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April Debut YA Novels

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It’s time to talk April debut YA novels, and this month, there are quite a few. I’ve rounded them up best as I can, but as usual, it’s likely I’ll miss a title or two and I’m happy to hear of other debuts from traditional publishers in the comments. I define debut as first novel. I’m not including debuts that are an author’s first YA novel; I want them to be first novels. 

All descriptions are from WorldCat. Titles that Kimberly or I may have reviewed we’ll include links to, as well. 

Breakfast Served Anytime by Sarah Combs: Spending the summer before her senior year at a camp for gifted and talented students, Gloria struggles with the recent loss of her grandmother while trying to meet new friends and make the best of her new circumstances.

Burn Out by Kristi Helvig: In the future, when the Earth is no longer easily habitable, seventeen-year-old Tora Reynolds, a girl in hiding, struggles to protect weapons developed by her father that could lead to disaster should they fall into the wrong hands.

Dear Killer by Katherine Ewell: Kit, a seventeen-year-old moral nihilist serial killer, chooses who to kill based on anonymous letters left in a secret mailbox, while simultaneously maintaining a close relationship with the young detective in charge of the murder cases. 



Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige: Amy Gumm, the other girl from Kansas, has been recruited by the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked to stop Dorothy who has found a way to come back to Oz, seizing a power that has gone to her head — so now no one is safe!

Expiration Day by William Campbell Powell: t is the year 2049, and humanity is on the brink of extinction. Tania Deeley has always been told that she’s a rarity: a human child in a world where most children are sophisticated androids manufactured by Oxted Corporation. 

Far From You by Tess Sharpe: After Sophie Winters survives a brutal attack in which her best friend, Mina, is murdered, she sets out to find the killer. At the same time she must prove she is free of her past Oxy addiction and in no way to blame for Mina’s death. 

Learning Not to Drown by Anna Shinoda: Clare, seventeen, has always stood up for her eldest brother, Luke, despite his many jail stints but when her mother takes Clare’s hard-earned savings to post bail for Luke, Clare begins to understand truths about her brother and her family.

Love Letters to the Dead by Ava Dellaria: When Laurel starts writing letters to dead people for a school assignment, she begins to spill about her sister’s mysterious death, her mother’s departure from the family, her new friends, and her first love.

Open Road Summer by Emery Lord: Follows seventeen-year-old Reagan as she tries to escape heartbreak and a bad reputation by going on tour with her country superstar best friend–only to find more trouble as she falls for the surprisingly sweet guy hired to pose as the singer’s boyfriend.

Pointe by Brandy Colbert: Four years after Theo’s best friend, Donovan, disappeared at age thirteen, he is found and brought home and Theo puts her health at risk as she decides whether to tell the truth about the abductor, knowing her revelation could end her life-long dream of becoming a professional ballet dancer. Kelly’s review. 

Prisoner of Night and Fog by Anne Blankman: In 1930s Munich, the favorite niece of rising political leader Adolph Hitler is torn between duty and love after meeting a fearless and handsome young Jewish reporter.

Salvage by Alexandra Duncan: Ava, a teenage girl living aboard the male-dominated, conservative deep space merchant ship Parastrata, faces betrayal, banishment, and death. Taking her fate into her own hands, she flees to the Gyre, a floating continent of garbage and scrap in the Pacific Ocean. How will she build a future on an Earth ravaged by climate change? Kimberly’s review. 

Sekret by Lindsay Smith: A group of psychic teenagers in 1960s Soviet Russia are forced to use their powers to spy for the KGB. Kimberly’s review. 

