A sweet, queer rom-com about the head of the high school stage crew and the show’s lead actress, perfect for fans of Becky Albertalli and Nina LaCour.
THE LOVE CURSE OF MELODY MCINTYRE
by Robin Talley
HarperCollins Teen, December 2020
Credit: Courtney Rae Rawls
Melody McIntyre, stage manager extraordinaire, has a plan for everything. Lead actor need a breath mint? She’s on it. Understudy bust a seam? Mel’s sewing kit is at the ready. Not only is her Plan A foolproof, she’s got a Plan B, and a Plan C, because actors can be total fools. What she doesn’t have? Success with love. Every time she falls for someone during a school performance, both the romance and the show end in catastrophe. So, Mel swears off love until their upcoming production of Les Mis is over. Of course, Mel didn’t count on Odile Rose, rising star in the acting world, auditioning for the spring performance. And she definitely didn’t expect Odile to be sweet, and funny, and care as much about the play’s success as Mel. Which means that Melody McIntyre’s only plan now is trying desperately not to fall in love.
Robin Talley is a queer author who grew up in southwest Virginia and now lives in Washington, D.C., with her wife and their daughter. She worked in digital communications for LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, educational equity, and other progressive causes for fifteen years before she turned to writing full-time, and is now the New York Times-bestselling author of five novels for teen readers: Pulp, Our Own Private Universe, As I Descended, What We Left Behind, and Lies We Tell Ourselves.
Also Available: Robin Talley’s upcoming novel, MUSIC FROM ANOTHER WORLD, will be published by Inkyard Press on March 31st, 2020. Set in the 1970s to a soundtrack of Bowie, Blondie and a whole lot of Patti Smith, two teenage girls’ worlds converge in ways they could never have imagined. With a fierce sense of rebellion and a feminist attitude to boot, they soon discover what it means to be their true selves, and one thing’s for sure: they’re both sick of blending in.
As birthdays go, this year’s birthday for radio producer Everly Dean hit an all-time low. Worse than the birthday she had a tonsillectomy. Worse than the birthday her loveably reckless parents decided to split up (the first time). But catching your boyfriend cheating on you with his assistant? Yea, even clichés sting. But no matter. This is Everly Dean’s year! The year she doesn’t let her anxiety hold her back. The year she stops being the hot potato in the overblown drama of her parent’s marriage. The year she pitches her podcast idea to her boss. There’s just one problem. Her boss, Chris, is way too cute. He’s also supremely respectful of her, to the point of being distant (which means he hates her, right? Or is that the anxiety talking)? Oh, and Stacey, best friend/ DJ, forgot to mute the mic as Everly ranted about Simon the Snake (syn: see Cheating Ex). Maybe she has three problems. Suddenly, people are lining up to date her, Bachelor-style; fans are voting for their favorite dates (Note to self: never leave house again); and meanwhile, that spark she feels for Chris might be a two-way street. It’s a lot to handle for a woman who considers avoiding people an Olympic sport. She’s going to have to fake it ‘till she makes it to get through all of this. Perhaps she’ll make a list of three (that’s barely a list)… Five (no one likes an odd number)… Ten rules for faking it. Because sometimes making the rules can find you happiness when you least expect it.
Last year, Alina Kane was a ballet dancer who was accepted into one of the country’s top programs on a professional track. Then, she shattered her leg. This year, Alina has two metal plates holding her bones together, exactly one friend, and zero chance of a ballet career. She is an aimless high school junior who got roped into doing the spring musical because her previous coping mechanisms (namely laying in bed eating Cool Ranch Doritos while watching contraband ballet videos) were ‘depressing everyone around her.’ And when she is cast in a sexy role opposite Jude, the (charmingly? annoyingly?) laidback lead, it seems she must transform from a ballet swan into someone else entirely. As she starts to get used to her new normal, Alina begins to re-examine her broken dream. Maybe ballet wasn’t the beautiful thing she always thought it was. Maybe it didn’t give half-Japanese girls like her the same chances it gave to white girls. Maybe it made her afraid to speak up. The problem is, Alina still loves ballet. But now she wonders if it’s stupid to love something she can’t do anymore. If it’s wrong to love something that’s so flawed. And if it’s bad to fall in love with someone when her heart was just broken, along with her leg. 
Lenica, Marie, Fanny and Elsa – four friends spending a never-ending summer on the Atlantic coast in France. The future lies ahead of them like a promise; they are so carefree and full of the joys of their very existence that they don’t notice life laying down its path forward. When they meet again many years later they realize that their dreams and longings still join them together like some invisible power – in spite of everything that has happened since that evening when Lenica brought Sean along.
Moscow, 1932. Gareth Jones, a young Welsh reporter, arrives in the Soviet Union excited to see for himself how Josef Stalin is forging a new civilisation. He meets American and British journalists who acclaim Stalin’s great experiment—but when Jones witnesses people starving to death in Ukraine, his belief in the Soviet revolution is shattered. He must decide whether to report the truth or become just another useful idiot, saying only what the Communist secret police allow and smothering the evidence of his own eyes. In this special kind of hell, anyone could be an informer, and Jones knows his life will be at risk if he is even thought to be defying Stalin. And when the woman he loves falls under the suspicion of the secret police, everything Jones values is in danger. Can he reveal the terrible truth about the Ukrainian famine to the world, or will he be silenced forever?