The Book Witch, Meg Shaffer (Ballantine Books 978-0-593-98358-4, $30.00, 320pp, hc) April 2026.
Rainy March, the titular character of Meg Shaffer’s The Book Witch, has spent her whole life moving in and out of works of fiction. Part of a group of witches with very specific powers, her job is to defend literature from those who seek to tamper with the plots and cause the books to essentially self-destruct. Rainy …Read More
Rialto, Kate Milford (Clarion Books 978-1-328-46691-4, $19.99, 480pp, hc) April 2026.
Author Kate Milford excels at crafting twisty puzzle-box novels that invite readers to join her young teen protagonists on magical mysteries of the most eclectic and immersive kind. In the 480-page Rialto she offers up an abandoned theme park, a collection of exotic music boxes, the appearance of more than one impossible creature, a forest with fairytale origins, and …Read More
And Side By Side They Wander, Molly Tanzer (Tordotcom 978-1-250-38205-4, $24.99, 112pp, hc) May 2026.
Molly Tanzer’s And Side By Side They Wander takes readers along with a small crew on a spaceship traveling from Earth to an alien museum on the other side of the galaxy. Greenwood, which is operated by the Cererians, is the location of many of the Earth’s greatest works of art including the entire Parthenon; …Read More
Girl of Lore, Melanie Dale (Aladdin 978-1-665-96982-6, $17.99, 368pp, hc) April 2026.
When a book has characters named Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker, you can bet that there is going to be a plot twist involving vampires even if it’s set in modern-day Georgia. (The town in this case is called London, but still, it’s in Georgia.) But in Girl of Lore, author Melanie Dale’s teen hat-tip to Bram Stoker’s …Read More
The Faraway Inn, Sarah Beth Durst (Delacorte 979-8-217-02430-8, $14.99, 384pp, tp) March 2026.
Sarah Beth Durst has carved out a reliable position as a cozy romantasy author, and with The Faraway Inn, she gives her avid readers another novel to fall in love with. Durst makes writing look easy because she is so good at it, but her talent with setting and dialogue is truly something special. While her Spellshop …Read More
Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore, Diana Peterfreund (Running Press Teens 979-8-894-14168-8, $12.99, 304pp, tp) April 2026. Cover by ???.
In Ellen Poe: The Forgotten Lore, Baltimore teen Ellen Poe Reynolds is the latest member of her family to carry the famous poet’s name and an uncertain legacy as a direct descendant. As the story goes, Edgar Allan Poe had an affair with Ellen’s five-times-great-grandmother shortly before his death, resulting in …Read More
Celestial Lights, Cecile Pin (Henry Holt 978-1-250-86349-2, $26.99, 256pp, hc) March 2026.
In the beautifully written and achingly realistic Celestial Lights, author Cecile Pin takes readers along on astronaut Oliver Ines’s deep space mission. Oliver is a man who has been governed by a powerful personal ambition his entire life. He reaches the pinnacle of his career when a billionaire offers him a position to lead a trip to Europa, …Read More
The Beheading Game, Rebecca Lehmann (Crown 979-8-217-08648-1, $29.00, 300pp, hc) March 2026.
Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was executed in 1536, the first of Henry’s wives to die at his order. In Rebecca Lehmann’s brilliant novel The Beheading Game, Anne wakes up hours after her head was cut off by an executioner’s sword, gets out of the wooden box where her remains have been unceremoniously dumped, steals …Read More
Red Star Rebels, Amie Kaufman (Knopf 979-8-217-02901-3, $19.99, 288pp, pb) February 2026.
Red Star Rebels by Amie Kaufman is that rarest of YA titles: a science fiction novel set in space! In the first pages, Hunter Graves has arrived at Pax, the United Nations base on Mars, with a plan to travel out to visit his family in their nearby private compound. Meanwhile, Cleo is hiding out on Pax, where …Read More
They Call Her Regret, Channelle Desamours (Wednesday 978-1-250-33770-2, $21.00, 320pp, hc) February 2026.
Channelle Desamours follows her stellar debut Needy Little Things with a creepy mystery that takes her protagonist in all sorts of unexpected directions. In They Call Her Regret, Simone Washington is famous at her high school for holding an annual epic Halloween Party. But while planning that event, she immerses herself in the urban legends blog of …Read More
The Astral Library, Kate Quinn (Morrow 978-0-063-47975-3, $30.00, 304pp, hc) February 2026.
Kate Quinn has made quite a name for herself in a series of bestselling historical fiction titles such as The Alice Network and The Rose Code. Her latest novel, The Astral Library, is her first foray into magic realism and with a twentysomething protagonist, it is an easy crossover title for older teens who look for some action …Read More
The Unwritten Rules of Magic, Harper Ross (St. Martin’s 978-1-250-39455-2, $28.00, 320pp, hc) January 2026.
