Review of (S)Kin, by Ibi Zoboi

Audiobooks, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

(S)Kin

by Ibi Zoboi
read by Bahni Turpin and Robin Miles

Versify (HarperCollins), 2025. 6 hours, 16 minutes.
Review written January 31, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2025 National Book Award Finalist

This paranormal novel in verse features two viewpoint characters. Marisol and her mother have moved from the Caribbean islands to New York City, and it’s the new moon – time for Marisol to shape shift. She sheds her skin and shifts into a fireball witch who flies through the night and wreaks vengeance on the person her mother directs her to. Her mother and the mothers before them have shapeshifted for generations, and they thought that in New York City, where no one believes the old stories, they might find it easier to be human, not treated as monsters.

Also in New York City, Genevieve, with darker skin from an unknown mother, lives with her white father and white stepmother. She’s got a terrible skin condition – some kind of allergy or eczema, always burning. Her father studies folklore, and she wonders if her mother was some kind of mermaid.

But when a woman shows up to tend her baby siblings who can soothe her skin, Gen wonders what kind of magic is happening.

Ibi Zoboi takes actual Caribbean legends and shows us what it might be like to be one of those mythical creatures – and dream of better things in America. How might that work out for teens who only want to be normal humans, blending in with their peers?

A powerful story of kinship and identity.

ibizoboi.net

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Review of We Deserve Monuments, by Jas Hammonds

Award Winners, Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

We Deserve Monuments

By Jas Hammonds

Roaring Brook Press, 2022. 375 pages.
Review written January 26, 2023, from a library book
2022 Capitol Choices Selection
2023 Coretta Scott King John Steptoe Award for New Talent
Starred Review

We Deserve Monuments is about a Black lesbian teen named Avery who suddenly got uprooted from her home in DC at the start of her senior year of high school. Avery’s grandmother is dying of cancer in rural Georgia, and her mother decided that the family needed to be with her – never mind that the last time they visited was when Avery was five.

Mama Letty doesn’t even seem glad to see them. She calls Avery “Fish” because her lip ring makes her look like a fish on a hook. She’s prickly and isn’t exactly grateful for the family swooping down because she’s dying.

But other things go surprisingly well for Avery. The girl next door and her white friend take her under their wing, and she’s quickly got better friends than she had in DC, including the girlfriend she recently broke up with.

But there are complications. Avery learns for the first time about her grandfather who was killed by Klan members before her mother was born. And then it turns out those Klan members are related to her new white friend. And she is attracted to the girl next door, but has no reason to think those feelings are returned.

All this is going on while she’s trying to get to know Mama Letty, but learns about family trauma and hurt. And why can’t her mother and grandmother ever have a conversation without fighting?

I like the way the author shows us a family with lots of flaws but also lots of love.

Jashammonds.com
Fiercereads.com

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Review of The Corruption of Hollis Brown, by K. Ancrum

Award Winners, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Corruption of Hollis Brown

by K. Ancrum
read by Andrew Gibson

HarperCollins, 2025. 8 hours, 20 minutes.
Review written January 7, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
National Book Award Longlist

This book begins with Hollis Brown getting beat up. He starts fights on purpose – knows how to say what will set people off – but this one got him hurt pretty bad. His only friends are two other seniors, Annie and Yulia, but they’ll be going off to college at the end of this year. They live in a small town with a defunct factory where everyone’s too poor to leave. Hollis’s own father is rarely home because he’s working in the city.

And then something strange happens when the seniors decide to spend the night in the abandoned part of town that’s reportedly haunted. Annie’s ex-boyfriend, whom she just broke up with, gets stabbed. And Hollis gets blamed for it because the guy was mad he was there with Annie, and Hollis was the only one with enough presence of mind to take him to the hospital. At that point, I thought the book was going to be about whatever mysterious thing was going on in the abandoned part of town.

And then – after Hollis cries in the woods about the unfairness of it all – he meets a strange boy who appears to be homeless and gives the boy his coat. After Hollis agrees to meet the guy again – a spirit comes out of the stranger’s dead body and inhabits Hollis’s body.

Hollis can’t control his body at all. He can talk to the spirit and tell him to wipe his shoes before he goes into the house and faces Hollis’s mother. But nothing else.

The spirit – whose name is Walt and turns out to have grown up in the same town a long time ago – has ideas about how Hollis should dress and act. He even gets Hollis making new friends. But at night, when Walt is asleep, Hollis works on controlling his own hand. If he can just reach his phone without waking up Walt….

But things from there continued to not go as I expected. As Hollis and Walt slowly come to know and understand one another, situations change.

Ultimately, this is a book about love and friendship and hope. But comes at it with an approach like nothing I’ve ever read before.

kancrum.com

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Review of Hekate: The Witch, by Nikita Gill

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

Hekate

The Witch

by Nikita Gill
read by the author

Hachette Audio, 2025. 6 hours, 12 minutes.
Review written January 10, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This audiobook was simply beautiful. The reader’s lovely accent helped. The whole audiobook, I wondered why they used a reader with an Indian accent to read a story from Greek mythology – and then when I went to write this review, I learned it had been the author’s voice all along. Her voice and accent are beautiful, and it turns out she’s British-Indian, which is also what I was hearing. Lovely!

The story is about a Greek goddess I hadn’t known anything about, though many of the elements of her life were familiar – but now made deeply personal. Hekate was a child of war – when the Titans, including her father Perses, were fighting the Olympians. When the Titans lost the war, Hekate and her mother Asteria had to flee. Asteria found Hekate a safe home in the Underworld, under the care of her sister, the goddess Styx. But Asteria herself had to continue to flee and turned herself into an island to escape from Zeus.

Because of those circumstances, Hekate grew up in the underworld, not knowing her purpose – which should have been given to her by her father at her birth. Meanwhile, she chafes under the “protection” of Styx – and devises her own quest to learn her parents’ fate and to discover her own powers and purpose. So it’s a coming-of-age tale for a goddess and a powerful witch.

And the writing is lyrical and beautiful. This is one of those audiobooks that you can actually tell is a novel in verse – often I can’t tell from the audio, but that wasn’t a problem here. I liked the way many of the individual poems ended with a reversal that would lead you into the next poem.

This is Greek mythology from the inside (or from the underside), seen through the eyes of a child growing into a goddess.

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Review of Under This Forgetful Sky, by Lauren Yero

Science Fiction, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Under This Forgetful Sky

by Lauren Yero

Atheneum, 2023. 399 pages.
Review written September 10, 2023, from a book sent to me by the publisher
Starred Review

This book is eligible for the Morris Award, so I’m writing this review after reading it myself, but before any discussion with the committee, so the opinions are entirely my own. I won’t post the review until after our Winners are announced. (Okay, long after – it got stuck in the cracks.)

This book was quite different than the other books I’ve read. It’s set in Chile in the distant future after environmental disaster. Wealthy, comfortable people live in the Upper Cities, closed in by a wall. Below them, without the same things making their lives easy are the Lower Cities, which in many places have been poisoned by chemicals from the Upper Cities.

We first meet Paz, a girl who lives in Paraíso (once Valparaíso), one of the lower cities. She works as a Scout for the Library. Today she found a dead hummingbird, and she’s privately tracking where she finds them, and it points to the Upper City of St. Iago. Here’s how she puts it:

But there’s a saying in Paraíso: sin pega, no vales nada. Without a job, you’re nothing. I was lucky to have this high-class job as a Library scout. I had a curse hanging over my head – in the eyes of the Library, my right arm was a sinner’s arm, shriveled and shameful. Most everybody in my condition picked trash. If I held up the bright green picaflor and told how I’d traced the stiff bodies of a thousand poisoned creatures all the way to St. Iago, I knew how it would look. It would look ungrateful. It would look like I was courting radical ideas. Everybody knew what they did to traitors.

Our other viewpoint character is Rumi, a boy who lives in St. Iago. He lives in comfort, but his every move is monitored. And he sees the world through virtual reality specs. Today’s the anniversary of his mother’s death by terrorism, and official eyes are on him and his mental health.

But then Rumi’s father comes home from a secret trip to the Lower City infected with a strain of Zábran, the virus that caused widespread death and destruction before the Upper City citizens were able to separate themselves from such contaminants. If the government finds out, he’ll simply be expelled to die – so Rumi goes on a quest to find a cure, which may exist in the Lower Cities.

