MY BEAUTIFUL ENEMY by Sherry Thomas
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Catherine (Ying-Ying) Blade didn’t think anything could unsettle her as much as meeting her daughter’s murderer on the voyage to England. She doesn’t know why the assassin was there–whether he might be after the same jade tablets her stepfather sent her to claim–but as she hurled the assassin overboard, she believed she had drowned the last remnants of her painful past with him.
She couldn’t have been more wrong.
Not only did the assassin survive, but the woman she saved from his clutches has a coincidental connection to the English spy that Ying-Ying fell in love with years ago. They never knew each others names in China, but that hadn’t stopped Ying-Ying and Leighton from betraying each other. Ying-Ying had thought her feelings would have softened over time. Truthfully, she believed she had killed Leighton, and from his pronounced limp, she infers that she came close. But seeing him now, with a fiancee on his arm, is almost more than she can bear. And bear it she must because if she has any hope of retrieving the jade tablets–or even surviving her mission–she’s going to need his help.
Set half in England, half in Thomas’ native China, MY BEAUTIFUL ENEMY is a Victorian Romance twist on the Chinese martial arts genre of wuxia. It is one of Thomas’ best, which given the strength of her canon is saying a lot! It is exciting and romantic, suspenseful with breaks of humor. The characters are strong, and the interweaving of cultures beautiful and engaging. A page-turner and a joy to read. Highly recommend to historical romance readers!
WE ARE OKAY by Nina LaCour
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Marin wishes Mabel weren’t coming to visit. She meant to leave her old life completely when she left California. She was supposed to start anew at college. And even though she hasn’t been entirely successful at hiding her grief, at least her new roommate didn’t know the old Marin. Whereas Mabel knows her far too well. What will she think when she sees Marin’s blank white walls, her empty bulletin board? Though she hasn’t spoken to Mabel in months–not since the day she found out her grandfather’s secrets–she knows Mabel will see right through her the minute she walks through the door. And when she does, Marin knows the tragic past she’s been trying to escape will drown her.
Though quiet in plot, this novel is loud in emotion. A deserved Printz Award winner, WE ARE OKAY bathes the reader in an authentic experience of grief and growth, of changing friendships, families, and relationships. Persistent story questions about the nature of the past tragedy provide enough suspense to keep readers turning pages even as the action of the plot itself is gentle and contained. I would highly recommend this book to fans of emotional YA realistic fiction. It’s an exceptional one.
OUTLANDER by Diana Gabaldon
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Claire and Frank are on their honeymoon. Technically, it’s their second honeymoon, but the War came so close on the heels of their marriage, that now they are like strangers. Now that their services to England are complete, this trip to Scotland is a chance to get to know one another again, to rekindle their romance. But when Claire falls through a time portal in a henge, she winds up in the eighteenth century, swept up by a raucous clan and pursued across the moors by Frank’s sadistic ancestor, English officer Jonathan Randall. Though she initially earns her keep at Castle Leoch by sharing her skills as an army nurse, Claire must eventually marry a young Scot named Jamie in order to keep out of Randall’s clutches. And as her relationship with Jamie deepens, Claire begins to lose her resolve to find a way home.
OUTLANDER has everything I love in a novel: humor, romance, suspense, immersive world-building, and deep themes. The contrast between Claire’s “modern” 1940s background and Jamie’s life in the 1700s allows for thoughtful commentary on the shifting nature of love and war as people begin to distance themselves from one another–whether it is the polite distance of Claire and Frank’s marriage or the mechanized distance of bombers and automatic weaponry in the war. Everything in the past timeline, both good and bad, is close and visceral and as much as Claire rejects (for example) the sadism of Randall or the corporal punishment the clans inflict on women and children, the unreserved passion between herself and Jamie (and the closeness of families and clans) binds her to her new life much more fiercely than she initially anticipated.
