been replaced by fangs, and she is suddenly ravenous for human flesh.
She has become a dreaded creature of the ocean—a mermaid.
Things aren’t all bad, though. The mermaid colony is mesmerizing and Eppie’s new sisters are fiercely loyal. And when Eppie meets Marie, a stunningly beautiful mermaid with a past as shadowed as her glossy, raven-black scales, she finds she no longer needs to resist the desires that were denied to her on land.
But the mermaid hunters are coming, and Eppie must decide whether to protect the new, monstrous family she’s found or leave it all behind for a chance to live above the waves once again.
The Way it Haunted Him by Laura R. Samotin
Guilt. Grief. Obsession.
Michael Stein arrives at the Schechter Institute for Judaic Studies battered and broken, blaming himself for the tragic accident that took his boyfriend’s life. He is haunted by his guilt and grief, but is determined to repent while at Institute by completing his boyfriend’s research into demonic entities.
But instead of being welcomed by the archivist, Michael is met by Jacob Schechter—the archivist’s enigmatic, brooding grandson, who has inherited the Institute after his grandfather’s death. As Michael explores the archive, delving into cryptic texts and whispered histories, shadows from the past begin to seep into the present. Tormented by demons both real and imagined, Michael’s grief warps into something far darker—an intoxicating, yet increasingly toxic obsession with Jacob, whose own secrets threaten to destroy them both.
Now, Michael must confront the terrible truth behind his boyfriend’s death—and his obsession with Jacob—before the darkness they awaken in each other claims more than just their love, and consumes them entirely.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | Blackwell’s
I’ll Take the Fire by Leila Slimani
Q: If your house was burning down, what would you take with you?
A: I’d take the fire.
–Jean Cocteau
Mia Daoud yearns to be free. Growing up in socially conservative Morocco, her imagination fired by her banker father’s charisma and political idealism, her doctor mother’s feminist example and social conscience, and the boundless possibilities suggested by her favorite authors, she learns to go after what she wants, even if it means jumping through fire to get it. Determined to be true to her sexuality and to differentiate herself from her adoring younger sister, she sets out in search of her place in the world, from Casablanca to Paris to London, and against the backdrop of era-defining events like the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, guided by a preternatural sense of justice and an unerring instinct for what makes her feel most alive.
Cages by Chantel Acevedo
Cages is the story of Felix—a zookeeper in Cuba during the time of the missile crisis, an exile in swinging sixties London, and finally a dying man in 1980s AIDS-era Miami. In this daring novel, Acevedo’s most personal and heartfelt to date, the fragments of Felix’s story are put together like pieces of a puzzle by one knew him mostly as an absence.
Cuba, 1963. Felix risks everything for an illicit love affair with a co-worker. In a society where homosexuality is branded “counterrevolutionary,” their tenderness unfolds in the shadow of danger, treachery, and political oppression. In London, Felix and his wife Anabel navigate exile and reinvention, while an aspiring actress named Claudia finds herself drawn into their orbit, her ambitions and desires colliding with Felix’s own hunger for connection. Years later, Virgilio—Anabel’s devoted brother—recounts the disintegration of Felix’s marriage and his decision to step in and protect the family Felix abandoned. From Anabel, long silent about her complicity in the events that forced Felix’s flight from Cuba, to Rita, the daughter born out of wedlock, each vivid character gives us a different version of Felix, and the result is a dazzling mosaic of longing, deception, survival, and reconciliation.
Social Animals by Camille Perri
Three women. One dog park. Things are about to get messy.
Val Caruso, Alex Reed, and June Kennerson come from completely different worlds—Val is a tough-talking private investigator; Alex is reticent, nervous and on the run from her past; and June is an athlete turned housewife whose true love is her pup.
When Val is hired by June’s husband to find out if June is cheating on him, it sets these three women on a collision course. Amid a colorful cast of characters who spend time at the shabby but beloved Hamilton Dog Park, they find they have more in common than they thought. Soon June is brave enough to aim for what she wants, Alex finds excitement she never expected, and Val is reluctantly opening her heart to the most high-maintenance dog she’s ever met. But when their secrets catch up with them, will their newfound friendships be able to withstand the pressure? Or will they find themselves in the doghouse?
Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer
An aspiring archivist determined to begin a “serious” life after an undistinguished undergraduate career takes up residence in the Italian countryside. Here, he becomes the all-purpose assistant to the Baronessa, known to her friends as Coco, a defiantly youthful and naturally flamboyant woman of ninety-two. Amid a chaotic and colorful milieu of gin-swilling princesses, incomprehensible handymen, roaming boarhunters, nuns, and other local wildlife, our young man does his best to catalog the villa’s extensive collection of art and antiques—although he notices that things seem to go missing from right under his nose.
Despite himself, he tumbles into an affair with a married man, complicating his future plans considerably. And when the Baronessa loses someone close to her, he becomes an unwitting accomplice in the acceleration of Coco’s great and final plan: to locate the love of her life and be reunited before it’s too late.
You Won’t Forget Me by Mazey Eddings
Cubby Clark’s life is falling apart. All she wants is to make music, but on the brink of hitting it big, Cubby’s on-again-off-again boyfriend and lead of her band, Connor, abandons the group. What’s worse, he rockets to overnight, solo stardom with a hit single about how bad she is in bed. With a fractured band, a publicly adored toxic ex, and a horrible case of writers block, her only comforts are her best friends and fellow bandmates, Darcy and Harry.
But, when an inadvertently romantic picture of Cubby and Harry goes viral the same night Cubby and Darcy hook-up (something that obviously means nothing for these two totally heterosexual gal pals), Cubby and her band find themselves redirecting the spotlight as tabloids eat up the rumored love triangle between Cubby, Harry, and Connor.
Thrust by their label into a whirlwind tour, Cubby wants nothing more than to turn to Darcy for support. But ever since the passionate hook-up they never talk about, there’s nothing but tension and distance between the usually inseparable pair. Under the pressure of newfound notoriety, an extremely dirty tour bus, and long buried feelings, Cubby and Darcy have a single summer to unravel the truth of what they mean to one another, or face losing the other forever.
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N
The Silent Paths of Night by David R. Slayton
This is the sequel to Dark Moon, Shallow Sea
For Raef, priest of the moon goddess Phoebe and one-time thief, it was too much to hope that resurrection of the moon and his mistress might set the world aright. The Grief still chokes the docks and streets of Versinae with vampiric ghosts, while the nations of Aegea prepare to war against each other.
Even worse, Phoebe did not return alone. Something evil came with her. Rerek, a demon who once waged war with the gods themselves, Corpse-Taker and sower of chaos, is back to make sure there is no peace in Aegea, now or ever again. And it has a plan.
Raef and his beloved Seth, knight of the sun god Hyperion, are all that stand between Rerek and utter destruction. But the ghosts of their respective pasts, the dangers they must face, and the truths that await them will test them as nothing they’ve yet endured. One way or another Rerek will get what it wants … and it will use Raef and Seth to achieve it.
Nonfiction
Autistically Me by Bradley Riches
Bradley spoke few words until age ten, when he found his voice at his theatre school. Fast-forward a decade, and he is not only a recognizable actor, but an inspirational spokesperson for autism advocacy and awareness.
Bradley is now on a mission to share his experiences and empower others like him to celebrate their neurodivergence and thrive! In this book you will discover:
- How to get a diagnosis and why it’s important
- Autism in different genders and common co-existing conditions
- Self-acceptance exercises, such as reframing negative self-talk
- Executive functioning strategies for daily life
- Tips on understanding social cues and creating healthy relationships
- Grounding techniques to manage sensory overload
- Strategies for flourishing in education and at work
- How to build self-advocacy skills and set boundaries
- Tips for dealing with poor mental health
- And how to tap into your creative passions and find your community.
With tips, exercises and everyday strategies, cutting-edge research from charity Autistica and case studies from others neurodivergent voices, this life-changing book will empower you to celebrate your unique mind!
