YOUNG ADULT
Blazewrath Games
Amparo Ortiz, Page Street Publishing (OCT 6) Hardcover $18.99 (368pp) 978-1-64567-079-7
“The world you know is a lie … The world that’s coming, that’s the one you should believe in.” So says a Dragon Knight who serves the Sire, a dragon-turned-human who’s targeting the Blazewrath World Cup. But this year, seventeen-year-old Lana is going to fulfill her life’s purpose and play as Team Puerto Rico’s Runner, the only player without a dragon steed. Lana will race to the top of a magically conjured mountain without getting blown away by fireballs or beaten to a pulp. Between the danger of Blazewrath’s world stage and the nearer world of her family, Lana has to figure out what it means to take a stand for all the competing parts of herself.
For Lana, Blazewrath goes deeper than just a love of dragons and sport. She hasn’t been to Puerto Rico for twelve years, ever since her Puerto Rican father and white American mother divorced. Lana’s complex family configuration highlights the personal toll of the United States and Puerto Rico’s unequal relationship.
There is so much that the novel does with ease, not least of all acknowledging the multitudinous natures of individual and cultural identities. It excels at establishing Puerto Rico as proud and fractured: not only are the people of Puerto Rico white, Black, and multiracial, straight and queer, cis and transgender, rich and poor, but the people of the larger world are also, and all are worth claiming and celebrating as central parts of this story.
Filled with the thrill of magical sports, international intrigue, dragons, and an unlikely team of teenagers who band together to save the world and each other, Blazewrath Games manipulates contemporary young adult fantasy conventions to tell a fantastic story that feels both familiar and all its own.
The Summer of Everything
Julian Winters, Interlude Press (SEP 8) Softcover $17.99 (312pp), 978-1-945053-91-7
In Julian Winters’s perceptive young adult novel, The Summer of Everything, a gay teenager is afraid of loving his best friend.
In Santa Monica, Wes is an insecure, comic book-loving geek. He lives above an independent bookstore, and it has always been his haven. When he and his fellow hipster employees learn that the store is set for a buyout, they try to save it. At the same time, Wes struggles with his feelings for Nico, his best friend, and his concerns about attending UCLA when he’s unsure of what he’ll become. Wes’s estranged but loving older brother adds to his worries. Here, “adulting” isn’t an end goal: it’s a series of evolving decisions.
Nico, Wes’s childhood friend turned crush, is an empathetic, gentle counterpart to Wes, who, in his hesitancy, is frustrating and sweet. Wes’s problems are lifelike, and he’s surrounded by eccentric, supportive, and inspiring friends who challenge and encourage him. These include Ella, an iconoclast who hides her softer side, and exuberant Cooper, who embodies California’s laidback cool. They, along with wise adults, help Wes to gather his courage.
Encounters at the store, where Wes and his friends banter over music and use social media, are interspersed with scenes at Santa Monica’s skate parks and beaches. Wes’s hopeful longings bubble into neuroses: he composes lists about first date plans that he’s too scared to implement. Mild complications and misread cues push him toward an unavoidable confession whose results are down to earth. Wes learns to risk being vulnerable, and his coming of age is endearing.
Set to a nineties alternative rock track, The Summer of Everything is a young adult novel about love, identity, and a close-knit community.
Cloud Hopper
Beth Kephart, Penelope Editions (SEP 8) Hardcover $17.99 (332pp), 978-1-73422-590-7
Look up, up, up to skies filled with endless possibilities in Beth Kephart’s young adult wonder, Cloud Hopper. Around the municipal airport of Gilbertine live three friends: Sophie is “the tallest, Wyatt’s the thinnest, K’s the strangest: those are facts.” They have heartbreaks in their pasts, but the wonder of flight fills their days. The three watch as a girl in patent leather pink Doc Martens hops through the clouds, seeming to draw in the dawn. Even before she falls from the sky, requiring their rescue, they feel connected to her. But there are some people who won’t welcome silent strangers in. If Sophie and team hope to help the hopper, they have to find out the truth about her before less sympathetic searchers do. Kephart’s lines are sensory and musical, leaning into zephyr and tempest winds with trust that the right words have magic. Here, a blueberry is not just a blueberry: it’s a Wyatt blue, capable of intoxicating hungry souls toward compliance. A field is not just a field, but a place coined by ponds, dotted with colors, and alive with possibilities. Of the hopper’s wreckage, Sophie observes: “there is the stuff of her hopping machine, all that has been shattered in the forest. Rusty parts of rusted things. The patchwork balloon with its busted crooked seams.” These poetic plays ease the audience into the book’s tougher topics, including loss and xenophobia. Sophie and company have a keen sense of what’s right, even when it’s the “right wrong.” They know that immigrants are “hardly different from the rest of us—all of us missing something,” and they work hard to protect their new friend. Shared secrets have the power to set young dreamers free in the aweinducing story Cloud Hopper.
