My local library has a fantastic new books area. It’s always the first thing I hit up when I go in, and I always end up picking up a ton of books on top of the ones I’ve already come in to pick up from the holds shelf. Beyond finding those titles, though, one of my favorite things about seeing so many new titles back to back to back is that it inspires things worth writing about.

It was the rows of adult fiction titles that made me realize there’s been a fun cover font trend in the last year and a half or two: titles in neon. Let’s take a peek at some of the books featuring this font choice — and though the bulk of these books are adult, it hasn’t missed the YA world entirely. Descriptions come from Goodreads and books are from 2017 and 2018 only.

If you can think of other recent neon titles, drop ’em in the comments. I like this trend, along with a couple of trends that Book Rioters have highlighted this year: Bodini font use and the Pantone color of the year (which includes (Don’t) Call Me Crazy now!).

 

The Age of Perpetual Light by Josh Weil

Beginning at the dawn of the past century, in the early days of electrification, and moving into an imagined future in which the world is lit day and night, The Age of Perpetual Light follows characters through different eras in American history: from a Jewish dry goods peddler who falls in love with an Amish woman while showing her the wonders of an Edison Lamp, to a 1940 farmers’ uprising against the unfair practices of a power company; a Serbian immigrant teenage boy in 1990’s Vermont desperate to catch a glimpse of an experimental satellite, to a back-to-the-land couple forced to grapple with their daughter’s autism during winter’s longest night.

 

 

 

 

Aroused: A History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything by Randi Hutter Epstein

Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies control with hormones. Armed with a healthy dose of wit and curiosity, medical journalist Randi Hutter Epstein takes us on a journey through the unusual history of these potent chemicals from a basement filled with jarred nineteenth-century brains to a twenty-first-century hormone clinic in Los Angeles.

Brimming with fascinating anecdotes, illuminating new medical research, and humorous details, Aroused introduces the leading scientists who made life-changing discoveries about the hormone imbalances that ail us, as well as the charlatans who used those discoveries to peddle false remedies. Epstein exposes the humanity at the heart of hormone science with her rich cast of characters, including a 1920s doctor promoting vasectomies as a way to boost libido, a female medical student who discovered a pregnancy hormone in the 1940s, and a mother who collected pituitaries, a brain gland, from cadavers as a source of growth hormone to treat her son. Along the way, Epstein explores the functions of hormones such as leptin, oxytocin, estrogen, and testosterone, demystifying the science of endocrinology.

A fascinating look at the history and science of some of medicine’s most important discoveries, Aroused reveals the shocking history of hormones through the back rooms, basements, and labs where endocrinology began.

 

Before The Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray

New York City.
1927.
Lights are bright.
Jazz is king.
Parties are wild.
And the dead are coming…

After battling a supernatural sleeping sickness that early claimed two of their own, the Diviners have had enough of lies. They’re more determined than ever to uncover the mystery behind their extraordinary powers, even as they face off against an all-new terror. Out on Ward’s Island, far from the city’s bustle, sits a mental hospital haunted by the lost souls of people long forgotten–ghosts who have unusual and dangerous ties to the man in the stovepipe hat, also known as the King of Crows.

With terrible accounts of murder and possession flooding in from all over, and New York City on the verge of panic, the Diviners must band together and brave the sinister ghosts invading the asylum, a fight that will bring them fact-to-face with the King of Crows. But as the explosive secrets of the past come to light, loyalties and friendships will be tested, love will hang in the balance, and the Diviners will question all that they’ve ever known. All the while, malevolent forces gather from every corner in a battle for the very soul of a nation–a fight that could claim the Diviners themselves.

 

Before Now by Norah Olson

A harrowing and heartbreaking teen romance expertly told with a reverse timeline, Before Now is another emotionally charged novel from suspense author Norah Olson about a young couple who runs headlong into tragedy while trying to escape their complicated pasts.

The odds were against them, but somehow aspiring astronomer Atty and her troubled boyfriend, Cole, managed to escape their old lives in the rough neighborhoods of Minneapolis and the judgmental eyes of their parents, who couldn’t see that Atty and Cole were meant to be. But they don’t get away clean. Eventually the mistakes and betrayals from their pasts catch up to them. Atty is lying about why Cole is being hounded by the cops and Cole won’t go quietly to jail—or anywhere without Atty. Then the unthinkable becomes reality and the future is instantly unwritten.

