SEASON OF LIGHT AND DARKNESS by Jillian Cantor comes out August 4

 

The Handmaid's Tale was one of the first adult books I read as an adult and it has really stuck with me. I feel like there wasn't a lot of dystopian YA when I was growing up and the bleakness of the world really hit me hard. Well, there is a LOT of dystopian YA now and yet, it is still a kick in the teeth when I see so many parallels to the world we are living in and hopefully not becoming.

You would have to be living under a rock to not recognize patterns between the start of this book and the current American experience. Substitute greed for pride in the overblown buffoon in office, substitute racism and fear for, I don't know, scientific understanding and gender roles, and we're nearly there!

But because this is YA, the lines are drawn pretty simply and the story boils down to a resistance adventure. In a good way! 

I try not to wallow in the doom that many folks gobble up and I don't judge those that live in fear now, but I appreciated the stark black and white of the fictional world. There is an elected "dictator." People are given "reeducation" (involving what sounds like some pretty good drugs) to make them more amenable to the new world order. Everyone is painted in black and white so that it is easy to see if they are a goodie or a baddie. It's kind of refreshing to know exactly who to hate. 

And the story kicks butt! It appears to be about Ellie, a girl who was frozen with her family to wait out an administration who hates science with the passionate intensity of a thousand burning suns. Which half the country would not ever be able to calculate because girls don't get to go to school anymore. But it is half the story of Scott, her little brother who ran away before he could be frozen and now lives in the wilderness with the partisans. Stir in an unstoppable grandma and sweet plot twist involving food allergies and you have a nonstop adventure in how to resist fascism. 

There are some great details in here. My favorite is that all women, who are expected to be married by 18 at the latest, are required to dye their hair blonde. The hatred of science is the main thrust of the police state, and it is explained by the end of the book, but it doesn't hit as hard as a more realistic idealist lynchpin. But no matter, this book isn't about defining the paradigm of the overlords so much as the freedom intrinsic to resistance. Wow, those last two sentences might be the word-salad-iest sentences I have ever written, but they are accurate. 

TLDR - I loved this book and will 100% be nominating it for the Mass. Teen Choice book award list. And I can't wait for the inevitable sequel, even though I will have to reread this one before reading it unless Jillian Cantor already wrote it and is going to release it before I forget all the salient details. Unlikely, but I live in hope!

Thanks to Netgalley for the digital ARC.

MOONSINGERS by Robin J. Pritzker comes out June 14, 2026

 

Well this was a cozy one! I am not the sort of reader who constantly seeks out the cozy, but I can appreciate the appeal. I think I am guilty of assuming a cozy read will be a simple story and yet there is a lot going on here.

Ismay has come to Glenmaidens Village to work as a teacher for three wild girls in hopes that she can put in minimal time and get out of there with a reference that will allow her to find more a more conventional teaching job going forward after an accident with one of her former students derailed her previous job. 

Needless to say, she falls in love with her new charges and gets embroiled in the life of the village, which is, complicated. Since the jacket copy informs us up front that the family she is working for is fairies, I can share that it really complicates things. 

Ismay has a bad train experience getting to the village and, as any good educator will do, she writes a strongly worded letter suggesting that the line be extended into the village. But there is a magic tree that is the portal to the fairy world and as cool as a fairy world sounds, it's a weirf place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. 

By the time she has realized that this is a problem, the train company - society? I don't know what they are called - sends a guy to figure out how to do this. He is Hamish Breck (awesome name!) who is fascinated by both train efficiency and Ismay. There is a slow-burn romance and a race against the clock as Ismay learns the error of her ways and tries to stop the extension to help her employers. 

The magic aspects of the book are far less interesting to me than the minutiae of rail planning (Hamish, too) and the way that the girls get into the whole process shows a wonderful aspect of teaching - often the best thing you can do is get kids fascinated by something and then let them take on ownership themselves. 

The story was delightful, the setting was comfy and the whole thing gave me a sweet feeling of x=coziness right down to my soul. And that cover is delicious!

ONCE UPON A K-PROM by Kat Cho

 

Now this was a high school book I can get behind. It has a lot going on. A teenage girl who doesn't like to be the center of attention, a much cooler sibling, a friend from way back who gets famous and love, sweet love. However it is rife with the kind of miscommunication that I find so annoying, but is kind of necessary to propel the plot. 