Stolen Songbird by Danielle L. Jensen: Trolls are said to love gold. They are said to live underground and hate humans, perhaps even eat them. They are said to be evil. When Cécile de Troyes is kidnapped and sold to the trolls, she finds out that there is truth in the rumors, but there is also so much more to trolls than she could have imagined. Cécile has only one thing on her mind after she is brought to Trollus, the city she hadn’t even known existed under Forsaken Mountain: escape. But the trolls are inhumanly strong. And fast. She will have to bide her time, wait for the perfect opportunity. But something strange happens while she’s waiting–she begins to fall in love with the handsome, thoughtful troll prince that she has been bonded and married to. She begins to make friends. And she begins to see that she may be the only hope for the half-bloods–part troll/part human creatures who are slaves to the full-blooded trolls. There is a rebellion brewing. And her prince, Tristan, the future king, is its secret leader.

Talker 25 by Joshua McCune: The fifteen-year-long war between man and dragons seems nearly over until Melissa becomes an unwilling pawn of the government after she–and those driving the beasts to extinction–discover that she can communicate with dragons.





Tease by Amanda Maciel: A teenage girl faces criminal charges for bullying after a classmate commits suicide. 

The Chance You Won’t Return by Annie Cardi: High school student Alex Winchester struggles to hold her life together in the face of her mother’s threatening delusions about being Amelia Earhart.

The Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy by Kate Hattemer: When a sleazy reality television show takes over Ethan’s arts academy, he and his friends concoct an artsy plan to take it down. 

Days of Blood and Starlight by Laini Taylor

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I’ve had this book for a while, but it took me a long time to actually get around to reading it. It’s not because I didn’t think I’d enjoy it. On the contrary, I enjoyed it quite a lot. I just loved the first book so much, and it ended so painfully for its characters, I knew the second installment would do cruel things to my heart. Despite my love for dystopias, I don’t have a huge capacity for reading about awful things happening to fictional people. Often I’ll have to repeat in my head over and over “These people are not real. This did not really happen.”

Needless to say, I had to tell myself that often while reading Days of Blood and Starlight.

It feels like a “middle of the series” book. Often that’s a negative thing, but Taylor’s writing is so good, I doubt many readers will mind. There’s not a whole lot of plot movement initially. Much of the novel focuses on Karou and Akiva coming to terms with what happened in Daughter of Smoke and Bone – namely, the rekindling of the war between the chimaera and the angels. The chimaera have been defeated, for all intents and purposes, but they’ve mounted a small resistance that is growing, thanks to the efforts of Thiago, the brutal son of the legendary chimaera warlord, and Karou, the chimaera’s new resurrectionist. Meanwhile, Akiva tries to (secretly) mitigate the effects of the angels’ actions upon chimaera civilians, to mixed results. They act separately and independently with very little knowledge of the other, but when they do meet on rare occasions, it’s painful – and I mean that in a good way.

So there’s a lot of misery going on here. Taylor does bring a bit of lightness with the arrival of Zuzana and Mik, who get to interact with a whole host of chimaera. Their presence is dangerous but funny at the same time. Their visit doesn’t serve much purpose other than bringing some levity to the story, but the levity is much needed and prevents the story from seeming to wallow in misery. Things do really start to move in the second half, where we go beyond the (admittedly well-written) scenes of skirmishes and slaughters. The ending sets up the third book nicely, setting the stage for a potentially much larger conflict, which is exciting to think about.

Days of Blood and Starlight focuses a lot on the awfulness of war, which isn’t exactly revelatory. But it goes beyond that rather obvious theme to ruminate on questions like: How do two groups who don’t even remember why they started fighting end the violence? What is justice and what is revenge, and does the distinction matter? Is forgiving people who have done awful things possible? How much can a person compromise herself to achieve a good end before the ends are not good anymore?

Where the first book was a story about transformation and discovering one’s true self, this book is a full-on war novel. Sometimes it’s exhausting, but it’s always well-executed.

I actually finally hunkered down and read this book since Laini Taylor was visiting my area. I wanted to have the book done so I could get it signed and attend the event without worrying about someone spilling the beans about its contents. Again, I find myself holding off on reading the third book because I know Taylor will put her characters through even more misery. I need to be in a particular mood to read a book that will devastate me. Don’t worry – I’ll be sure and review it many months after everyone else has already read it, just like this one.