Through Atty’s journal, all the intimate details of her tragic romance with Cole unfold from finish to start, including the mystery of what brought them together—and tore them apart.

 

Blackfish City by Sam J Miller

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges—crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population.

When a strange new visitor arrives—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people—each living on the periphery—to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves.

Blackfish City is a remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying power of human connection.

 

F*cked: Being Sexually Explorative and Self-Confident in a World That’s Screwed by Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson

Comedians Corinne Fisher and Krystyna Hutchinson started Guys We F*cked: The Anti Slut-Shaming Podcast in 2013, intending to interview guys they’d slept with to learn more about themselves and squash the stigma so often associated with sexual women. As the podcast grew, and Corinne and Krystyna got to know their fans, stories of sexual assault, verbal and emotional abuse, and crippling shame became common topics of discussion along with those humorous conversations highlighting overall sexual confusion among many adults. The podcast is now an community of over a million listeners worldwide, and a place where any and all taboo sex topics are discussed freely, both with celebrity guests and the real people in their lives.

Their new book, F*cked, follows that model, as Corinne and Krystyna bring a mix of raw, ridiculous, and serious sexual conversation to the page.

 

 

God of Shadows by Lorna Crozier

How many gods can dance on the head of Lorna Crozier’s pen?

The poet Lorna Crozier has always been brilliant at fusing the ordinary with the other-worldly in strange and surprising ways. Now the Governor General’s Literary Award-winning author of Inventing the Hawk returns with God of Shadows, a wryly wise book that offers a polytheistic gallery of the gods we never knew existed and didn’t know we needed. To read these poems is to be ready to offer your own prayers to the god of shadows, the god of quirks, and the god of vacant houses. Sing new votive hymns to the gods of horses, birds, cats, rats, and insects. And give thanks at the altars of the gods of doubt, guilt, and forgetting. What life-affirming questions have these deities come to ask? Perhaps it is simply this: How can poems be at once so profound, original and lively, and also so much fun?

 

 

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

 

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.

 

 

 

 

Memphis Luck by Gerald Duff

Homicide detectives J.W. Ragsdale and Tyrone Walker are back…investigating what appears to be a simple home invasion robbery gone fatally wrong. The clues lead them to an autistic teenager, an aspiring gang member, who talks to the ghosts of Martin Luthor King Jr. and singer Ricky Nelson for guidance. The troubled, homicidal teen has fallen into the thrall of cowboy preacher Jimbo Reynolds, a slick, bible-thumping, Stetson-wearing conman who has based his cash-cow ministry on ideals plundered from John Wayne movies. What Jimbo doesn’t know is that he’s the target of a gang of misguided ex-cons, led by a psychopathic Native American, who are plotting to take all of his cash…with the help of his greedy publicist and his conniving housekeeper. All of these colorful characters collide in a fateful day of darkly funny, brutal mayhem that’s pure Memphis Luck.

 

 

 

Providence by Caroline Kepnes

Growing up as best friends in small-town New Hampshire, Jon and Chloe are the only ones who truly understand each other, though they can never find the words to tell one another the depth of their feelings. When Jon is finally ready to confess his feelings, he’s suddenly kidnapped by his substitute teacher who is obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft and has a plot to save humanity.

Mourning the disappearance of Jon and facing the reality he may never return, Chloe tries to navigate the rites of entering young adulthood and “fit in” with the popular crowd, but thoughts of Jon are never far away.

When Jon finally escapes, he discovers he now has an uncontrollable power that endangers anyone he has intense feelings for. He runs away to protect Chloe and find the answers to his new identity–but he’s soon being tracked by a detective who is fascinated by a series of vigilante killings that appear connected.

Whisking us on a journey through New England and crashing these characters’ lives together in the most unexpected ways, Kepnes explores the complex relationship between love and identity, unrequited passion and obsession, self-preservation and self-destruction, and how the lines are often blurred between the two.

