This post was so fun to make! A few of the titles below were on my radar, and a few I discovered why planning this post, so now I’m even more thrilled about what’s to come. If you would like to support the blog and you plan to purchase any of these books, you can do so using my affiliate links with Bookshop.org! You’ll be supporting independent bookstores and my work at the same time. And now onto the books!

Middle Grade:

Book One: Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls was one of my favorite books of 2021, so I am SO pumped for this follow up. Cece thought that saving her sister, Juana, would be the end of her troubles with the criatura in Devil’s Alley, but part of Juana’s soul is still trapped! The Rios sisters, along with their criatura allies-including some of my favorite characters like Little Lion and Coyote-must journey deeper into Devil’s Alley to face the dangerous criatura El Cucuy.

11 year old Kofi Offin’s life is turned upside down after a wrestling match in his village, Kwanta, results in an unexpected death. Set in West Africa’s Asante Kingdom in 1860, the book takes you on a journey alongside Kofi as he is abruptly snatched from all he knows. A novel in verse from the king of the verse novel, Kwame Alexander, this sounds like a book that is not to be missed.

Young Adult:

I audibly gasped when I saw this in Netgalley at work today. I LOVED the Scythe series, which I only found about when I was assigned the first book in a Young Adult Library Services course in grad school. I’m so excited for what this book will contain, because as the summary states “Storylines continue. Origin stories are revealed. And new Scythes emerge!” But it’s not just Neal Shusterman returning to the timeline of the Arc of the Scythes series. He will be joined by collaborators like David Yoon, Jarrod Schusterman and Sofia Lapuente. Let’s see!

A Scatter of Light promises to be another beautiful queer coming of age story from Malinda Lo, author of another favorite of mine, Last Night at the Telegraph Club. After a graduation party goes wrong, Aria Tang West is sent by her parents to stay with her grandmother in California. After meeting her grandmother’s gardener, she begins questioning “who she is and what she wants to be”. For fans of Telegraph Club this book even offers a glimpse into Lily and Kath’s lives almost 60 years later!

After a series of internet mishaps and accidental Twitter threads Lark takes the fall to protect Kasim, their former best friend, from embarrassment. At the time it seems like the perfect solution- Lark gets a lot of Twitter attention which helps their burgeoning writing career, Kasim gets protected, and the two become close again like they used to be. But of course it isn’t all so simple, and the lie starts to take its toll. The book follows Lark’s journey to “speak the truth and discover how their own self-love can be a revolution”.

Adult:

Another book, from another author of one of my favorites-Kevin Wilson author of Nothing to See Here. This one got me at “teenage misfits”. Set in Coalfield, Tennessee in 1996, two teenagers meet and create an unforgettable poster that will have ramifications years down the line. I love Kevin Wilson’s weird, humorous writing and I’m expecting this one will be no exception.

I love female friendship!!!! I honestly feel like this book is going to be hard to read, but it also sounds so amazing and the reviews it is already getting are really promising. Edith and Ashley have been best friends for over 42 years, but now the unthinkable has happened. Edi is dying of ovarian cancer. As she spends her last days at a hospice near Ash, the two reminisce on their lives together amidst a cast of hospice characters, ex husbands, lovers, daughters and friends. Get the tissues ready.

After reading the description of this one, it has become one of my most anticipated reads of 2022. Set in a dystopian near future, the story follows 12 year old Bird and his odyssey to find his mother. When he was 9 years old his mother, a Chinese American poet, left him and his father. In the intervening years he has been instructed not to speak of her and his father has destroyed all trace of her and her work in their home. But a letter from her changes all of that. The story is filled with folktales, a network of underground librarians, and an exploration of the “lessons and legacies we pass on to our children”. This sounds AMAZING.

When an Indigenous woman finds a bracelet that belonged to the mother she thought had abandoned her, she is faced with her mother’s spirit and a peak into a dark past. This sounds like a haunting story from debut author Erika T Wurth, an urban Native of Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee descent.

I’ve heard this described as The Secret History meets Ninth House. Yes and YES. When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City to work as a curatorial assistant, she expects to be at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead she finds herself assigned to the Cloisters, surrounded by “enigmatic researches studying the history of divination”. This book sounds perfectly dark and creepy and just the right read for Fall.

And that’s what I’ve got! Let me know what you’re looking forward to reading in the comments. What else should be on my radar?