Elena is just trying to get through high school and maybe save her beloved community center when Robbie Choi, her childhood bestie and first crush, comes back to town and asks her to prom. Several times. Publicly. He is now a huge K-pop star and her refusals are broadcast to all his followers, complicating her life immeasurably. She has been volunteering at the local community center and comes up with the great idea that her classmates could take all the money they would overspend to go to prom and donate it to try to keep the center going while they wait to hear if it will be funded going forward. Shockingly, her classmates find this annoying and her social stock, already embarrassingly low, falls further. 

The publicity inherent in having Robbie seem somewhat obsessed with her adds to the equation and if you have even read a book before, you are going to figure out what happens. But it is a delightful ride.

What I loved about this is the inside look at the life of an idol. It is a very narrow range of acceptable behaviors and you are constantly under scrutiny. This is horrible for Elena who likes to stay under the radar, but it is also stifling for the other characters who live in this world full time and are chafed by all the monitoring. It plays out sweetly and made the book a little more of an educational process for me rather than just a puff read. I put this down with a satisfied feeling of connections made and a desire that these crazy kids just might make it work. 

YESTERYEAR by Caro Claire Burke

 

As much as I didn't enjoy much about Yesteryear, I did enjoy the experience of reading it. I am not usually a fan of an unlikeable narrator and I usually just don't even bother with books that have them. Olive Kittridge is about as unlikeable as I get and there is a core of decency in her that made me love her. I don't think there is really a core of anything in Natalie. I mean, she has a core of steel and she appears to be a woman of faith, but mostly she seems single mindedly obsessed with herself and her own success. Maybe the joy of this book was supposed to be in seeing her brought low, but I didn't. 

I found the whole thing fascinating, but I wish the book had continued to focus on Natalie and her real life BEFORE the throwback times began. It was interesting to see her try to make a go of it in the actual homestead experience, but I didn't get off on her suffering the way I think I was supposed to. I just felt bad for her. You are allowed to feel bad for people who also are kind of insufferable and I feel like the book didn't want me to. 

It was very well written and a fascinating commentary on, well, a lot of things. I kind of want to read it again, knowing how it ends, but I also don't really want to spend more time with these people. I can see why it has been kind of polarizing and kudos to Burke for making that conversation happen. But it wasn't for me. 

The Thrashers by Julie Soto - Mass. Teen Choice Book Award Nominee

 

I did not expect to enjoy The Thrashers. It seemed scandalous and set in a high school which is usually problematic for me. Unless it is a romcom or written by someone who has spent a lot of time in an actual high school exactly like the one I work in. I just hate it when "realistic" high school books don't feel real to me. Like I loved Fake Skating, but there is no way in hell that they wouldn't let a new kid join any freaking club they wanted to! 

Back to The Thrashers. There is a popular clique that is actually NAMED The Thrashers (strike one), there is a younger kid who thinks that they will let her join because she is in love with the main thrasher (strike two), she kills herself the night of prom (strike three), the Thrashers are all called in to the police station about it (can you have more than three strikes?). I mean, I was suspending so much disbelief that my arms were shaking. 

And yet it kind of worked. I needed to know what actually happened and Soto pretty much told me by the end. It got way weirder than I anticipated, but I didn't mind the ride. Sure, Zach is a douche from day one, but high school girls are notoriously attracted to those. Lucy and Paige were essentially interchangeable to me. And I found it really hard to believe that with all the Logan Echols vibes Julian was throwing off that he and Jodi never connected at all before the shit-storm. But the whole thing was better than the sum of its parts. 

I have been booktalking the MTCBA titles and this one always puts a gleam in the eye of several kids who want to read about really horrible high school experiences, maybe as a way of making the actual horrors of high school seem more benign. And more power to them!

ATMOSPHERE by Taylor Jenkins Reid

 

It feels so strange to read a book just, you know, to read it. This middle-aged-lady book isn't for the Mass. Teen Choice Book Award or Netgally and I just picked it up for no reason (other than I really loved Daisy Jones and the Six, Malibu Rising and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - although Reid's earlier books can kiss my butt) but then I put it down because it begins with a horrible accident in space and then proceeds to make me fall in love with all the people who are likely going to die in the carnage. No THANK you!

But then my book club chose it and I was back on board. So I guess I broke my rule about not reading anything that I don't fall in love with, but for me and Atmosphere, it was a slow burn. I did end up loving it. 