The Flight and Flame Trilogy, Book One
In R. J. Anderson’s twisting middle grade fantasy Swift, a pixie struggles to find her place.
Life is getting harder for Ivy, a young pixie. She’s smaller and weaker than her peers, and she can’t fly. Ever since her mother disappeared years earlier, Ivy’s father has been withdrawn and her older brother hostile. After she befriends a prisoner, Richard, Ivy begins to suspect that not everything is as perfect as the leader of the pixies would have everyone believe. In a desperate attempt to find the truth, Ivy runs away, learning that nothing—and no one—is what they seem.
Relationships are a key within the novel. Ivy struggles to reconcile her love of her fellow pixies with their actions. The pixie persecution of faeries, her mother’s apparent abandonment, and her grief-stricken father’s withdrawal all present emotional challenges. Ivy learns that loving someone does not always mean agreeing with them.
Stereotypes, including notions of certain genders or groups being superior to others, are examined as Ivy forges her own path and befriends non-pixies, including a kindhearted human. Ivy’s story encourages discovering the truth for oneself and speaking out for change.
Some events, including Richard’s escape from an ominous Faerie empress, are underexplained within the otherwise well-developed story. The book’s language is engaging and accessible, and tensions between the bright promises of the pixies’ home’s safety and the darker realities of its poisonousness are drawn out through detailed descriptions of elements like the freedom of the forbidden sky and the cruelty of Richard’s confinement.
With magic stemming from its vibrant language and enchanted creatures, Swift is a spellbinding and delightful fantasy.
A True Story of Love, War, and Survival
Amra Sabic-el-rayess’s account of her youth during the Bosnian War is a timely personal testimony on the strictures of survival. Gripping and achingly humane, The Cat I Never Named captures what it means to face an ideological tide bent on your personal eradication.
Amra and her family “are Muslims of birth, of ethnicity, not religion, really.” Amra is also a devoted and gifted student, not just at the top of her class, but in the top tier of her country. But then war springs—not “all at once. Instead, like a cat, it stalked” in, and Amra didn’t “believe it was there until it pounced.” She’s betrayed when her Serbian teachers destroy her records before fleeing ahead of invading Serbian forces. It’s then that Amra realizes, “Only one kind of test matters now. The test of survival.”
Amra does survive, both ethnic cleansing and “more than 1,100 days under the Serb’s military siege.” Nonetheless, Amra’s war is shaped by the destruction of dreams, both physical and metaphorical. Her parents’ dream home decays; her childhood, then her future, are swallowed by human darkness. What lingers is Maci—“cat” in Bosnian. This feline refugee adopts Amra’s family even though a cat isn’t something they “need.” Maci is a narrative anchor and a constant reminder that, even during times of horror, life contains inexplicable softness—elements that are gentle, protective, and loving.
The Cat I Never Named is immersive, and Sabic-el-rayess’s visual imagination is a slipstream. Amra’s words have a subtle, relentless force, creating a world where life is a danger, a demand, and a warm, calico presence. In the face of violence, death, and creeping despair, Amra and her family find ways to keep their bodies and spirits together.
R.J. Anderson, Enclave Escape (AUG 18) Hardcover $22.99 (272pp), 978-1-62184-132-6
Amra Sabic-el-rayess, Laura L. Sullivan (Contributor), Bloomsbury (SEP 8) Hardcover $19.99 (352pp), 978-1-5476-0453-1