Five books that mix modern teenage life with supernatural problems

Christine Lynn Herman writes books about magic, monsters, and growing up. She is the author of YA novels The Devouring Gray and The Deck of Omens.

At Tor.com she tagged five "favorite works of YA fiction where characters have to balance magical destinies and dangerous supernatural problems alongside contemporary issues real teens face every day." One title on the list:

Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

Yadriel is a brujo with a problem: He’s summoned a spirit who won’t leave him alone. A spirit who just so happens to be Julian Diaz, an extremely cute bad boy with some loose ends to tie up before he’s ready to move on. Set over the course of Día de Muertos in an East LA brujx community, Cemetery Boys chronicles Yadriel and Julian’s journey to try and put the latter boy’s spirit to rest.

In addition to handling the supernatural, debut author Thomas delves deeply into Yadriel’s journey of seeking acceptance as a trans boy in his brujx community. Yadriel knows exactly who he is, and his family’s ancestral magic knows, too—but convincing some members of his community is proving a bit more difficult. There is such honesty and heart on every page of this book, and readers across the world will feel affirmed and seen as they get to know Yadriel. I was lucky enough to read an ARC of Cemetery Boys and urge you to snag your own copy when it’s releases on 9/1.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top books to prepare for motherhood

Francesca Segal's latest book is a memoir, Mother Ship.

At the Guardian, she tagged several novels and memoirs to prepare for the new emotional territory that is motherhood. One title on the list:

Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year made me roar with laughter, and is joyous because it shows that you do not have to have every black-and-white frieze hung, every muslin ironed, each educational material absorbed – you do not need a perfect life, merely an open heart and, to quote Mary Oliver, “to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves”.’ A recovering alcoholic with no money and no co-parent, Lamott does a beautiful job of loving and raising her son, who grows up to be a thoroughly good egg.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten unforgettable thrillers featuring memory loss

Kate White's new novel of suspense is Have You Seen Me?

At CrimeReads she tagged ten of her "favorite thrillers with a main character who can’t remember what matters most." One title on the list:

In the Woods
By Tana French

In the summer of 1984, three children go out to play in the woods near their Dublin suburb, but only one, Rob Ryan, returns—or, rather, he’s found groping a tree in terror, his shoes bloodied. He has absolutely no memory of what happened. Twenty years later, Ryan, now a detective with the Dublin Murder Squad (his superiors know nothing of his history) is assigned to investigate the murder of a young girl in the same woods. Of course, he should immediately ask to be removed from the case, but Ryan sees this as a chance to not only hunt down the killer of the young girl but also shed light on the horrible mystery of his own past. This stunning, atmospheric novel was French’s debut. Read it and you’ll soon be tearing through the other amazing mysteries she’s written since.

Read about the other entries on the list.

In the Woods is among Kathleen Donohoe's ten top titles about missing persons, Jessica Knoll's ten top thrillers, Tara Sonin's twenty-five unhappy books for Valentine’s Day, Krysten Ritter's six favorite mysteries, Megan Reynolds's top ten books you must read if you loved Gone Girl, Emma Straub's ten top books that mimic the feeling of a summer vacation, the Barnes & Noble Review's five top books from Ireland's newer voices, and Judy Berman's ten fantastic novels with disappointing endings.

The Page 69 Test: In the Woods.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top cyberpunk books about the now

Corey J. White's new novel is Repo Virtual.

At Tor.com he tagged "five 21st Century cyberpunk books that resonate with the now," including:

Tears in Rain by Rosa Montero

As you can probably gather from the name, Rosa Montero’s Tears in Rain takes more than a little influence from the film Blade Runner. Where uncertainty about Rick Deckard’s humanity is central to Blade Runner (as well as the broader question of the personhood of replicants), Tears in Rain’s Bruna Husky is well-aware of her artificial status, and is (understandably) preoccupied with her rapidly approaching expiration date.

But the similarities end there, with Montero setting her novel in the bustling 22nd Century, populated with humans, replicants, alien refugees, and people mutated as a side-effect of teleportation. With its central plot concerning a human supremacist conspiracy, and the machinations of a violent fascist seeking to gain power, the story could (sadly) reflect modern politics in various parts of the world, but it’s something else that made me want to talk about Tears in Rain: animal extinction.

