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An experienced mental health therapist and author, Josh Silver asks some important questions with his debut novel HappyHead. First, he wonders, whether happiness is an illusion or a notion prescribed to us by others. Ultimately, he suggests that we individually define happiness and need to resist many of the systems in place that manipulate our feelings about happiness. A dystopian thriller set in Scotland, HappyHead explores the potential for mental health to have a shady side if those designing therapy wish to use behavior modification to engineer a more nearly perfect society. While not an Aldous Huxley model, Silver does ponder the power that theRead More →

Cover for book Heir

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Fans of Sabaa Tahir’s Ember in the Ashes series will love this spinoff duology. Full of all the elements which Tahir’s fans are used to (stunning prose, enthralling mythology, and deeply relatable characters) this book easily grabs the readers’ attention and holds on to it. Set 20 years after the conclusion of the Ember series, this novel follows Quil (the baby Ember fans saw born in that quartet) now as a grown man ready to take the throne of the Martial Empire. A series of events force Quil and his best friends Arelia and Sufiyan (another descendant of characters from the last series) to travelRead More →

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Seventeen-year-old Sal Amani lives in a haunted house, and everyone at Holden High knows it. However, Sal is keeping secrets, and his sister Asha—who is a talented writer with dreams of attending university and becoming a journalist—has put her life on hold while their mother deals with the loss of her husband. When the house keeps Sal awake, he runs. Sal’s good friend Dirk Madden tries to help, but he’s worried about social capital. Then, there’s Elsie, who has wrongly been labelled a slut.  When Pax Delaney moves to town, he claims he’s good with ghosts. Although weird and unbalanced is Pax’s normal, Sal isRead More →

Cover image for the book Please Be My Star

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Please Be My Star by Victoria Grace Elliot captures the uncertainty of first love and the awkwardness of being a teenager in a beautifully illustrated graphic novel.  Erika’s status as a new student at school is awkward enough without her awareness that she is a ‘creep.’ Erika is aware that her tendency to draw cute boys she doesn’t know and to fantasize about boys that she does makes her more than a little weird. Something that is constantly being told to her by her imaginary inner self who looks like a vampiric alter ego. This alter ego is Erika’s most opinionated critic, verbalizing all ofRead More →

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With her writing and illustrating for the graphic novel The Deep Dark, Molly Knox Ostertag takes readers on a journey into the psychology of dark thoughts and their potential to suck the life from us. Trying to survive senior year, Magdalena Herrera (aka Mags) is stuck in a small Southern California town under a mountain of responsibilities that include coursework, a part-time job, caring for her mostly bed-ridden abuela, and struggling with her gender and sexual identities. When her transgender childhood friend Nessa returns from college, Mags has a kindred spirit to help support her, and together they must make the choice to thrive orRead More →

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G.F. Miller sets out to explore early relationships in her book Not If You Break Up with Me First. The novel follows two best friends: Eve McNeil and Andrew Ozdemir. The pair has “seen each other through growth spurts, family drama, and broken bones” (9). However, hormones and other life changes occur during the summer between seventh and eighth grade. When Andrew returns from a Florida trip taller, stronger, and with a deeper voice, Eve’s parents are struggling to hold their family together. At school in Andrew’s circle of friends, talk of Legos and video games has shifted to talk of which girls the boysRead More →

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Set in 1994 in the United Kingdom, Boy Like Me by Simon James Green tells the story of high school junior Jamie Hampton who grew up in a time when thoughts of cuddling a same sex partner were considered a perversion. In fact, from 1988 to 2000 in Scotland and from 1988 to 2003 in England and Wales, Section 28 made homosexuality a crime. At sixteen years old, Jamie is dealing with issues of identity and self-discovery. Although he wants to be unique, Jamie is a straight-A student, a writer, an organizer, and somewhat of a book nerd. Better to fly under the radar andRead More →

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Readers of Tracy Wolff and Ava Reid will likely appreciate Jennifer Donnelly’s fascinating twist on a fairy tale, Beastly Beauty.  In her version, Donnelly flips the script by creating a handsome man and a beast of a woman. Thrust together by fate or magic, these two young people have complicated pasts, so they carry heavy emotional pain. In a foreword, Donnelly tells readers that her story “isn’t for the heroes, shining knights, and princesses but for the screw-ups, for those who never get it right. The ones who say too much, or not enough. . . . It’s a story of hardship. And heart. AndRead More →

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A novel in verse, Wild Dreamers by Margarita Engle is dedicated to scientists and future scientists. It features two Cuban American youth: Leandro and Ana Tanamá, who take inspiration from Jane Goodall and other conservationists to protect the planet by rewilding. Rewilding efforts attempt to restore biodiversity. Seventeen-year-old Leandro fled Cuba at the age of seven with his family. His father drowned saving his son, so Leandro blames himself and has suffered from  uncontrollable attacks of dizzy panic ever since. His service animal, Cielo is a blue merle dog who shares her perspective intermittently in the novel. After living in Florida for a time, theRead More →