Personal copy.

Laini Taylor and I are having a Very Important Discussion. Also, bonus top of Margaret Stohl’s head.

Cover Double, Triple, and (formerly) Quadruple: Risk Taking and Cover Design

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I haven’t done a cover double post in quite a while, but here’s one. Let me start at the beginning because this cover has had a journey to it. 

Sourcebooks unveiled this as the cover for Juliana Stone’s Boys Like You at the end of last year or beginning of this year. It’s cute, but it’s not necessarily remarkable. It looks like a light romance title. But that cover didn’t last long, and instead, Sourcebooks took it in a new direction:

This cover tells an entirely different story. It might still be a romance, but it doesn’t look as light as the previous cover. The redesign definitely fits into the trend of text and image driven covers that are becoming the new dominant look in YA (almost to the point those all look the same too). 

The book’s description (via WorldCat): When Monroe Blackwell, who is spending the summer at her grandmother’s Louisiana bed-and-breakfast, meets Nathan Everets, who has a court-appointed job there, they share, and begin to recover from, their respective feelings of loss and guilt.

I don’t think either cover quite nails it via description alone. The tag line, which changed a little bit between cover redesigns, does a pretty good job capturing it, but I’m not sure where the guitar fits in in the new look and for the old one, it might just look too lighthearted. 

Stone’s book comes out May 6. 

Let’s return to that first cover iteration, though. That stock image is going to get quite a bit of play elsewhere, even though it didn’t end up being used for Boys Like You. 

Kat Spears’s debut novel Sway will get the stock image. The title and the author placement are exactly the same as they were in Stone’s book, too. Again, there’s the feeling of a lighthearted romance here, despite the fact the tagline conveys something different.

Because Sway doesn’t come out until September 16, there’s not yet a description up in WorldCat, but here’s the lengthier one from Goodreads:

High school senior Jesse Alderman, or Sway as he’s known, could sell hell to a bishop.  He also specializes in getting things people want—term papers, a date with the prom queen, fake IDs.  It’s all business with Jesse.  He has few close friends and he never lets emotions get in the way.

But when Ken, captain of the football team, leading candidate for homecoming king, and all around jerk, hires Jesse to help him win the heart of the angelic Bridget Smalley, Jesse finds himself feeling all sorts of things.  While following Bridget and learning the intimate details of her life, he falls helplessly in love for the very first time. He also finds himself in an accidental friendship with Bridget’s younger brother who’s belligerent and self-pitying after spending a lifetime dealing with cerebral palsy.  Suddenly Jesse is visiting old folks at a nursing home in order to run into Bridget, and offering his time to help the less fortunate, all the while developing a bond with this young man who idolizes him.  The tinman really does have a heart after all. 

A Cyrano De Bergerac story with a modern twist, Sway is told from Jesse’s point of view with unapologetic truth and biting humor. His observations about the world around him are untempered by empathy or compassion–until Bridget’s presence in his life forces him to confront his quiet devastation over a life changing event a year earlier and maybe, just maybe, feel SOMEthing, again.

It’s a male point of view, though from the cover, I’d never quite get that. I like that my expectations are bucked like that, but I wonder how much the cover image conveys what the story looks to be about. It’s a fairly generic image that suggests light romance, and I’m not sure if that’s what the book is about. 

While I do not think that books have gender and wouldn’t hesitate to hand a boy a book like this, I think it’s the kind of cover that could be difficult for boys to pick up on their own from the shelf. Romance fans, though, would definitely gravitate toward this, regardless of gender. 

When Spears’s cover was revealed a couple of weeks ago, another cover was revealed from Entangled Teen that looked pretty familiar.

The same stock image is the base for Shannon Alexander’s Love and Other Unknown Variables, which will come out October 7. While it isn’t the same exact treatment, it’s clearly the same stock picture. What’s interesting about this cover is that the side elements are completely different, as they’ve been done up with flowers (to the point where it looks like the plants are rubbing against the girl’s leg in a weird and uncomfortable way) and the color has been completely stripped, save for the pops of red. The placement of the title and the author are completely different than in the Spears cover, which almost makes it not look like the same image. 

Here’s the description from Goodreads:


Charlie Hanson has a clear vision of his future. A senior at Brighton School of Mathematics and Science, he knows he’ll graduate, go to MIT, and inevitably discover the solutions to the universe’s greatest unanswerable problems. He’sthat smart.

The future has never seemed very kind to Charlotte Finch, so she’s counting on the present. She would rather sketch with charcoal pencils, sing in her pitch-perfect voice, or read her favorite book than fill out a college application.

Charlie’s future blurs the moment he meets Charlotte. She’s not impressed by the strange boy until she learns he’s a student at Brighton where her sister has just taken a job. At Charlotte’s request, Charlie orchestrates the biggest prank campaign in Brighton history. But by the time Charlie learns Charlotte is ill and that the pranks were a way to distract her sister from Charlotte’s illness, Charlotte’s gravitational pull on him is too great to overcome. Soon he must choose between the familiar formulas he’s always relied on or the girl he’s falling for (at far more than 32 feet per second). 


I can’t get a clear read, but it seems to me that this book is told from more than one point of view, both Charlie’s and Charlotte’s. Like with Spears’s cover, though, I think this has more appeal to female readers from the shelf perspective, particularly those who like romance. 

I’m not sure I love the way this cover looks, changed from the original stock image. I feel more pulled toward Spears’s, and perhaps it’s because of the color and the way that the title and author’s name are less obscuring of the image. 

But wait! There’s another cover out featuring this image. 

Elizabeth Langston’s A Whisper in Time is available now, having been published April 6 by Spencer Hill Press. It features the same stock image, but it’s been dressed up a bit. Rather than the girl not having anything covering her legs, there’s been a skirt added. Rather than just the sun in the background, there’s been a water scene added. Rather than sticking with the side images in the original, there’s been some fall foliage to give the cover an even warmer feel. While I don’t love how it looks — I think it looks far too tinkered with — I do like the feel of it, especially compared to the Alexander cover treatment. 

Here’s the description from WorldCat: Rescued from a life of servitude by the boy she loves, Susanna Marsh escapes across two centuries, only to be plunged into a world she’s ill-prepared to face. Unable to work or go to school, Susanna finds herself dependent on others to survive. Immersed in the fun and demands of his senior year of high school, Mark Lewis longs to share his world with the girl who’s captured his heart. But first he must tackle government bureaucracy to prove Susanna’s identity.Overwhelmed by her new home, Susanna seeks refuge in history and in news of the people she left behind. But when she learns that danger stalks her sister, Susanna must weigh whether to risk her own future in order to save Phoebe’s happiness.

What makes this cover work for this title is that it does feel historical. The girl having a skirt, rather than a bare leg, gives that suggestion, as does the color treatment. It doesn’t feel entirely modern. 

It’s interesting to me that when there are so many potential cover options, that four books in the same year could use the same stock image. One got changed, but the other three remain the same (as of now, at least). It’s not a bad image, and all of the designs have worked to make them distinct enough. But it makes me wonder why they can’t be distinct without having to use the same picture. I’d like to see far more cover diversity on my shelves in terms of design. While text and image driven covers have really taken off in the last couple of years — we can definitely thank The Fault in Our Stars and Eleanor & Park for that — even when that keeps emerging again and again, it gets boring and waters down what covers can look like. 

When you think of covers that stand out and are memorable, they’re not ones that look like every other cover. They’re ones that do something different — think Winger for example or this year, Rebel Belle. 