Maybe it is the fact that I read before bed and often fall asleep with my book on my lap, but I had a really hard time lining up the secondary characters in my head (my fault, not Taylor's) but once I did, this beauty really came together for me. 

It deals with women in the space program in the 80s who fall in love and it ticks all the ideological boxes pretty deftly. I didn't feel preached to, but I did feel I was given a little lesson. No harm, no foul - it's important stuff. It is also about family and expectations and love and drive - alittle something for everyone. 

My book club liked it overall and I had an interesting conversation with my goddaughter - a grown-up now and a voracious reader - and she said that while she loves pretty much the same TJR books that I do (she also loathes the early ones) she didn't care for Carrie Soto is Back. I haven't read that one, and I may yet give it a try, but I theorized without having read it, as I so often do, that one of Reid's strengths is creating a sense of unexpected community and maybe that was what was missing. Frankly, I can't remember if she said that was the case or if we just became distracted by the cheese board. But I digress...

This was an engaging and heartfelt work of historical fiction (from the 80s, for the love of God...) that made me interested in the space program for the first time since the moon landing in 1968. And I am not even sure I was interested then, but there is a picture of toddler me sitting enraptured in front of the TV as Neil Armstrong made his famous leap for mankind. Maybe I was just thrilled to be able to watch TV in the daytime. Who can say?

Bridget and Gabe are Not Okay by Lex Croucher comes out August 11, 2026

 

It has been a long time since I stayed up after midnight to finish a book, but that is just what happened last night! I loved the previous book in the Camelot Disasters (ha!) series Gwen and Art are Not in Love in which Croucher visits Camelot a few hundred years after Arther Pendragon did his thing and made pretty much everybody a gay new adult. This followup looks at the aftermath of the violent events of the last third of G&A (mild spoiler) and I am here for it. 

The first book focused on Gwen, the king's daughter, and Arther, a descendent of the original recipe Arthur who has been destined to wed Gwen since babyhood. The plot focuses on the funny feelings Gwen gets when she sees Bridget (Sir of Lady depending on who you ask) who is a kick-ass knight in the tournament circuit. She knows she will never marry Art. He is annoying and an attention whore, although quite funny and charming. He is also looking with interest at Gabe, Gwen's brother and the heir to the throne. I'll leave you to read that delightful (until the last bit with the huge fight scene that was necessary but irritating) romp.

So everything is back to normal. Bridget and Gwen are growing organic vegetables and run a farm to table restaurant and Gabe and Art are fixing up a B&B on the seaside. Just kidding! Everyone is trying to deal with the aftermath of the rebellion and is miserable and, except for Arthur and to a degree, Gwen, think that the best course of action is to turn their backs on the one person who makes them happy.

Bridget has PTSD that is causing her to be hypervigilant to any danger. Gabe is having panic attacks and hates kinging, even as he begins reforms to education and "friends of Lancelot" legislation trying to normalize queer love. Gwen is just sad but is doing a great job of helping her brother rule. 

Then Lady Odessa (or something like that), the king's PR person and Gwen's new role model, suggest a reboot of the round table where Gabe, Gwen, and a bunch of knights travel around England trying to explain his new normal to the populace - adventures, hilarity, and renewal ensue. 

Croucher does a lovely job of updating the adventures of the original round table - the Green Knight, the Lady of the Lake, the freaking GRAIL - with our heroes revisiting them to different results, The secondary characters are the BEST! Sidney and his beloved Agnes are back, there are a couple of hot-daddy knights, a stick in the mud head of security knight and the son of one of the attempted usurpers who is writing their adventures and "comforting" Arthur, much to Gabe's dismay. 

This is one of my favorite kinds of adventures, a scrappy band of misfits going on a quest, and the parallels to Arthurian legend are delightful. The dialogue is often laugh out loud funny despite the grief and mental illness, and everything turns out okay. I loved seeing these kids try to change the world for the better and sometimes succeeding. The parallels to the current divisiveness in the US are hard to miss, but they are portrayed as hopeful.

I would love to nominate this for the MTCBA, but I am really not sure if it would work as a standalone, I don't remember the details of the first book, but the main story arc did give me a shortcut to the characters motivations. I may give it a shot and see what the rest of the committee thinks. I think it may not qualify as it is being touted as a sequel, but I loved it so much and want everyone to read it, so we shall see...

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced digital copy!

