Tag Archives: teen

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.

Lock the Doors – Vincent Ralph

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Sixteen-year-old Tom’s mother has had a string of bad luck with men, but now she is married to Jay, who is exactly who he says he is – a nice guy – and they have recently moved into a brand new house. Not everything is perfect. Jay’s daughter, Nia, is also living with them. She’s a year older and clearly hates Tom. And although the house is Tom’s mom’s dream come true, Tom soon makes an odd discovery. It looks like someone had installed locks on the outside of two of the bedroom doors. Weird, right?

At school, Tom is tagged to show new girl, Amy, around and although Tom is slightly awkward and not all that good with the ladies, he and Amy sort of hit it off. Then Tom discovers that Amy used to live in his old house. As bits and pieces of Amy’s life are revealed Tom starts to think that things just don’t add up. But the more he pushes Amy, the stranger things get. When Tom meets Amy’s family, June and Chris and Amy’s younger brother, Will, and makes some new discoveries in his new home, well – it all makes for page-turning fun.

Tom is a clever and likeable character who suffers from OCD.

I’m worse when I’m worried. On good days, I can touch everything once and sleep like a baby. On the worst days, I check everything twenty or thirty times and only make it halfway up the stairs before doing it all again. I know it’s silly, I know it’s irrational. But it’s part of me, and it’s not going anywhere.

It is perhaps partly his OCD that makes Tom so dogged when it comes to figuring out the truth. It might also be, in part, because of the horrors his mother faced prior to meeting Jay. What if Amy is in trouble? Tom can’t imagine not helping her even if it means getting himself into some scrapes.

Of course, it all comes together perhaps a tad too easily in the end, but I had a good time reading and I think teens who like mysteries will really enjoy this one.

Everything We Never Said – Sloan Harlow

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Ella’s senior year of high school is complicated. For one thing, she has to make her way through the days without her bestie, Hayley, by her side. Hayley died in a car accident and Ella is still trying to process her grief and her guilt -she was at the wheel when the car crashed, although she remembers virtually nothing about the accident.

Then there’s the problem of Sawyer, Hayley’s over-the-top hot boyfriend. The three had always been together, but since Hayley’s death she can feel the waves of anger and hate coming off Sawyer and she knows it’s all directed at her. And yet – there’s something else smoldering underneath and pretty soon Ella and Sawyer can’t keep their hands off each other. Of course, they are both aware of the optics of this development, and the fact that they are meeting secretly only heightens their feelings for each other.

But then, plot twist, Hayley’s mother asks Ella to come clean out Hayley’s room – a task she can’t bear to do. It is there she finds Hayley’s diary and although she does deliberate about whether or not she is doing the right thing, Ella gives in to her curiosity and starts to read. What she discovers throws another wrench into her growing feelings for Sawyer and also puts her in danger.

Sloan Harlow’s debut novel Everything We Never Said attempts a lot and succeeds on many levels. I thought I had it figured out early on; there are plenty of red herrings. The book does make some attempt at tackling the topic of domestic violence. It also looks at grief and friendship. Sometimes the characters seem a bit shrill and other times way too passive. I found the sex scenes a bit much – not that I don’t believe that seventeen-year-olds are intimate, but I found some of the dialogue a little cringe-y. The last third moves at a quick pace, with one or two surprises in store.

It’s a solid debut.

Hell Followed With Us – Andrew Joseph White

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Andrew Joseph White claims his debut novel Hell Followed With Us was written because he was angry. On his website, we’re told “His work focuses on the intersection of transgender and autistic identity through the lens of horror, monstrosity, violence, and rage.” Got that right.

Benji is on the run. His father has just been killed and the Angels and their Graces are hunting him down, except that there is not really any place to go. That’s because these people – part of the cult that raised Benji – have unleased Armageddon via The Flood, decimating the world’s population.

The hellscape of the world White imagines is unlike anything I have ever read before. This is a world devoid of humanity, where goods are bartered with the exchange of human ears, where the monsters are

made of corpses and the Flood – sharpened ribs lining its back in a row of spines, eyeballs blinking between sinew, muscles so swollen they split the skin

At the beginning of the novel, when Benji is recaptured by the Angels, it is not so they can kill him: he’s important to the cult because he is a Seraph, or about to become one anyway. He has the power to control the Graces and The Flood and also, his mother is kind of a big deal at New Nazareth. Before they can get Benji back to New Nazareth, though, he is rescued by a ragtag group of teen resistors from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Centre (ALC). It is his relationship with these people, specifically the handsome sharp-shooter, Nick, that propels Benji on a dangerous mission to take down New Nazareth once and for all.

Hell Followed With Us is an allegorical tale. Before Benji was Benji, he was Esther, betrothed to Theo. At their engagement ceremony, Benji’s mother tries to find a passage about marriage, something that would “hammer home” Benji’s role as a wife, something that could “beat the boy” out of him. Throughout the novel, Benji struggles to find acceptance and while the monsters might be dreamt from Whites very scary imagination, the big ideas- of acceptance, or personal autonomy, of the dangers of blindly following are anything but fiction.

Great read.