 

The Sky Is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith

In the burned-out, futuristic city of Empire Island, three young people navigate a crumbling metropolis constantly under threat from a pair of dragons that circle the skies. When violence strikes, reality star Duncan Humphrey Ripple V, the spoiled scion of the metropolis’ last dynasty; Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg, his tempestuous, death-obsessed betrothed; and Abby, a feral beauty he discovered tossed out with the trash; are forced to flee everything they’ve ever known. As they wander toward the scalded heart of the city, they face fire, conspiracy, mayhem, unholy drugs, dragon-worshippers, and the monsters lurking inside themselves. In this bombshell of a novel, Chandler Klang Smith has imagined an unimaginable world: scathingly clever and gorgeously strange, The Sky Is Yours is at once faraway and disturbingly familiar, its singular chaos grounded in the universal realities of love, family, and the deeply human desire to survive at all costs.

 

 

 

Strange Lies by Maggie Thrash

Only at Winship Academy would an evening science expo turn into a criminal fiasco. First, there’s the anonymous boy in the girls’ bathroom handing out drugs to anyone with the secret password. Then the student body president is maimed in a horrifying and tragic accident—but was it an accident or an attack?

Benny Flax and Virginia Leeds are right at the center of it all. And so is the headmaster’s son, Calvin Harker, an oddball poet whose interest in Virginia sets off alarm bells for Benny. As the case bleeds from Winship Academy to the surrounding city, the deep fault lines of racial tension in Atlanta’s history reveal explosive hatred still simmering under the city’s surface.

 

 

 

Suicide Club by Rachel Heng (UK Cover)

What are you doing to help yourself? What are you doing to show that you’re worth the resources?

In a near-future world, medical technology has progressed far enough that immortality is now within grasp – but only to those who show themselves to be deserving of it. These people are the lifers: the exercisers, yogacisers, green juicers and early nighters.

Genetically perfect, healthy and wholesome, one hundred-year-old Lea is the poster girl for lifers, until the day she catches a glimpse of her father in the street, eighty-eight years after their last encounter. While pursuing him, Lea has a brush with death which sparks suspicions. If Lea could be so careless, is she worthy of immortality?

Suicide Club wasn’t always an activist group. It began as a set of disillusioned lifers, gathering to indulge in forbidden activities: performances of live music, artery-clogging meals, irresponsible orgies. But now they have been branded terrorists and are hunted by the state.

And Lea has decided to give them a call.

 

There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins

Love hurts…

Makani Young thought she’d left her dark past behind her in Hawaii, settling in with her grandmother in landlocked Nebraska. She’s found new friends and has even started to fall for mysterious outsider Ollie Larsson. But her past isn’t far behind.

Then, one by one, the students of Osborne Hugh begin to die in a series of gruesome murders, each with increasingly grotesque flair. As the terror grows closer and her feelings for Ollie intensify, Makani is forced to confront her own dark secrets.

 

 

 

Things Jolie Needs To Do Before She Bites It by Kerry Winfrey

Jolie’s a lot of things, but she knows that pretty isn’t one of them. She has mandibular prognathism, which is the medical term for underbite. Chewing is a pain, headaches are a common occurrence, and she’s never been kissed. She’s months out from having a procedure to correct her underbite, and she cannot wait to be fixed.

While her family watches worst-case scenario TV shows, Jolie becomes paralyzed with the fear that she could die under the knife. She and her best friends Evelyn and Derek decide to make a Things Jolie Needs To Do Before She Bites It (Which Is Super Unlikely But Still, It Could Happen) list. Things like: eat every appetizer on the Applebee’s menu and kiss her crush, Noah Reed. Their plan helps Jolie discover what beauty truly means to her.

 

 

 

What We Were Promised by Lucy Tan

After years of chasing the American dream, the Zhen family has moved back to China. Settling into a luxurious serviced apartment in Shanghai, Wei, Lina, and their daughter, Karen, join an elite community of Chinese-born, Western-educated professionals who have returned to a radically transformed city.

One morning, in the eighth tower of Lanson Suites, Lina discovers that a childhood keepsake, an ivory bracelet, has gone missing. The incident contributes to a wave of unease that has begun to settle throughout the Zhen household. Wei, a marketing strategist, bows under the guilt of not having engaged in nobler work. Meanwhile, Lina, lonely in her new life of leisure, assumes the modern moniker taitai–a housewife who does no housework at all. She spends her days haunted by the circumstances surrounding her arranged marriage to Wei and her lingering feelings for his brother, Qiang. Lina and Wei take pains to hide their anxieties, but their housekeeper, