Tag Archives: teen

The Safest Lies – Megan Miranda

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Seventeen-year-old Kelsey and her mother live in a fortress of a house; it even has a safe room in the basement. Kelsey has always felt safe there and, in fact, “The black iron gates used to be [her] favorite thing about the house.” She acknowledges that her life isn’t like the lives of her classmates. For starters, her mother hasn’t left the house in 17 years. For another, she has to meet with Jan.

Seeing Jan was part of my mother’s deal to keep me. Jan was assigned by the state. I’ve come to rely on her, but I also don’t totally trust her, because she reports to someone else, who decides my fate. My mother relies on her even more, and trusts her even less.

Although previously homeschooled, Kelsey now attends high school and on her way home one day she has a car accident. Ryan, classmate and local volunteer firefighter, is first on the scene and “saves” her from certain death. His heroism lands the pair in the paper and that’s when Kelsey’s life starts to unravel.

She does something she shouldn’t and sneaks out of the house one night to see Ryan receive a medal for saving her life. When she returns home, she discovers the gate at the front unlocked, and when she makes her way inside, her mother is missing. It’s a big deal because, remember, mom hasn’t been outside in 17 years.

Megan Miranda’s YA thriller The Safest Lies is pretty much what you’d expect from a book of this type. A plucky heroine, a solid love interest, a couple red herrings, a mystery and enough action to propel the plot forward. I was pretty invested when there seemed to be stakes (who are the shadowy figures lurking around and I guess that safe room will come in handy after all, eh?) It doesn’t necessarily wrap up as satisfactorily or as believably as I might have hoped, but as a seasoned thriller reader, that’s to be expected.

Teens probably won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough.

Shattering Glass – Gail Giles

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Although Gail Giles is now a well-known name in the world of YA, she had to start somewhere and that somewhere was with her 2002 debut Shattering Glass.

Young Steward, so named due to a complicated family tree, narrates the story of what happens when his best friend, Rob, decides to elevate class doofus, Simon Glass, from zero to hero.

Simon was textbook geek. Skin like the underside of a toad and mushy fat. His pants were too short and his zipper gaped about an inch from the top. And his Fruit of the Looms rode up over his pants in back because he tucked his shirt into his tightey-whiteys. He had a plastic pocket protector, no joke, crammed with about a dozen pens and a calculator.

Rob is the most popular guy in their Texas high school. “He wore confidence like the rest of us wore favorite sweatshirts.” When he decides to make a bit of a project out of Simon, none of the members of their group including the handsome Bobster and star football player Coop raise an objection. Coop, in particular, seems to form an authentic relationship with Simon, but Young has a different view because “Simon Glass was easy to hate.” Young can’t say no to Rob though, although he does wonder why Rob is so eager to change Simon’s social standing.

The novel follows Simon’s gradual metamorphosis from nobody to somebody and how this act also changes the dynamic between the friends. It is clear from the beginning that something awful has happened. Each chapter begins with a short comment from some other secondary character, which allows readers to anticipate an event that the main narrative builds towards. Let’s just say that the book’s title is not merely figurative.

The book examines bro culture to a degree. Why do people follow others even when their conscience tells them they shouldn’t? Young is sympathetic, but also frustrating as he makes one bad choice after another. Even his decision at the novel’s expected but startling climax does nothing to redeem him.

Shattering Glass is a solid book. It’s well written and there’s lots to talk about.

Out of the Easy – Ruta Sepetys

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I have yet to meet a book by Ruta Sepetys (Salt to the Sea, The Fountains of Silence, Between Shades of Gray) that I haven’t liked.

Out of the Easy is the story of Josie Moraine, a just-turned-eighteen-year-old who lives in a little room over the book shop where she works with her BFF, Patrick, whose father owns the store. Josie has lives there since she was twelve. Josie’s mother, Louise, is a prostitute in the employ of Willie Woodley, a madam who owns a brothel on Conti Street. The story is set in the 1950s.

I saw her hand first, veiny and pale, draped over the arm of an upholstered wingback. […] The voice was thick and had mileage on it. Her platinum blond hair was pulled tight in a clasp engraved with the initials WW. The woman’s eyes, lined in charcoal, had wrinkles fringing out from the corners. Her lips were scarlet, but not bloody. She was pretty once.

Willie, gruff as she is, is more of a mother to Josie than Louise has ever been and although Josie loves her mother, she also recognizes that she is bad news and mostly they stay out of each other’s way.

More than anything, Josie wants to attend college. When she befriends right-side-of-the-tracks, Charlotte, it looks like realizing her dream and getting out of New Orleans might be in the cards for her. But nothing is ever as easy as it seems, especially when Josie finds herself in the crosshairs of Charlotte’s icky Uncle John and a local mob boss.

Out of the Easy is jam-packed with plot, but sacrifices nothing because of it. I was wholly invested in Josie’s story and I loved all the secondary characters, including Cokie, Willie’s driver; Jesse, a local mechanic; and Sweety, Dora, and Sadie, some of the women who work at Willie’s.

Josie is constantly reminded of the kindness of others and that sometimes our true family has less to do with biology than we think.

I very much enjoyed this book.

Coming Up For Air – Nicole B. Tyndall

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Nicole B. Tyndall’s 2020 YA debut Coming Up For Air was a pleasant surprise. In her acknowledgments, Tyndall said that the story had a piece of her heart.

It started as pages from my high school journal, and now, somehow, it’s a real book. And I want to say that I’m grateful for that sixteen-year-old girl who was brave enough to write down all the ways she hurt…

The story definitely has the ring of truth.

High school junior Hadley Butler lives with her parents and older twin siblings. Her besties, Becca and Ty, and her passion for photography keep her grounded and busy.

Then she meets superstar swimmer Braden Roberts. If the rumours are to be believed, Braden is a player and the advice Hadley’s sister offers is to stay away because “he’s friends with Wyatt [her ex], and from what [she’s] heard, he’s even worse than him.”

Turns out, though, the rumours are far from the truth. When Hadley is tasked to attend a swim meet, circumstances put Hadley and Braden in each other’s orbit and the rest is history.

The first part of the book, which takes place during junior year, allows us a window into the teens as their feelings for each other grow deeper. These are two nuanced and intelligent people and you can’t help but root for them as they navigate “first love.” And it’s all sweet and romantic until it’s not.

Braden is an elite swimmer hoping for a scholarship to college. Then he gets an injury. Hadley’s life is pretty perfect too, until her mother’s cancer makes a return visit. How will these obstacles impact Braden and Hadley? Well, that’s the path this book travels.

I really enjoyed this book. The first part was swoon-worthy, really, and the banter between Hadley and Braden was terrific. The second half of the book is definitely more serious, but it wasn’t over-wrought. I think Tyndall handled all of the drama with a great deal of care for her characters. What happens when you love someone, but can’t help them?

I don’t know if this author has written anything else, but I would definitely read it based on this book.

The Secret Year – Jennifer R. Hubbard

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Colten Morrissey has a secret and it’s a big one. For the past year, he and Julia Vernon have been hooking up, but no one knows about it because 1. Julia has a boyfriend and 2. “she lived up on Black Mountain Road, in a house that was five times as big” as Colt’s. Yeah, Colt’s not in Julia’s snack bracket at all. So at school, the two don’t even speak to each other or even acknowledge that they know each other. But outside of school

We’d meet on the banks of the river, clutch at each other in the backseat of her car, steam up her windows and write messages and jokes to each other in the fog on the glass, and argue about whether to turn on the A/C. Sometimes we swam in the river late at night when the water was black and no one could see us.

When Jennifer R. Hubbard’s YA novel The Secret Year opens, we learn that Julia is dead. Colt is trying to process this devastating loss and he has to do it privately. After her death, Julia’s brother, Michael, approaches him in the school cafeteria and as it turns out, he knew about his sister and Colt. Well, he found Julia’s journal and put the clues together. Now he wants Colt to have Julia’s notebook. It is both a blessing and a curse.

The Secret Year is sort of Romeo & Juliet, but without the angst (or the poetry) of the play. Sure, Colt and Julia have vastly different lives but that doesn’t seem to matter when they’re making out. And of course, because Julia is dead when the book opens we only ever see her through the eyes of other people and what she reveals about herself in the journal – which isn’t anything very deep, to be honest. Mostly it’s that she has to break up with her boyfriend and she has to do it soon, no, she’s going to do it this minute, but she never does. Truthfully, it’s hard to see what drew these two together other than hormones.

Binding 13 – Chloe Walsh

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Here is something that you may not know about me: I love YA romance way more than I love adult romance. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because when I was a teenager I was always in love (and out of love and then in love again). Maybe it’s because that’s as far as I ever got on the romantic maturity scale. Whatever the reason, adult romances rarely ever hit for me, but YA often does. (There are exceptions to this rule, of course. I love Talking at Night and The Paper Palace and everything by David Nicholls.)

I am all in for shows like The Summer I Turned Pretty and To All the Boys I Loved Before and Maxton Hall. Books like Perfect Chemistry and Easy and The Do-Over are way more palatable to me than books by Emily Henry (I’ve tried two and DNF either.)

So, that brings me to Binding 13 by Chloe Walsh, a book that I picked up and put down a million times at the bookstore. Then it was recommended by a couple reviewers that I like, and it was on sale, so I bought it. It’s long, just over 600 pages, but I read it in just a couple of days.