This matters because it does impact who these books reach on the most basic level. Covers are the book’s biggest marketing tool. It sells the story to the reader. It is what compels a reader to look at the flap copy and see if it’s something that interests them. If we rely on the same looks over and over, we can only ever reach the same exact readers over and over. A lot of this has to do with fear, of course. If a cover is different, will it sell? Will Barnes and Noble stock it? The publishing world is exceptionally conservative when it comes to risk taking. 

Which leads me to ask a few things: what are some of your favorite and most memorable YA covers in the last couple of years and why? What made those covers stand out? What haven’t you seen on covers that you would like to see? 

In the Shadows by Kiersten White and Jim Di Bartolo

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I’m a sucker for beautiful books, and In the Shadows is nothing if not beautiful. The cover tells you that the text story is by Kiersten White and the art story by Jim Di Bartolo, letting you know right away that the art is not just a series of pretty illustrations – they tell a story that intertwines with the text in important ways, if inscrutable at first.

The story is set (mostly) in Maine, in 1900, in a boardinghouse run by a widowed woman, Mrs. Johnson. She has two teenage daughters, Cora and Minnie. Arthur, a rather brooding teenager, has been sent to stay at the boardinghouse for mysterious reasons; ditto for teen brothers Charles and Thomas. Charles, the elder brother, is dying from an unspecified disease. Together, the five teens become caught up in a dark conspiracy that goes back many years. I won’t share much more (that would ruin some of the fun of discovery), but I will say that the conspiracy is supernatural in origin.

Reading this book was a bit like playing the computer game Myst. Those of you who have played it, or any of its sequels, will know that there’s a storyline, often featuring strange secrets and faraway places, that the player must discover along the way. There are the stunning graphics that tell part of the story, but then there’s also journals, letters, and voiceover – text, really – that tells the rest. Figuring out how everything goes together is the main puzzle of Myst, and I felt like this book was a similar sort of puzzle. The book alternates between art chapters and text chapters. The art chapters have no captions and no dialogue. There are a few letters to characters, but they’re partly obscured so you can’t make out them entirely. They’re clues. The fun, the discovery, is learning how the art story and text story coalesce. It’s not readily apparent at first; stick with it. The rewards are worth it.

I loved Jim Di Bartolo’s work on Lips Touch: Three Times, so it’s unsurprising that I loved it here as well. Here, his art is equal in significance to the text, inviting multiple re-reads and long moments spent poring over the panels. His work is very moody, fitting the tone of the story. His colors are bold, and he uses a liberal amount of black, often casting his characters in shadow. I encourage you to check out a few samples at his website. His art is entirely my style.

White’s no slouch here either. She chooses to tell her part of the story by varying the points of view, though everything remains third person. I think she does a fine job of developing the characters in this way. She doesn’t get a whole lot of space to do it, considering the book is 384 pages and many of those pages belong to the art. At first I had a hard time remembering who was whom (which one is the sick one? Which ones are related?), but this didn’t last long. She gets across quite nicely Charles’ cheerfulness as well as his desperation, Thom’s feelings of helplessness, Cora’s fear, Minnie’s desire to help Cora past that fear – often in unwise ways. The only other book of hers I’ve read is Mind Games, and I think the writing of In the Shadows is much stronger.

Even these text pages are works of art – everything is on glossy paper with lovely, subdued splashes of color around the borders. The whole book has the weight of a graphic novel. In many ways, the stories told by the text and art are not completely original, but the way they’re told is, and that’s what makes this book stand out.

This is a book that needs to be read twice. The first time, read it straight through as presented; the second, go back and re-read just the art. You’ll pick up on more details, and most of your lingering questions will be answered. In the Shadows is unique among current YA offerings (though I’m not wild about its generic title) and will satisfy fantasy readers looking for something different.

Review copy provided by the publisher at TLA. In the Shadows will be published April 29.

On Expectations for Girls in YA Fiction, Misleading Reviews, and Sexuality

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A few weeks ago, I picked up and devoured Julie Halpern’s The F-It List. It’s a story about two girls who are best friends and how their relationship weathers everything. It starts with Becca sleeping with Alex’s boyfriend the day of Alex’s father’s funeral. The summer immediately following, the girls aren’t hanging out as much as they used to. Sure, Alex is angry and upset about what Becca did, but their reason for not hanging out has much more to do with Alex’s need to grieve losing her father than it does what Becca did or losing that boyfriend.

When the school year begins, Alex learns via another girl that something awful happened to Becca over the summer: she was diagnosed with cancer. Alex immediately runs to Becca’s side, and their friendship, while not perfectly patched up, is allowed to continue, and it’s through this agreement of continuing their relationship that Becca asks Alex for a favor. She needs to complete her f-word-rhymes-with-bucket list. Since Becca’s sick and worried a bit about what her future may hold, she wants Alex to do and experience a number of things that she’s always wanted to do but wonders if she’ll ever have the chance to do.

A number of items on the list have to do with sex. Becca wants Alex to masturbate, and she wants Alex to have sex with someone she can say I love you to and mean it. Other items on the list range from doing some silly prank-like stuff to more relationship-driven items. But it is those sexually-related items that Alex homes in on most and those are the items that come to signify not just a lot of what the relationship between the two girls is — blunt, honest, and unashamed — but also points where readers may either bristle or dig in for something deeper. In many ways, I thought the ways that both the sexually-related items and the friendship more broadly played out in the story were what made The F-It List knock out. It’s rare to see such positive portrayals of sex for girls. Both Becca and Alex enjoyed sex and both were very open and honest about liking it and sharing those positive experiences with one another.

But not everyone felt this to be the case. Here’s the review Halpern’s novel got in School Library Journal (you can click to make it larger):

I’ve read and reread this review many times, and every time, something new feels off in it. Keep in mind many trade reviewers review from advanced reader copies of books, meaning that not all of the kinks have been entirely worked out.

I note, too, that I also read The F-It List from an advanced reader copy.

Although I could dive into the notion that Alex performs the items on the f-it list out of guilt — an idea I disagree with entirely, as Alex begins to really embrace this as a commitment to her relationship with Becca — what I find fascinating is this line: “Both girls have casual, unprotected sex with all of their boyfriends without any thoughts of taking precautions.”

This line presumes a few things in it. The first is that it’s the responsibility of the girls to think about and carry out the actions necessary for protection during sex. While print space is limited and words have to be carefully selected in a trade review, the way this particular line is phrased, in conjunction with the line before it, casts a judgment upon the female characters in the story. They’re crass, with limited vocabulary, and they’re not taking responsibility for their own actions. These are the kinds of girls you don’t want to be role models for readers, since they’re not being “good girls.” They don’t arouse sympathy because what happens to them is all a matter of consequences and choices they make. They weren’t smart enough or thinking through things enough to protect themselves.

But what is worse in this line is that it’s factually incorrect.

Early in the book, Alex talks about the first time she’s had sex, as a means of thinking through Becca’s request that she have sex with someone she loves and cares about. The first person — and only person at that point — she’d slept with was a boy named Aleks, who was a foreign exchange student. Starting at page 76 in the advanced reader copy, Alex lays out the story as follows:

Becca was disappointed I hadn’t seen his penis yet and handed me a condom the next time I saw her. Two days later, armed with the Trojan, I followed Aleks back to his house again. […] Me in my underwear, him in blue boxers, we moved over to the bed. “Wait–” I told him, the first work spoken that afternoon. I found Becca’s condom in my backpack and brought it up to the bed. […] He slapped on the condom.


It’s pretty evident immediately that condoms play a role in not just Alex’s sex life, but in the discussions she and Becca have had as best friends about being sexually active. Alex got the condom from Becca, and Alex insisted that Aleks wear it when they slept together. Seems straightforward enough.

But there’s more.

Later on in the story, when Alex begins a relationship with Leo, the issue of the condom isn’t the only one that comes up before they take the plunge and have sex (they had a few intimate moments, but in each case, Leo stopped when Alex asked him to). She talks about why she wants to make sure there is protection. Starting on page 141 of the advanced reader copy:

His hands were gentler than I wanted, and I grabbed one and wrapped it around my breast. I let out a sigh, and Leo reciprocated with a sound of his own. “So you have a condom?” I asked. Life had been too cruel in the last year not to get me pregnant or diseased if I wasn’t careful. I couldn’t trust my body to do the right thing, and I didn’t want to have a conversation with Leo in the middle of this to talk past sexual partners. I didn’t want to know. I just needed it to happen. 


Immediately after, Leo puts on a condom.

In both instances, Alex takes precaution. In both instances, it is Alex — the girl — who insists on using a condom before engaging in intercourse and in the second section, Alex lays out why it is she finds taking this precaution important. With everything going on in her life right now, she recognizes that not being careful would only lead to further problems. She didn’t want to saddler herself with that, nor did she want to get into it with Leo, either. It’s clear and evident that Alex thought about precautions prior to intercourse, and she’s not shy in laying that out there for readers, just as she’s not shy in laying out there what and how she comes to enjoy her budding sexuality.

I’m struck by that review line again because it seems to me the reviewer missed these things (reading too quickly? Not paying close enough attention to the details yet still bringing them up in the review?). But I’m further struck in thinking about whether or not we as readers need to be hit over the head with how careful our protagonists — females especially — need to express how they’re protecting themselves when they choose to engage in sex.

Did the reviewer find fault in the fact that Alex doesn’t tell us about condom use in subsequent sexual situations, despite the fact she’s made it clear she wouldn’t be crazy enough to have sex without a condom? Is it necessary for every instance of sex, whether on the page or fade to black, be explicit in its depiction of protection use? And if that’s the case, where is there a line drawn between telling the story and being faithful to how the characters are and positing an over-the-head message about safe sex? Do readers believe that if Alex doesn’t explain in every sexual moment that she’s making sure there’s a condom in place that she’s chosen instead to not protect herself? Because as a reader, I assume when it’s laid out there for me as openly as it is, that there will be a condom. That I don’t need to be reminded again and again.

Because when real people have sex and are resolute in their wanting to be protected against pregnancy and disease, it becomes a routine, rather than a point of conscious decision making. You always have that box of condoms or you’re faithful in taking birth control (or both or neither). The story isn’t in the routine; it’s in the break from the routine. In Alex’s case, the routine is protecting herself, and I think any more insertion of the condom lines through the story would have turned this from a book where Alex (and Becca) really come to embrace their ability to be sexual beings to a story where they become pawns for the Message of “make sure you use protection.”

Part of me wonders, too, whether the fact this is such a positive portrayal of girls embracing sex and doing so without apology and without holding back on being crude and, at times, obscene, is what will hold some readers back from seeing these smaller moments when Alex is very keen on keeping herself and Leo safe. Halpern hasn’t written an easy story here in any capacity. But I think it’s this complexity which makes The F-It List such a great, memorable read. Because it’s not about Becca’s diagnosis. It’s not about death or the fear of that. It’s about embracing life and relationships — friendly and romantic — to their fullest in whatever way you need to. It’s unfortunate, though, that a trade review in one of the largest, most well-respected library journals could be factually incorrect about the story. In doing so, this book might not end up in the hands of those readers — girls particularly — who would get so much out of it. Who would see themselves in Alex or in Becca. Who would see it’s perfectly okay to enjoy sex alone or with a partner.

And that yes, it’s important to take precautions for yourself and have solid reasons behind why.

I can’t help wonder, too, whether books that do similar things as Halpern’s but feature a male main character undergo the same scrutiny and character judgment.