This novel is difficult to put down, and a great book club book if all of your readers are ok with sex and violence. (As my above expostulations should suggest, it has a thematic purpose and isn’t there gratuitously.) OUTLANDER will appeal to historical romance readers as well as many historical fiction and suspense/thriller readers. The dash of sci-fi/fantasy of the time travel is negligible, so I wouldn’t necessarily plug it to SF/F readers.
A HEART IN A BODY IN THE WORLD by Deb Caletti
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Annabelle starts running and doesn’t stop. She runs out of her hometown in Washington State and keeps running. She’s not going to stop until she reaches Washington D.C. In a panic, Annabelle’s mother sends her grandfather in an RV to bring Annabelle home. But her grandfather understands why she’s running and decides instead to come along for the ride. Soon, Annabelle’s brother and her friends got on board, starting a social media campaign to raise money and awareness. Because they were all affected by the tragedy. They understand why Annabelle wants–needs–to run. And soon the rest of the country will too.
Heartbreaking and powerful, this novel is difficult to put down. The immediacy of the third person/present tense narration complements the flashbacks Annabelle experiences. While it would have been easy to feel stuck in Annabelle’s head for most of the book, the third person narration helps with that as well, providing a bit of distance. Ultimately it is the suspense of the unknown tragedy in the past that propels the book forward to its message at the end–a speech that could have seemed didactic except that it comes so authentically from Annabelle’s voice and experiences throughout the novel. This is a book that will stick with me. Recommended to teens who enjoy realistic fiction with a TW: gun violence and abusive relationships.
THE POET X by Elizabeth Acevedo
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Xiomara’s mother wanted to be a nun. She wanted to spend the rest of her life in a convent in the Dominican Republic. But she wound up married to an unfaithful husband and living in NYC. And for some inexplicable reason, she takes her life’s frustrations out on Xiomara. To her mother, everything about Xiomara is wrong–from her curvy body to her love of poetry to (especially) her discomfort with Catholicism. In fact, when Xiomara tells the priest she doesn’t want to be confirmed in the church, her mother refuses to accept the priest’s recommendation that she let Xiomara wait. Xiomara has toed the line her entire life, but in this, she stages a small rebellion. Instead of attending confirmation classes, she stays late after school and joins the poetry club. And after a spending most of her life trying to repress and hide the parts of herself her mother won’t like, Xiomara finally starts to find her voice.
There’s nothing more I can add to the gushing praise of this book except to say (truthfully) that I literally did not put it down. I meant to read a few pages after dinner and ended up carrying it around with me for the rest of the evening until I finished it. It is rare that a realistic fiction engages me to that extent. Xiomara’s story is riveting and nuanced. As a Catholic myself, I appreciated the fact that alongside Xiomara’s reservations about religion, her best friend and brother (and the priest) show positive depictions of faith. The story is raw and authentic, with well-developed characters that give every reader a chance to both see themselves reflected and to see someone else’s point of view sensitively portrayed. There’s a reason this one is an award-winner and an instant classic. If you haven’t read it yet, do.
THE GIRL KING by Mimi Yu
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Princess Lu has known for years that her father plans to name her as his heir. She has spent those years training, enthusiastically learning swordplay, riding, hunting–all the skills she will need as emperor. But when her father instead names her cousin Set as his heir, betrothing Lu to him in the process, Lu knows it is her mother’s doing. Her mother has always hated her and favored her younger sister Min, the princess who desperately tries to do whatever is expected of her, no matter how much anger boils inside of her. Lu devises a plan to take back the throne, but when it goes wrong, she finds herself on the run with a boy from her past, one of few survivors of a genocide perpetrated by Lu’s father. And Min finds herself married to Set, an unlikely empress, with her mother, Set, and an unnerving monk all trying to influence and claim her surprising power as her own.
There is a lot going on in this series starter, set in an Asian-inspired fantasy world. The world building is rich, with themes of ethnic conflict, identity, morality in politics, and the use and abuse of power–to name a few–adding depth to a whirlwind plot. A fun read for fantasy fans!