Fifteen-year-old Shannon has endured a life time of bullying and not just at school; her father is abusive, too. She lives with her parents, one older brother, Joey, and three younger brothers, on a council estate in Ballylaggin, Ireland. Finally, her mother decides to send her to Tommen, a private school, where she hopes her daughter will be safe from the students who have tormented her her whole life. (She mostly conveniently ignores the fact that her husband is physically abusive, too.)

On the first day of school, while crossing the sports field, Shannon gets hit with a rugby ball, which knocks her down, cracking her head off the ground and causing a mild concussion. This is how she meets Johnny Kavanagh, captain of the rugby team and all around super stud.

Okay, you know how these things go. Girl who doesn’t know how beautiful she is meets boy who totally knows how beautiful he is try to ignore their feelings, can’t, and eventually <<insert 600 pages of Irish slang, rugby talk, longing looks, expletives>>….yeah, apparently I will have to read the gosh darn sequel Keeping 13 to find out what happens – even though, of course, I know what happens.

Although Binding 13 is shelved in the YA section at my local Indigo and even though the main characters are all teenagers, I wouldn’t actually consider this to be YA. And neither, apparently, would the author. On her website, Walsh says “Please note that all of Chloe’s books are intended for mature readers of 18 years and above. Chloe’s self-published work has always been categorized as new adult and contemporary. The topics of conversation in these stories are NOT suitable for younger audiences. The first four books in the Boys of Tommen series were self-published and marketed for adult readership only.”

I don’t believe in censorship, but I probably wouldn’t put this book in my classroom library. To be fair, though, I would be happier with my students reading this than I would be if they were reading Colleen Hoover. That’s saying something.

There’s lots to like about Binding 13. I really grew to love both Shannon and Johnny. There are a lot of great secondary characters, too. The book is often laugh-out-loud funny. I wouldn’t say that there is swoon-level romance, but Johnny proves himself early on to be protective and not above throwing a fist if he needs to. I was definitely invested in these characters and their individual struggles: Shannon’s safety and the pressure Johnny puts on himself to be an elite athlete. How will these crazy kids ever get together?

There are also some things I didn’t like. It is tropey, for sure. Shannon is teeny, child-like and Johnny is a 6’3″ wall of muscle. Shannon falls down a lot – she is constantly running into Johnny’s muscular chest and landing on her ass. I didn’t like the way the boys talked about the girls sexually. Their conversations are far more graphic than anything the characters might have gotten up to. Sometimes the conversations between Johnny and Shannon seem to do a complete 360 out of nowhere, which I guess you can explain away by their ages. And much is made of their ages, although there is really only two years between them: Shannon turns 16 in the book and Johnny will turn 18. They read a lot older, although I guess you could explain that away by their life experiences.

Look, I know that I am certainly not the audience for this sort of book, but I will be purchasing Keeping 13 and reading it straight away and that is something I never do.

There. That’s my endorsement.

Words We Don’t Say – K.J. Reilly

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High school junior Joel Higgins has a hard time speaking his truth, so instead he writes texts to people: his principal, his best friend, Andy, and Eli, the girl on whom he has a major crush. He doesn’t actually send the texts, though.

Joel lives with his parents and five-year-old brother, Jace. He hasn’t really found his niche yet. He says “Basically the things that I am good at, they don’t teach in high school.” Other than Eli, Joel is pretty solitary. “I’m always surrounded by people, but I have no real friends. […] The things most kids care about don’t matter to me.”

Joel (and Eli) volunteer at the local soup kitchen as part of their graduation requirements. Many of the people who come in for food are veterans who have been abandoned by the system. Joel forms a sort of attachment to one of these men, and this relationship – although this man does not speak – starts to crack through Joel’s protective shell.

Words We Don’t Say cares very much about words, actually. When Joel’s English teacher suggests his students read all the banned books they can get their hands on (after ranting about how books like Winnie the Pooh have been banned because the bears are anthropomorphized and don’t wear pants), Joel realizes that

free speech [was] something we should protect even if that means sometimes we had to hear stuff that made us uncomfortable and how lucky we were to read whatever we wanted to read even if that only meant sitting on the curb and reading a book out loud to a man who has a Purple Heart that came with delusions and a heartbreak of an illness that nobody could fix.

This book is quite often very funny, but also filled with heart and empathy for a wide variety of characters. Joel eventually starts to understand that he is not the only person who has to carry a broken heart around with him, and it is only when he really starts to reach out to people that he starts down the path to healing.

This is a great book.

Goodbye Days – Jeff Zentner

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Oh, Jeff, what are you doing to me?

The Serpent King, Jeff Zentner’s YA debut, was one of my favourite books of 2024. I figured I couldn’t go wrong with reading his follow-up, Goodbye Days. Geesh. Who is this Jeff Zentner guy and why does he insist on breaking my heart?