In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Blade Runner, and Tears in Rain, environmental degradation has led to mass extinction and replicant animals have taken on great significance. But where the animal extinctions never quite struck me in the former two works, a scene in Tears in Rain with a replicant clone of the final polar bear—the polar bear endling –stayed with me long after I’d finished the book. It’s a minor point though, so I can only guess that it stayed with me because of guilt at living through the Sixth Great Extinction (or extermination, if you prefer).

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven online influencers in fiction

Charlotte Duckworth is a graduate of the Faber Academy’s acclaimed six-month ‘Writing a Novel’ course. She started her career working as an interiors and lifestyle journalist, writing for a wide range of consumer magazines and websites.

Alongside writing, she now runs her own website design studio.

Duckworth's debut novel, The Rival, was published in September 2018. Her second novel, Unfollow Me, is out now in the US from Crooked Lane Books.

At CrimeReads, Duckworth tagged seven top books featuring vloggers, social media personalities, and their (occasionally obsessive) fans. One title on the list:

Kiss Me First by Lottie Moggach

Possibly one of the first novels to explore the divide between virtual and actual reality, Kiss Me First was released in 2014. It tells the story of Leila, who offers to impersonate vivacious and fragile Tess—a woman in her late 30s with mental health issues who wants to ‘disappear’ from life and all social connections. But can someone else truly take over our lives, even just online? We know the proposition is a bad one from the outset, but this gripping read takes us further into the dark than you could ever imagine.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top novels about moving

Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, C Pam Zhang has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She’s been awarded support from Tin House, Bread Loaf, Aspen Words and elsewhere, and currently lives in San Francisco.

Her new novel is How Much of These Hills Is Gold.

At the Guardian Zhang tagged ten top novels that "deal with movements physical and emotional," including:

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

The loneliness of living in another country, with all its attendant awkwardness and desire for physical contact, drives a novel that swallows its reader whole. Though I encountered this book during a hot summer, I remember feeling physically cold, so completely was I transported to the cramped apartments and dim streets of a morally ambiguous Sofia.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top novels about France

Liz Boulter is a subeditor on the Guardian travel desk.

One of her "personal top 10 novels that give une véritable saveur" of France:

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

This Pulitzer-prize-winning novel seems tailor-made for these days. The title refers to a teacher’s comment in the book about how our brains, locked in our skulls without a spark of light, build for us a luminous world. And today we, in lockdown, can rebuild in our imaginations 1940s Paris and the “open-air fortress” of Saint-Malo. We do this partly through the mind of young Marie-Laure, blind since she was six, who finds her way using scale models her brilliant father builds for her. Characters in the occupied Brittany town come to life, and readers’ hearts go out to Marie-Laure and young German counterpart Werner as they confront a world of hate and horror with grace and integrity.

Read about the other entries at the Guardian.

All the Light We Cannot See is among Emily Temple's fifty best contemporary novels over 500 pages, Jason Allen's seven top books with family secrets, Whitney Scharer's top ten books about Paris, David Baldacci's six favorite books with an element of mystery, Jason Flemyng's six best books, Sandra Howard's six best books, Caitlin Kleinschmidt's twelve moving novels of the Second World War and Maureen Corrigan's 12 favorite books of 2014.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight novels that explore the uncanny in fiction

Camilla Bruce was born in central Norway and grew up in an old forest, next to an Iron Age burial mound. She holds a master's degree in comparative literature, and has co-run a small press that published dark fairytales. Bruce currently lives in Trondheim with her son and cat.

You Let Me In is her first novel.

At CrimeReads, Bruce tagged eight novels to make you question reality, including:

The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Sarah Crowe, a struggling author, rents a remote house in order to battle writer’s block and work through the grief following her partner’s suicide. What she does not know when moving in is that the plot of land she is staying on also houses a large red oak that has been surrounded by rumors and folklore for centuries. This is a case of stories within stories, told through various manuscripts, but mainly Sarah’s journal. She is not the most reliable of narrators, though, and as the legacy of the oak is slowly being revealed, Sarah’s own world unravels. Toeing the line between psychological thriller and Lovecraftian horror, this makes for a deliciously unsettling read.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five of the best sibling relationships in fiction

Born in Beijing but mostly an artifact of the United States, C Pam Zhang has lived in thirteen cities across four countries and is still looking for home. She’s been awarded support from Tin House, Bread Loaf, Aspen Words and elsewhere, and currently lives in San Francisco.

Her new novel is How Much of These Hills Is Gold.