Once there, he gets captured by the terrorists Las Oscuras. Where Paz is also imprisoned. Then Rumi thinks Paz rescues him, not knowing that finding out what he’s up to is her initiation to join the terrorist group. She takes Rumi to the Library, where they do get information how to find a person who has the cure – but Rumi also gets secrets to keep from Paz.

The bulk of the book is the dangerous journey to find a cure, but there are secrets and intrigue in the background.

Right up until the end of the book, I wasn’t sure how much I liked this book. Some of the interplay between powerful forces was a bit confusing. But let me say only that the author pulled it off. She shows us that people are complicated, but will fight for Hope. She didn’t tie things up in a neat bow or leave too easy solutions, but she showed us people taking steps to find solutions to difficult problems, and learning to see from the perspectives of others with very different backgrounds.

laurenyero.com
simonandschuster.com/teen

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Review of Reasons We Break, by Jesmeen Kaur Deo

Contemporary, Starred Review, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

Reasons We Break

by Jesmeen Kaur Deo

Hyperion, 2025. 406 pages.
Review written November 24, 2025, from a book sent by the publisher.
Starred Review
2025 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #6 More Teen Fiction

Good girl Simran tutored Rajan in math all through high school. She was the first math tutor he could tolerate. After high school, Rajan shows up in her life again as a mentee in a program for helping troubled youth with community service. The rumors in their Sikh community say that he killed someone. Rajan’s visiting his probation officer as scheduled and trying to stay clean.

Then his old gang picks him up to pull him back into the gang – and grabs Simran, thinking she’s his girlfriend, as leverage. But that ends up turning out the opposite of expectations, as Simran volunteers to replace the gang’s bookkeeper (who recently got arrested) just long enough to pay off Rajan’s debt, so he doesn’t have work for them and break the conditions of probation.

Of course, once Rajan finds out about that, he’s not going to stand by and let Simran be in danger. But Simran is already intrigued by the puzzle of trying to figure out a rival gang’s code.

One thing keeps leading to another, and we gain insight that everyone can have life events that break them and lead them to choices they might not otherwise have picked.

It was interesting reading this book at the same time I was reading Gregory Boyle’s book, Cherished Belonging. Gregory Boyle works with gang members in Los Angeles, and is incredibly good at seeing their good hearts – and showing those good hearts to his readers. This story was fiction, but it also takes a compassionate look at teens caught up in gangs and all the difficulties of getting out.

The book also gives insight into the Sikh religion and that immigrant community in British Columbia – while delivering a suspenseful thriller about people we come to care about.

JDeoWrites.com
HyperionTeens.com

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Review of The Forbidden Book, by Sacha Lamb

Historical, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Forbidden Book

by Sacha Lamb

Levine Querido, 2024. 251 pages.
Review written February 18, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review
2025 Sidney Taylor Young Adult Silver Medal

The Forbidden Book is another brilliant paranormal story playing off Jewish folklore, as with When the Angels Left the Old Country that I enjoyed so much. This one is set in medieval Eastern Europe.

As the book opens, a lumber merchant’s daughter named Sorel is about to be married to the rebbe’s son from the nearby city. She knows she feels like the girl dressed up in the wedding clothes is a stranger, and she wants to leave. But it’s when she hears a voice in her head saying that they’ll go with her that she leaps out the window and flees.

She steals the stable-boy’s clothes where he stashed them in the stable, along with a knife. She cuts her hair short and sets out, feeling oddly free.

I thought it was a story about a young transgender man, but it turns out there’s more to the voice she heard than her own wishful thinking. When asked her name, Sorel comes up with Isser Jacobs, and before long, she gets attacked in an alley by thugs looking for Isser Jacobs and something he stole. But a giant black dog interrupts the attack and Sorel escapes.

But she’s worried about the girl, a friend of the real Isser, that the thugs mentioned. One thing leads to another, and Sorel and a small group of others are trying to find out what happened to Isser and looking for a magic book that he stole, which was written by the Angel of Death.

The book is full of that touch of magic and reads like a mystical folktale. Sorel has some encounters with spirits before she’s through and needs to think about what she actually wants for her life.

sachalamb.wordpress.com

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Review of True True, by Don P. Hooper

Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

True True

by Don P. Hooper

Nancy Paulsen Books (Penguin Random House), 2023. 368 pages.
Review written October 20, 2023, from my own copy, sent by the publisher.
Starred Review

True True is the story of Gil, a Black teenager from Brooklyn with Jamaican roots, who transfers for his senior year to a prep school in Manhattan to be on the robotics team. But once there, he gets confronted by racism – a football player and two teammates start a fight with him, and Gil is the only one who gets suspended and put on probation.

