Archives de catégorie : Young Adult

UNNECESSARY DRAMA de Nina Kenwood

UNNECESSARY DRAMA follows Brooke as she navigates friendship, romance, ex-best friends, exboyfriends, housemates, her own overly anxious tendencies and what it means to find a home away from home.

UNNECESSARY DRAMA
by Nina Kenwood
Text Publishing Australia, October 2022

Brooke likes order, she likes lists, she likes rules. The first and only rule of her new sharehouse is ‘no unnecessary drama’. Which means no fights, no tension, and absolutely no romance with housemates Penny and Jesse. That’s fine by Brooke, because she has plans. This is going to be her year: her first year of university, the year she’s moved to Melbourne, and the year she’s going to live up to all of her potential. But things get off to a bad start: university isn’t what she thought it would be; she’s desperately homesick, chronically anxious and, to add to her problems, Brooke might be developing inconvenient romantic feelings for off-limits housemate Jesse.

Nina Kenwood is a writer, who lives in Melbourne. She won the 2018 Text Prize for her debut young adult novel, It Sounded Better in My Head.

DANCING BAREFOOT d’Alice Boyle

A story about finding love, figuring out your place in the world, and learning to embrace the challenges life throws in your path.

DANCING BAREFOOT
by Alice Boyle
Text Publishing, Summer 2022

Patch feels out of place at Mountford College: she wears the wrong clothes, she’s on a scholarship, and she has an embarrassingly persistent crush on Evie Vanhoutte, popular girl and golden child. Evie has no idea Patch exists until one day, a chance encounter sparks a friendship that’s equal parts exhilarating, terrifying, and very, very confusing.
As if that weren’t enough to deal with, Patch is also trying to avoid a vindictive school bully, forgetting to be supportive of her transitioning best friend, Edwin, and worrying about a potential new stepmother turning out to be the evil Baroness from The Sound of Music.

Winner of the 2021 Text Prize

Alice Boyle is an English teacher and author living in Naarm/Melbourne. She’s written for SBS Voices and the Stella Prize, and her short story ‘The Exchange’ was published in the anthology Growing Up Queer in Australia. In 2019 she was highly commended for the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter program.

LOVE TIMES INFINITY de Lane Clarke

A complicated—and often hilarious—love story about a Black high schooler’s experience with friends, family, and identity.

LOVE TIMES INFINITY
by Lane Clarke
Poppy/Little, Brown BFYR, July 2022
(via Park & Fine)

Navigating junior year, Michie is struggling to answer the question of who she is for her scholarship essays, the only chance she has at making it into Brown as a first-generation college student. Or maybe it’s not so much that Michie doesn’t know who she is as it is that she doesn’t like who she is: having been estranged from her mother from the age of five and surrendered to her grandmother, Michie has made an art of hiding, especially from herself. After all, if her own mother doesn’t think she’s worthy of love, who will?
Then a new student—basketball superstar Derek de la Rosa—enrolls in her school and enlists Michie as a tutor to catch up in Spanish class, turning Michie’s life upside down. Because, Derek? He is very cute, very talented, very popular, and very much has his eye on Michie, no matter how invisible she thinks she is.
When Michie’s mother reaches out to make amends, and with her scholarship essay deadline looming, Michie will have to decide if she wants to reopen old wounds or close the door on her past once and for all. And as she spends more time with Derek, she will have to figure out how close she can risk getting to him, and how much of her heart she is willing to share. Because while Michie may not know who she is, she’s starting to realize who she wants to become—if only she can take the chance: on Derek, on herself, and on her future.

Lane Clarke received her Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from Virginia Tech, where she received an honorable mention in the 2015 Steger Poetry Prize, administered by Nikki Giovanni. She got her J.D. from Chicago University and now lives in Northern Virginia and practices law in Washington D.C. LOVE TIMES INFINITY is her debut novel.

BEFORE TAKEOFF d’Adi Alsaid

THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR meets JUMANJI when two teens meet and fall in love during a layover-gone-wrong at the Atlanta airport in this thrilling new novel from the author of LET’S GET LOST!

BEFORE TAKEOFF
by Adi Alsaid
Knopf BYR, June 2022
(via Park & Fine)

James and Michelle find themselves in the Atlanta airport on a layover. They couldn’t be more different, but seemingly interminable delays draw them both to a mysterious flashing green light—and each other.
Where James is passive, Michelle is anything but. And she quickly discovers that the flashing green light is actually… a button. Which she presses. Which may or may not unwittingly break the rules of the universe—at least as those rules apply to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta.
Before they can figure up from down, strange, impossible things start happening: snowstorms form inside the B terminal; jungles sprout up in the C terminal; and earthquakes split the ground apart in between. And no matter how hard they try, it seems no one can find a way in or out of the airport. James and Michelle team up to find their families and either escape the airport, or put an end to its chaos—before it’s too late.

Adi Alsaid was born and raised in Mexico City, where he spilled hot sauce on things. Along with writing and traveling the world, Adi has coached high school and elementary school basketball. In addition to Mexico, he has lived in Tel Aviv, Las Vegas, Monterey and Chicago. His previous YA books include Let’s Get Lost, Never Always Sometimes, North of Happy, Brief Chronicle of Another Stupid Heartbreak, and We Didn’t Ask for This.

CAKE EATER d’Allyson Dahlin

An utterly addictive new YA novel from debut author Allyson Dahlin! Set in an alternate future Versailles, social influencer Marie Antoinette and her shy new husband Louis Auguste must right the wrongs of generations, amid rampant misinformation and capitalist propaganda.

CAKE EATER
by Allyson Dahlin
HarperTeen, August 2022
(via Writers House)

The year is 3070, and Marie Antoinette has just arrived at Versailles. Marie is an App sensation, a style icon and a maven of social influence with millions of followers—but here, in the glamorous Franc Kingdom, her job is simply to marry Louis August. Unfortunately, Louis doesn’t seem interested in Marie, making her feel lonelier than ever in this new country. Luckily, Marie has a distraction: opulent soirées and decadent after-parties abound in Versailles.
But beneath the luxurious world lies a sinister underbelly, and a storm hits Versailles that reveals to Marie and Louis the gilded world around them for the cracked facade it truly is—a hideaway for the rich and powerful, while the people outside suffer and starve. Determined to set things right, Louis and Marie must devise a way to right the wrongs of generations past—and outwit those who want to keep them pawns in a deadly game.
CAKE EATER will take readers to a glittering world full of breathless luxuries, deadly secrets, and a thrilling romance that attempts to rewrite history itself.

Allyson Dahlin grew up on a farm in central New York, where she had little to do but read loads of library books and make up magical and slightly creepy stories about the woods and farm animals while pretending to be a witch/homesteader. She studied psychology in college while working as a housekeeper at a motel in Cooperstown. That job involved a lot of boring hours to think up backstories for the guests whose rooms she cleaned. A shawl left on a chair by an aging opera soprano, a stack of old baseball cards left by a Hall of Fame inductee, and the legend of a monster in the lake were all fodder for stories. It was during that time she transformed from a reader and a daydreamer to a writer.