THE DISASTERS by M.K. England
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Nax Hall can’t believe he flunked out of the Academy. He has been planning this for years–to become a pilot, leave Earth, and head out to the Colonies to start a new life. He should have been top of his class, but instead he is sitting with the other handful of rejects, waiting for the shuttle that will take them back to Earth. But as their shuttle is arriving, a group of terrorists invade the space station. Nax and the other three rejects barely make it onto the shuttle and escape before the terrorists deplete the space station of oxygen. With everyone else at the Academy dead and a terrorist ship on their tail, Nax and the others make the jump to the colonies where they learn that no one knows of the attack. In fact, whoever orchestrated the assault has claimed that Nax and his companions are wanted fugitives. As the only ones who know the truth, it is up to this misfit band of strangers to pull together and figure out the terrorists’ plan while there’s still time to save the world.
Billed as “Guardians of the Galaxy meets the Breakfast Club,” this novel is a thrilling start to a new sci-fi series. An action-heavy plot is balanced by the deep and nuanced characters and rich world-building. I highly recommend it to sci-fi fans!
MAGPIE MURDERS by Anthony Horowitz
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When an editor receives the final installment in famous author Alan Conway’s Atticus Pünd mystery series, she is immediately sucked into the story. A housekeeper has died falling down the stairs–a seeming accident. But when the wealthy estate owner is decapitated at the foot of the same staircase days later, it must be connected. Detective Atticus Pünd hadn’t intended to take any more cases since he learned he is dying. But the facts of the case are too strange to pass up. It seems everyone in the village had a motive for one or both murders, and yet none of the motives seem to explain all of the events. As the novel draws to a close and Pünd is about to reveal the murderer, the editor realizes that there is a chapter missing. She puts in a call to her boss, asking him to contact the author, and instead receives startling news: the author is dead–an apparent suicide. It turns out that he, like his character Pünd, was dying of cancer. But something doesn’t sit right about the author’s death, and as the editor searches for the final chapter of his manuscript, she begins to suspect that he may have been murdered, as well.
This intriguing double mystery reads a bit like an Agatha Christie. It is riddled with quirky suspects and red herrings–both in the framing story and the mystery “novel” within. I found the Pünd plotline more engaging at first, as it took me a little while to get into the framing mystery once the Pünd story abruptly ended. But it was a neat concept and definitely kept me reading to the end. I recommend it to fans of classic whodunit mysteries.
COME FIND ME by Megan Miranda
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Ever since the chilling tragedy that shattered her world, Kennedy has been trying to keep her brother, Elliot’s, work alive. She sneaks back to her old house (the one her uncle and now guardian Joe is intent on selling) and takes the readings from Elliot’s radio telescope, continuing his search for messages from extraterrestrial beings. But she isn’t the expert that Elliot was, and when she gets a strange reading–a negative frequency that shouldn’t exist–she has to turn to the Internet message boards to ask for advice on how to interpret the results. The consensus is that there must be something wrong with the telescope or the computer program. The frequency cannot exist. But one other user has somehow detected the same pattern of negative frequencies. Nolan has been searching for his older brother ever since he mysteriously disappeared. Although his parents have turned their house into a call center to search for missing children, Nolan is convinced that the explanation for Liam’s disappearance is not so simple. After all, Nolan had a strange premonition the night before that Liam would disappear. And there was that night when Nolan had the high fever that he was so sure he saw Liam in the living room–like he was trying to communicate with Nolan from another dimension. That was when Nolan got the EMF meter and started taking readings in the woods where Liam disappeared. When his path crosses with Kennedy, they realize that the two tragedies that took their brothers might be connected, and that the frequency they’ve discovered might hold the key to solving both of the mysteries.
I would classify this book as a truly character-driven thriller. While the tantalizing mysteries thread through the story, it is the emotional plot of these two teens finding one another and helping each other process the tragedies that truly drives the book forward and makes it impossible to put down. It is a masterful piece of writing that will appeal to fans of thrillers, mysteries, and even realistic fiction. (The sci-fi elements actually turn out to be very light.) Highly recommend it! The audiobook is very good, as well.
Susan the Librarian 