In Harper Ross’s The Unwritten Rules of Magic, protagonist Emerson Clarke is struggling mightily to control her life. Her father, a famous fantasy author, has died recently after a struggle with Alzheimer’s. Her mother, who has not been happy for years, is drinking heavily and making sudden decisions about her living situation, and her late …Read More
Sundown Girls, L.S. Stratton (Nancy Paulsen Books 979-8-217-00494-2, $19.99, 320pp, hc) January 2026.
As L.S. Stratton’s Sundown Girls opens, sixteen-year-old Naomi Ward is struggling mightily to fit in with her family. At odds with her slightly older sister, oblivious to the antics of her little brother and awkward around her well-meaning but frustrated parents, she feels adrift as they set off for a three-week vacation in rural Virginia. Naomi’s problems …Read More
The Swan’s Daughter, Roshani Chokshi (Wednesday Books 978-1-250-87310-1, $22.00, 400pp, hc) January 2026. Cover by Kerri Resnick.
Finally, in her latest title, The Swan’s Daughter, Roshani Chokshi has put together another complex fairy tale that is both traditional and wholly her own. Tagged as ”a possibly doomed love story,” this is the tale of Prince Arris, who will soon be married and likely die shortly thereafter, and Demelza, a veritas …Read More
Secrets of the First School, T.L. Huchu (Tor UK 978-1-035-05548-7, £20.00, 380pp, hc) October 2025. (Tor 978-1-250-44091-4, $23.99, 400pp, tp) December 2025.
T.L. Huchu brings an end to his thoroughly satisfying Edinburgh Nights series with its fifth exceedingly thrilling entry, Secrets of the First School. Readers will be quite familiar with the dire situation protagonist Ropa Moyo found herself in at the end of the last book, but in case …Read More
The Glass Slide World, Carrie Vaughn (47North 978-1-662-53050-0, $16.99, 271pp, tp) October 2025.
Carrie Vaughn follows up her Victorian era historical fantasy The Natural World with a sequel set a couple of decades in the future, The Glass Slide World. The protagonist this time is Ava Stanley, daughter of Beth Stanley, the heroine of the first book, and member of the smart and talented Stanley/Torrance/West household. Like her parents, Ava …Read More
Year-End Review
The challenge every year when I sit down to write this essay on recommendations is how to not leave anything out. But every year when it’s published, I am reminded of a title I neglected. This year, I want to begin with a book from 2024 that has stayed with me: Cinderwich by Cherie Priest. The author also had a book come out last year, It Was Her …Read More
The White Octopus Hotel, Alexandra Bell (Del Rey 979-8-217-09179-9, $19.00, 349 pp, tp) October 2025.
The White Octopus Hotel (my fourth hotel book this year!), by Alexandra Bell, is a time-travel novel in the Bradbury tradition and a love story that is full of drama and mystery and, upon reflection, far more romantic than it seems while reading. It’s also a great big story of family and history and regret …Read More
The Salvage, Anbara Salam (Tin House 978-1-963-10847-7, $17.99, 368 pp, tp) October 2025.
Anbara Salam’s The Salvage is a deliciously spooky novel set on Cairnroch Island, just off the coast of Scotland, in 1962. Marta Khoury, a marine archaeologist from an Edinburgh museum, has been dispatched to dive on a Victorian shipwreck which was recently discovered in Arctic waters and then dragged back to the crew’s home at Cairnroch. The …Read More
The Steeping of Blood, Hafsah Faizal (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 978-0-374-38942-0, $20.99, 448 pp, hc) September 2025.
Hafsah Faizal’s YA Blood and Tea duology comes to a close with A Steeping of Blood, which picks up mere moments after the first book’s intense ending. This means that readers must – absolutely must – read A Tempest of Tea before opening Steeping, and it also makes reviewing Steeping exceedingly tricky. Certain …Read More
The Moss, Lisa Lueddecke (Simon & Schuster 978-1-665-98449-2, $20.99, 304 pp, hc) September 2025. Cover by Yorgos Cotronis.
For YA readers looking for their own moody mystery, Lisa Lueddecke’s The Moss has everything you could want. One year earlier, Emma’s sister walked into the nearby forest and disappeared. She was following the footsteps of their mother, who vanished the same way three years before. The forest is home to an …Read More
If Looks Could Kill, Julie Berry (Simon & Schuster 978-1-534-47081-1, $21.99, 448pp, hc) September 2025.