On probation, he’s not supposed to work with the robotics team for a month. But he knows he can help – is it worth doing if he can’t take any credit?

The racism is quite blatant, but still unacknowledged. Gil fumes and figures out how to get those opportunities his grandma and mother sacrificed for, while still showing his friends in Brooklyn that he cares about them. The sensei at his dojo has a copy of The Art of War, and Gil tries to use the principles found there to battle the racism so strong at school.

It’s all portrayed in such a way that it feels real, and we are with Gil as he tries to juggle friends, family, classes, martial arts, robotics, all while trying to battle racism in the most savvy way. He makes many mistakes along the way, which gets us all the more firmly on his side.

This book has so much heart, it doesn’t feel like an issue book. It’s a book about a teen trying to deal with what life throws at him.

DonHooper.com
PenguinTeen.com

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Review of Legendary Frybread Drive-In, edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Legendary Frybread Drive-In

Intertribal Stories

edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Heartdrum, 2025. 7 hours, 46 minutes.
Review written December 20, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Seventeen authors and seven narrators have created this delightful work of art. Here’s how editor Cynthia Leitich Smith describes the magical place at the center of these stories:

Sandy June’s Legendary Frybread Drive-In is a liminal (or in-between) space that feels like home, welcoming Indigenous young heroes and their chosen kin. It’s a refuge, a place of reconciliation, of romance, a warm meal, an Elder’s hug, and artistic inspiration. The grandparents who run it offer happiness, hope, and healing with frybread on the side.

The list of seventeen authors who collaborated on this book is impressive. The four I’d already read award-winning young adult novels from – Darcie Little Badger, Jen Ferguson, Byron Graves, and Angeline Boulley – did not disappoint, but neither did any of the other authors.

The idea behind the book is that Sandy June’s Legendary Frybread Drive-In is a place outside regular time and space. And indigenous people – teens in these stories – can find their way to Sandy June’s from wherever they are in Turtle Island. The path will open up for them when it’s needed. And the food is the best anyone’s ever tasted.

The stories bring together people across generations, show us teens finding true love, grappling with loss, and finding self-confidence and direction.

I probably should have read the book instead of listening (and I still may some day) – but it was easier for the book to get to the top of my audiobook queue than my visual reading queue. But I may have to visually read it again to catch more of the characters who show up in more than one story – and to appreciate it from the beginning as I understand better how the paranormal drive-in works. Or just for the fun of reading it again! This is a set of feel-good stories from a bunch of stellar indigenous authors.

cynthialeitichsmith.com

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Review of The Princess and the Grilled Cheese Sandwich, by Deya Muniz

Fantasy, Graphic Novel, Romance, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Princess and the Grilled Cheese Sandwich

by Deya Muniz

Little, Brown and Company, 2023. 250 pages.
Review written June 20, 2023, from a library book
Starred Review

The Princess and the Grilled Cheese Sandwich is a delightfully fun and light-hearted graphic novel about a young noblewoman named Cam who must pose as a man in order to inherit her father’s estate. She moves to the capital city to be far away from the people who knew her before her father’s death – and catches the princess’s eye.

The two of them do many things together, including enjoying grilled cheese sandwiches. (Everyone in the capital city has a name that’s a type of cheese.) As they fall in love, Cam realizes she can’t take things any further because she needs to keep her secrets. And nobody likes to find out the one they love has been hiding who they really are.

I was rather amazed this is a debut. The drawings are wonderful – I especially loved all the outfits. Cam keeps her hair long but wears fake sideburns and nice suits when posing as a man, and it wasn’t too hard to believe that she could have fooled people. (Maybe a little hard. But not too bad, because she did look like a well-dressed young man.) There’s variety in the panel sizes, and the story keeps moving at a nice pace. It only took me about an hour to read, and left me smiling.

I’m writing this before discussing anything with the Morris committee, so my opinions are entirely my own, and I’ll have to wait to publish this review until after we’ve made our decision. But I am looking forward to more from this author, and I think teens are going to love her work.

lbyr.com
theNOVL.com

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