TIME TRAVEL FOR BEGINNERS by Jaclyn Moriarty comes out August 4, 2026

Wow, this was a sheer delight from beginning to end! I have read Jaclyn Moriarty's YA novels and appreciated their humor and the exotic Australian setting, but this took me by surprise with its depth and sheer magical storytelling. 

The blurb mentions 3 main characters - Anna, Teddy and Jade - but as I read it, I was mostly fixated on Anna. She was my gateway character and I adore her. She is a mother first and foremost, of a nerdy little wonderful middle schooler and is nervous about her parenting. She shouldn't worry, she is making all the right mistakes. 

Teddy is a cutie pie, a good friend, a solid listener and an appealing possible love interest for Anna. 

Jade didn't do much for me. I found her kind of an annoying, self-centered person who seems to put herself first in most situations. I read the sections from her point of view with some interest, but also a little bit of disdain. Until her world and Anna's shift closer and their daughters become embroiled in one another's lives - then I liked her even less, until she realizes she is dropping the ball and - Dare I say? - she becomes a wee bit self-aware. 

But I haven't even mentioned the time travel!! In this version, any trip a visitor makes to the past through the agency starts a new shoot into the multiverse. Travelers can choose to just be an observer or to have corporeal form. They can interact with people in the past, knowing that it won't change their future. Of course most people think it is a clever immersive kind of special effects matrix at best or a bunch of hooey at worst. It is beautifully rendered and I loved the shout out to Frances Hodgson Burnett. 

So Anna works there (with some great secondary characters), Teddy uses the service to try to deconstruct why his marriage fell apart and Jade goes to a creativity workshop upstairs from the offices.  To tell you anymore would give too much away. Suffice to say there is humor, grief, regret, renewal and some vicious tween girl drama. 

This is in my top 5 of the year so far - and that is saying something!

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced readers' copy.

ABBY OFFSIDES by Anna McCallie comes out June 23, 2026

 

As someone who has binged Ted Lasso 11 times, I came to this book with some expectations. And I am thrilled to inform you that they were all met, nay EXCEEDED! 

This delightful rom-com is about Abby who, in the wake of a bad break-up, leaves her job with the Boston Red Sox to take on a marketing role for a Liverpool football team. 

Maybe it's World Cup fever, or just my own shock that I have developed a love for an actual sport (although, frankly, just fictional versions) but this book hit hard! 

First off, the banter is DELICIOUS! These characters are so quippy and funny that my family nearly lost their vision rolling their eyes at my braying laughter. 

Abby is a delight. She is complex and suffering, but also mustering her wits and standing in her own defense. And Lachlan is a freaking dreamboat. Jamie Tartt's looks,  Roy Kent's conflicted backstory, and just a touch of Coach Beard's compelling weirdness. 

Of course there is the annoying bit where a simple honest conversation could have headed off the last third of the book. But if it didn't exist, there wouldn't be a last third of the book and that would make me sad, so I'll allow it. 

Of course I am a little disappointed that this is McCallie's first book so there is no back catalog for me to devour, but she is a strong writer with a gift for dialogue and I will read whatever she deigns to put out!

RETRO by Jessica M. Goldstein comes out June 23, 2026

 

In the words of the great Fred Kwan - That was a hell of a thing! Jessica Goldstein's debut novel is a wild ride through time and I know it is not my place, but I DEMAND a sequel! 

The premise could have gone many ways - an out of work actress with a lot of regrets gets a job at a time travel company and it spins her life completely out of control. She begins to notice changes in her everyday life, even as her colleagues and boss assure her that her constant visits to other points in time will not affect the timeline in which she lives. I don't want to go into too much plot detail because one of the main charms of the book is the change/no change conundrum. The other thing that got me hooked was the details in the time travel events. Goldstein has a flair for setting you in the, well, the setting, with a confident level of detail. 

In my research to make sure that she is a young person who will be writing novels I am going to love for ages, I discovered her celebrity interviews and humor colums and DANG she is amazing! 

Great cover design too!

Thanks to NetGalley for the digital ARC and for introducing me to this compelling and entertaining voice. 

BETTER THAN BEFORE by Courtey Walsh is coming out June 8, 2026

 

Well this was a delightful romance-ish, second chance-y book about the importance of community. This is a new favorite subgenre of mine and I was thrilled that it turned out to be the theme of this story. 

