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!