5 Reasons June Is an Amazing Month for YA
This month we’re devouring YA reads with unreliable narrators, unlikely romances, and a skin-crawling mermaid story we highly recommend bringing to the beach (just don’t expect to log much time in the water). Here are 5 of the most exciting young adult titles coming out in June:
Say What You Will, by Cammie McGovern
Amy is a fabulously blunt high-school senior with cerebral palsy, trying to learn the art of making friends before she goes to college. Matt is her OCD-afflicted classmate, in over his head from the minute he signs on to be one of Amy’s student aides—or, as she puts it, one of the people her parents are paying to pretend to be her friend. Possessed of a quick mind and an uncooperative body (among other handicaps, she can speak only through a machine), Amy makes it her mission to rehabilitate shy, isolated Matthew. The friendship and tentative romance that blossom between these misfits is warm and funny without being cloying.
Ruin and Rising, by Leigh Bardugo
In Shadow and Bone and Siege and Storm, Bardugo created a chilly, evocative fantasy world combining elements of Tsarist Russia with a soaring mythology and a badass heroine fans can root for (not to mention a trio of very different love interests). Now, in the Grisha trilogy’s long-awaited final chapter, formerly fugitive Sun Summoner Alina goes on a supernatural and political quest, accompanied by her best friend and fellow rebels.
Don’t You Forget About Me, by Kate Karyus Quinn
Gardnerville is a small-town Shangri-la, a place where people grow old without growing sick, and few who live there ever choose to leave. The worm in the apple: every four years, Gardnerville’s teens are afflicted with a supernatural curse, which drives one or two of them mad or even murderous. Four years ago, Skylar’s older sister, Piper, led a group of teens to their deaths before disappearing. Now it’s another dangerous fourth year, and it’s time for Skylar to stop popping forget-me-not and start investigating her memories of what happened that night.
Inland, by Kat Rosenfield
Rosenfield delivers a genuinely creepy paranormal tale that will satisfy even non-genre fans. After becoming the only witness to her mother’s mysterious death at sea, Callie and her father leave their coastal home for the arid midwest, where an undiagnosed respiratory illness ravages her body and shrinks her life into a series of hospital visits. When her father reluctantly takes a job that brings them back to the coast, Callie’s health returns, her dangerous longing for the ocean spikes, and the fractured pieces of her past begin to come together into a very disturbing picture.
Complicit, by Stephanie Kuehn
Fans of twisting tales and slippery narrators should give this one a try. 16-year-old Jamie Henry, whose traumatizing early years gave way to adoption by a stable family after his birth mother’s murder, lives in fear of the return of his older sister, Cat, who did some very bad things before being shipped off to juvie. When she makes contact, Jamie’s trauma symptoms start to reappear—numbness in his hands, lost time—as the two siblings rush headlong toward a collision that will reveal more about Jamie’s past than he’s ready to remember.
What YA titles are you reading this month?