Carver Briggs, aka Blade, would have been pretty excited about his final year at Nashville Arts Academy if he hadn’t just buried his three best friends: Blake Lloyd, Eli Bauer and Mars Edwards. Now, though, he has to navigate this last year of high school without the rest of the Sauce Crew and deal with the overwhelming guilt that he is, in fact, responsible for their deaths.

He doesn’t think he killed them on purpose. And he knows that no one thinks he “slipped under their car in the dead of night and severed the brake lines.” But he did text Mars, who was driving, and the authorities did find Mars’s phone at the crash scene with a “half-composed text” to Carver. That was right before his friends slammed into the semi.

Now Carver is having panic attacks and debilitating feelings of guilt which are compounded by the fact that he is growing closer to Jesmyn, Eli’s girlfriend. It’s all too much. And he knows that he is not the only one who is suffering.

When Blake’s grandmother suggests that the two of them share a “goodbye day” for Blake, Carver is initially reluctant. She proposes that they spend a day together, doing the things that Blake used to love to do, and sharing their stories about him. A ‘goodbye day’ of sorts.

“Funny how people move through this word leaving little pieces of their story with the people they meet, for them to carry. Makes you wonder what’d happen if all these people put their puzzle pieces together.”

Goodbye Days is my first five star read of 2025. In all the ways I loved The Serpent King, I loved this one just as much. Zentner is so gifted at writing teenagers who are thoughtful and funny and broken and hopeful. This book was profoundly moving and yep, I cried.

For the most part, you don’t hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.

I will read anything this guy writes.

Wink Poppy Midnight – April Genevieve Tucholke

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I knew I was going to love Wink Poppy Midnight pretty much from the opening line when Midnight tells us that “The first time I slept with Poppy, I cried.” Midnight isn’t much at sixteen but Poppy, the school’s icy queen bee, tells him

You’re going to be so beautiful at eighteen that girls will melt just looking at you, your long black lashes, your glossy brown hair, your blue blue eyes. But I had you first, and you had me first. And it was a good move, on my part. A brilliant move.”

Thing is, Poppy doesn’t want Midnight, not really. She wants Leaf Bell (yes, everyone in this novel has a weird name.) Poppy fell in love with Leaf “the day he beat the shit out of DeeDee Ruffler.” The fact that Leaf doesn’t want anything to do with Poppy; he “saw right through the pretty, saw straight through it.”

Leaf’s younger sister, the dreamy red-haired Wink lives at a farm across the road from the house Midnight moved into with his antiquarian book-seller father after his mother and half-brother, Alabama, move to Paris so she can write her latest novel. One day, Wink shows up on Midnight’s doorstep and in her odd presence, Midnight feels peaceful because “Wink wasn’t taking stock. She wasn’t trying to figure out if I was sexy, or cool, or funny, or popular. She just stood in front of me and let me keep on being whoever I really was.”

April Genevieve Tucholke’s (Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea) YA novel is dreamy and other worldly. These teens inhabit a world outside of the halls of a high school, but their imaginations, petty cruelties and longings will be recognizable. I enjoyed my time with them and loved the way this book was written.

Every Single Lie – Rachel Vincent

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Beckett Bergen’s life is about to get a whole lot more complicated -and it was pretty complicated to begin with. For starters, she just dumped her boyfriend, super-hot-star-baseball player, Jake, because she’s convinced that he’s cheating on her. He insists it’s not true, but there’s definitely something he is not telling her.

Then there’s her complicated home life. Her mom, Julie, is a detective on the teensy police force in their small Tennessee town, and she’s barely at home – meaning that Beckett and her older brother, Penn, are responsible for looking out for their younger sister, Landry, 13. Beckett’s dad died several months ago, and it turns out there’s lots Beckett and her siblings don’t know about the circumstances of his death.

But Rachel Vincent’s YA novel Every Single Lie really kicks off when Beckett makes a shocking discovery in the locker room at her school.

There’s something sticking up out of the open duffel. I step closer, then I stumble to a shocked halt.

It’s a hand. A tiny, tiny little red hand.

And it isn’t moving

This discovery sends shock waves through Beckett’s small town and without really quite knowing how, she finds herself at the center of a lot of attention. Rumours start spreading like wildfire – many of which are spread by an anonymous Twitter account, Crimson Cryer, which asserts that perhaps Beckett is more closely linked to this baby than just being the person who discovers the body.

I really liked Beckett and her tenacity. She is determined to find out who this baby belongs to, even though the rumour mill is making it very difficult, and potentially dangerous, for her to do so. There are lots of clues which lead her to some very surprising places, but this book is more than just a solid page-turning mystery. This is also a book about grief, secrets and the damage social media can do.