Claire's selfish asshole husband leaves her for a younger woman when she is in her 40s and, after a horrific scene of embarrassed devastation that almost resulted in me only giving this book four stars, she moves from Colorado to Chicago. Okay, the Chicago of this book could have been Any-city, USA, (and so I caved to the 4 stars that feel like a death-knell to me) but the people she meets are delightful. This is a rom-com with a slow burn and some nice vindication. Of course there is a bakery because every romcom has to end with a fucking bakery, but it isn't too predictable - it's just predictable enough for me!

No, there isn't anything new in this book, but the familiar rhythms of starting over and finding new love (and opening a bakery) washed over me in the most comforting way. 

TRUTH IS by Hannah V. Sawyerr and THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS by Kenneth Oppel

 Okay, these two books have nothing in common except that I read them back-to-back-ish in my quest to read all the Mass. Teen Choice book award nominees. But now that I think about it, they share a thread of the eternal teenage struggle of maintaining one's individuality and identity in the face of near-constant observation. It might be a stretch, but hear me out. 

TRUTH IS is the story of Truth Bangura who is the daughter of a distant and controlling mother who reminds Truth frequently that giving birth at 17 ruined her life. Truth's dad has never been in the picture. When Truth is 17 she finds herself pregnant and has an abortion. But this is not the whole story. Truth is a poet, a talented and devoted poet who is part of a slam poetry team. When one of her performances is recorded, a performance that contains the story of her complicated relationship with her mother as well as her choice to terminate her pregnancy, it goes viral. Everyone now knows her biggest secrets. 

This is a novel in verse that reads like a novel in VERSE. It is not one of those books that claims to be, but really just leaves out the descriptions and character development to have fewer words. Truth contains multitudes, as do the secondary characters - her parents, her teammates and her shitty school friend. Her anguish and her victories feel earned and I closed the book feeling like I knew Truth.

THE BEST OF ALL WORLDS is a bit sci-fi, a bit dystopia and compulsively readable. Xavier goes to sleep at his parents' lakeside cabin one night only to find that in the morning the lake has disappeared, along with the lake, the car, the wifi and every other person on the planet. He, his dad and his pregnant step-mom figure out that they are stuck in a bubble with seemingly no escape. There is a time jump and we see the family, now with a little bother. Soon another family shows up with a completely different perspective on their situation and, well, they have some problematic politics. (That's a nice way of saying they are southern conservative racists. At least the parents. 

So I read some Goodreads reviews to try to find the little brother's name and it seems like lots of people have a problem with the fact that the Canadian liberals vs. American conservatives set up is anti-American. To which I would reply not all Americans! But still people like that exist in both camps and I think Oppel is going for the conflict, not for a nuanced commentary on our relationship with our neighbors to the north. Also, there are complaints that the female characters are not a fully developed as the male ones. My thought is that since it is a male protagonist and the secondary characters are SECONDARY, this makes sense. I read it for the story - How will they get along? Will they escape? Both of these questions were answered satisfactorily in my estimation. Yep, no one is perfect, but they did the job for me. I whipped through this book and found it to be an interesting ride. 

The more I think about it, the more I think this should have been two separate posts, but it's too late now!

THE BEAR by Andrew Krivak

This book was chosen as the "One Read" for the city in which I live so I decided to give it a try for the summer reading list at the high school. I was completely pulled in! It is weird because I don't like books about nature as a rule and I REALLY don't like books about animals (except Princess Donut in Dungeon Crawler Carl). There was something about this beautiful post-apocalyptic father/daughter survival story that just hit me hard. 

The father and the girl live off the land. The mother died when the girl was too young to remember her, not quite in childbirth, but shortly thereafter. The father has been teaching the girl all the things she needs to survive. Every year he gives her a gift that will help her with a new skill and by the time she is 11, she is adept at survival.

And this is a good thing because when they go to the ocean to get salt, they are separated and she has to make her way in the world alone. Alone except for the creatures of the forest, including the bear. 

The story was inspired by the area around Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire - a mountain climbed by many a car from my area of the country - and the setting is vivid. The girl is focused on staying alive and it is interesting that because of that, her personality is practically nonexistent other than her cleverness and tenacity. I cared deeply about her in spite of the fact that her inner life was so fixated.

This book is not at all something I would ever have picked up on my own, but I am so glad I did. And I did put it on the high school summer reading list. It is so easy to booktalk - I just reference HATCHET by Gary Paulson and they are all on board!