At the Waterstones blog Zhang tagged five favorite sibling relationships in fiction, including:

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

There are not one but two pairs of conflicted brothers in Steinbeck’s novel, which is inspired by the Biblical brothers Cain and Abel. Emotions are appropriately grand in scope. There are grim suicides, brutal assaults, seductions, plots, heartbreaks, power struggles, betrayals. Though the one-dimensional nature of certain characters – including an almost comedically evil seductress – can be grating, there’s no denying the ambition of this book. At its best it hums with the agony of brothers who are joined by brutality and dark history, and the question of whether they can ever break the cycle.

Read about the other entries on the list.

East of Eden is among four books that changed Mary Norris and John Mullan's ten best fraternal hatreds in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Fourteen crime novels in the time of plague

Molly Odintz is the Associate Editor for CrimeReads. She grew up in Austin and worked as a bookseller at BookPeople for years before her recent move up to New York City for a life in crime. She likes cats, crime novels, and coffee.

At CrimeReads she tagged fourteen "mysteries and thrillers set against a backdrop of epidemics, contagions, and outbreaks," including:

A Beautiful Poison, Lydia Kang
Setting: New York City, 1918
Plague: Influenza

A Beautiful Poison takes place during the last great pandemic—the Influenza Epidemic of 1918. As the epidemic rapidly spreads through New York City, a socialite desperate for distraction from her coming engagement teams up with an apprentice medical examiner to examine a number of suspicious deaths in her social circle, attributed to the disease but quite possibly stemming from the most unnatural cause of murder.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Page 69 Test: A Beautiful Poison.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven top SFF murder mysteries

Elisa Shoenberger is a freelance writer and journalist. At Tor.com she tagged seven books that combine "the genre of murder mysteries with that of fantasy and science fiction, whether it’s the locked room mystery but in space, or innovative retellings of the British manor history." One title on the list:

Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty

It’s the quintessential locked room murder mystery but in space. When Maria Arena wakes up in her cloning vat, she is surprised to see dried blood from the body of her former self. Turns out that Arena is not the only person of the seven crew of the spaceship Dormire who wakes up in a new clone body after their violent deaths. The crew has to figure out what happened and who is responsible. The story explores the ethics and logistics of a world where cloning is common and widespread.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight toxic friendships in crime fiction

Lisa Levy is a columnist and contributing editor at LitHub and CrimeReads. She is the former EIC of crime fiction site The Life Sentence and the former Mystery/Noir editor at the LA Review of Books.

At CrimeReads Levy tagged eight of the most toxic friendships in crime fiction, including:

Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley

Women are not the only ones who can have toxic friendships. Exhibit A, and essential to the founding of the trope is Tom Ripley. Ripley, desperate to move among the very rich, gets himself hired to find the son of a rich guy: a young man named Dickie Greenleaf who has disappeared in Italy. Tom finds him irresistible, but Dickie is obsessed with Marge, an American dilettante. The constant shifting of alliances and affection runs through Highsmith’s five Ripley novels, one of the few books in which she alluded to homosexual feelings (Highsmith was a lesbian).

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Talented Mr Ripley is on Elizabeth Macneal's list of five sympathetic fictional psychopaths, Laurence Scott's list of seven top books about doppelgangers, J.S. Monroe's list of seven suspenseful literary thrillers, Simon Lelic's top ten list of false identities in fiction, Jeff Somers's list of fifty novels that changed novels, Olivia Sudjic's list of eight favorite books about love and obsession, Roz Chast's six favorite books list, Nicholas Searle's top five list of favorite deceivers in fiction, Chris Ewan's list of the ten top chases in literature, Meave Gallagher's top twenty list of gripping page-turners every twentysomething woman should read, Sophia Bennett's top ten list of books set in the Mediterranean, Emma Straub's top ten list of holidays in fiction, E. Lockhart's list of favorite suspense novels, Sally O'Reilly's top ten list of novels inspired by Shakespeare, Walter Kirn's top six list of books on deception, Stephen May's top ten list of impostors in fiction, Simon Mason's top ten list of chilling fictional crimes, Melissa Albert's list of eight books to change a villain, Koren Zailckas's list of eleven of literature's more evil characters, Alex Berenson's five best list of books about Americans abroad John Mullan's list of ten of the best examples of rowing in literature, Tana French's top ten maverick mysteries list, the Guardian's list of the 50 best summer reads ever, the Telegraph's ultimate reading list, and Francesca Simon's top ten list of antiheroes.

--Marshal Zeringue