Historical fiction fans, especially of history’s darker aspects, will want to seek out If Looks Could Kill, Julie Berry’s venture into Jack the Ripper mythos. Set largely in New York City in 1888, when the infamous serial killer was on the prowl in Whitechapel, the novel focuses on two young social workers for the Salvation …Read More
The Executioners Three, Susan Dennard (Tor Teen 978-1-250-33466-4, $22.99, 304pp, hc) August 2025.
Freddie Gellar, the protagonist of Susan Dennard’s The Executioners Three, never intended to put herself at the center of her high school’s decades-long prank war with their crosstown rivals. She felt something strange in the woods, she heard something strange, and she smelled something awful. That a bunch of Allard Fortin Prep students got caught drinking because …Read More
The Enchanted Greenhouse, Sarah Beth Durst (Bramble 978-1-250-33398-8, $29.99, 384pp, hc) July 2025.
Sarah Beth Durst returns to the world of cozy romantasy with The Enchanted Greenhouse, a companion to her earlier book The Spellshop. Terlu Perna, the librarian who practiced illegal magic and whose story was introduced as a cautionary tale in The Spellshop due to the punishment she received for creating the sentient spider plant Caz, has now …Read More
Red Rabbit Ghost, Jen Julian (Run For It 978-0-316-58056-4, $18.99, 384pp, tp) July 2025.
Jesse Calloway is a year into college when he begins to receive anonymous messages concerning his mother’s death 18 years earlier. Found beside a river near their home, with her toddler Jesse beside her, Constance Calloway was believed to be a victim of drugs or alcohol. The police did not regard the death as ”suspicious.” But …Read More
Diabolical Plots 8/25
Small Wonders 8/25
Strange Horizons 8/4/25, 8/18/25
The August Diabolical Plots includes Lilia Zhang‘s Skin as Warp, Blood as Weft , a surreal story about a weaver maiden, Zhinü, who works constantly weaving garment after garment, locked away from the memories that might explain how she came to be trapped in this situation. Without context, she seems to accept her role as part of a …Read More
Saving Thornwood, David Surface & Julia Rust (Yap! Books 978-1-949-14058-3, $18.00, 345pp, hc) July 2025. Cover by Errick Nunnally.
In Saving Thornwood, authors (and spouses) Julia Rust and David Surface combine relevant discussions of mental health treatment with a riveting ghost story. In 2022, Annie is devastated when her father, a successful architect currently at work on a project to save Thornwood Hospital, suffers a ”psychotic break,” which leads to …Read More
The Forest of a Thousand Eyes, Frances Hardinge (Amulet 978-1-419-77778-3, $19.99, 128pp, hc) August 2025. Cover by Emily Gravett.
Author Frances Hardinge and illustrator Emily Gravett follow up Island of Whispers with a new middle-grade fantasy, The Forest of a Thousand Eyes. Entirely appropriate for that age group and YA readers in search of an adventure story that carries great significance, Forest is the story of Feather, who must walk …Read More
The Yomigaeri Tunnel, Kelly Murashige (Soho Teen 978-1-641-29703-5, $19.99, 272pp, hc) July 2025.
Kelly Murashige follows up The Lost Souls of Benzaiten with The Yomigaeri Tunnel, another speculative fiction title that cements her status as a YA author crafting books of deep emotional resonance. Monika should be enjoying her final summer before college but finds herself thinking often about Shun, a classmate who died months earlier. Although the two did …Read More
The Listeners, Maggie Stiefvater (Viking 978-0-593-65550-4, $30.00, 360pp, hc) June 2025.
Oddly enough, I read two books set in large hotels this month. (And even stranger, I have at least two more waiting for me in my stack.) Wildly popular YA author Maggie Stiefvater has her adult debut with the historical novel The Listeners. Set in the early days of World War II at a West Virginia hotel that caters …Read More
Wake the Wild Creatures, Nova Ren Suma (Little, Brown 978-1-616-20672-7, $18.99, 384pp, hc) May 2025.
YA powerhouse author Nova Ren Suma returns several years after her last luminous and darkly fantastic title with the intense and timely Wake the Wild Creatures. The story of Talia, a teen raised by a society of women who live in an abandoned and lost Catskills hotel, is steeped in the lore and legends of …Read More
Flight of the Sparrow, Fallon Demornay (Podium 978-1-039-48282-1, $19.99, 336pp, tp) April 2025.
Set in the distant future with a space pirate family at its center, Flight of the Sparrow is the story of Nimah Dab0-124, who grew up on the galaxy’s outer rim (think Tatooine but grimmer). Through hard work, grit, and determination she landed a position at the STARS military academy and is poised for great success. But …Read More
