Jean, Emiko. Ever After / Tokyo Dreaming.

NY: Flatiron Books, 2021.

NY: Flatiron Books, 2022.

I’ve read a couple of YA rom-coms in which an American teenager gets involved with a young male royal — the younger son of the Crown Prince of Scotland, or the heir to some tiny Alpine princedom, or whatever — and I had a lot of trouble getting into them because of the whole fictitious country thing. It just kind of kills my suspension of disbelief right off the bat. At first glance, these two — the original and its sequel — seem to be in the same ball park, but they’re actually pretty good, and also a lot more credible. (Really.) The primary character is Izumi Tanaka, born and raised in the shadow of Mount Shasta by her single mother (a college biology professor), and now in her senior year of high school. On her mother’s side,’s she’s sansei — third-generation Japanese-American — but on her father’s side? She has no idea, because her mother refuses to say anything about Dad, except that he was a Japanese exchange student and they were both seniors at Harvard together, and they had a one-night stand, and then he was gone again before her mother found out she was pregnant. And Izumi has always been told it doesn’t matter anyway, but of course she really wants to know who her father is.

Urrea, Luis Alberto. Good Night, Irene.

NY: Little, Brown, 2023.

I was an Army brat, living mostly overseas in the 1950s, surrounded by men in uniform, and also some Army nurses, who had gone through the war, so I tend to approach historical fiction set during that time with a skeptical and rather judgmental eye. This story is about a group of young American women, all with something to escape from, who sign up late in 1943 with the Red Cross to run Clubmobiles in the European theater — two-and-a-half-ton trucks outfitted with coffee makers and doughnut-making machines and phonographs with loudspeakers attached. They’re there as morale-builders, taught to be as cheerful as possible, and to act, as Capt. Marjorie Miller tells them, as “sister, girl next door, mom, sweetheart” to the equally young troops they met. “You will be nothing less than home.”

Lethem, Jonathan. Brooklyn Crime Novel.

NY: HarperCollins, 2023.

This is the author’s 12th novel, most of which I have read and (mostly) enjoyed, and nearly all of them were rather different from each other. In his earlier work, especially, Lethem appeared to want to try everything — cozy murder mystery, science fiction, Chandleresque detective noir, post-apocalyptic road trip, Bildungsroman, comic book superhero, and every other genre you can think of. This one is not so much a “novel” as a large collection of short-ish vignettes and scenes, but they all take place in Brooklyn in the mid-’70s, with an occasional jump to the present day for the purposes of reflection on how the past used to be.

Griffith, Nicola. Menewood.

NY: Farrar, Straus, 2023.

I’ve been a history junkie all my life, and that extends to historical fiction. And because my undergrad degree was heavy on late classical and early medieval Europe, I really enjoy a good novel set in that period. (Cecelia Holland is one of my all-time favorite novelists for that reason.) All of which is to say that I really, really wanted to love Hild, the fictionalized early life of the 7th-century Hild Yffing, who became St. Hilda of Whitby, and the earlier book to which this one is a sequel and continuation. But it was a real struggle to get through that one, it took me several times longer than usual, and it was ultimately a disappointment.

Lowell, Nathan. Quarter Share.

Np: The Autor, 2007.

I recently read The Wizard’s Butler and really enjoyed it, so I went looking for the author’s earlier work and found this first episode in a six-volume space opera series called “Trader’s Tales” (apparently a sub-series of “The Golden Age of the Solar Clipper” stories) set a few centuries from now and featuring eighteen-year-old Ishmael Wang, living with his single mother, an academic, on Neris, and whose death in a flitter crash leaves him in a tight situation. Neris is a “company world” and since he’s no longer the dependent of an employee, and since they have no unskilled jobs available for him, he can’t stay. He was about to enter the university, but now he finds himself with ninety days to find a way off-planet, which comes down to a choice between the military (which isn’t for him) and signing on as very junior crew with a freight-hauler.

Cherryh, C. J. Defiance.

NY: DAW, 2023.

I first met Carolyn Cherry in 1976, when I was a reference librarian in Dallas and she was still teaching Latin in the Oklahoma public schools, and had just published Brothers of Earth, her first novel, She attended AggieCom in College Station (her first con, too, I believe), and was startled at being mobbed by a horde of enthusiastic new fans. I was one of them, and I’ve read and enjoyed everything she’s written in the nearly half-century since then. Of course, she’s now a Grand Master and is regarded as having inherited the mantle of Ursula LeGuin when it comes to alien worldbuilding. Cherryh’s coauthor on this, as well as several other recent novels, is Jane Fancher, her partner for many years and her wife since 2014. You won’t really be able to tell which of them was responsible for which parts of the book, though, their joint effort is so seamless.

Hiaasen, Carl. Wrecker.

NY: Knopf, Sep 2023.

Besides writing an award-winning column for thirty-five years for the Miami Herald, Hiaasen is best known for his off-the-wall crime novels, all set in his native Florida, and all eighteen of which have made the New York Times Bestseller List (several have also made it to the big screen). But even some of his fans may not be aware that he has also written half a dozen books for younger readers — and that the first one, Hoot, won a Newberry Medal. This latest one is aimed at adolescents and it’s a model of how to take teenage readers seriously. The focus of the story is Valdez Jones VIII of Key West, fifteen years old and an eighth-generation Conch, descendant of a 19th-century Bahamian salvage diver — a “wrecker” — in the days before Scuba gear when freediving on storm-sunken ships was tough and dangerous work.

Lippman, Laura. Prom Mom.

NY: Morrow, Jun 2023.

For the first few chapters, I thought this would turn out to be some version of a bunny-boiler story, but I should have known better. Lippman has made a career of being unpredictable. She leads you along the path to complacency and then suddenly shoves you off a narrative cliff. I learned some time ago to buckle up before I started one of her books. A guy getting a girl pregnant when they’re both still in high school is the sort of unplanned, completely unexpected event that has the potential to derail their whole lives. And that’s pretty much what happened to honor student Amber Glass of Baltimore, back in 1997 — only it was much worse than merely getting knocked up. She was either very naive, or deep in denial, or perhaps both (it’s never made clear, really) but Amber had her baby very prematurely on the bathroom floor of a hotel room on the night of Joe Simpson’s senior prom. Amber cleaned up the mess, wrapped the (now) dead newborn in a towel, and went home. Joe knew nothing about any of this until the next day, when the cops came to see him.

LeMire, Jeff. Collected Essex County.

Atlanta: Top Shelf Productions, 2009.

LeMire is one of the very, very best graphic fiction writers and artists working today. I’ve said that before, but if you’re at all interested in this stuff, it bears repeating. And one of his best works (and the winner of numerous awards) is Essex County, originally published in parts but collected here in as single 500-page volume. And that’s especially useful, because all four of the principal stories are closely interrelated. A supporting character in one will be the protagonist in another, and you won’t always even realize that at first, because the storytelling is very subtle. No superheroes here, just ordinary people in a rural county not far from Windsor, Ontario. The two most important things in Essex County (as in most of Canada) are farming and hockey, and both play a large role in all the stories.

Holt, Jeremy & Kat Vendetti. Virtually Yours.

NY: Jeremy Holt Books, 2020.

This graphic novel about a guy and a girl is less about a potential romance and more about a relationship, and it’s pretty good. The title refers to a new dating app for your phone that provides (fake) evidence for the consumption of one’s friends and family that the user is in a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. It’s intended for those who are either too busy with their lives to bother with dating or who are simply too hopeless at ever finding someone.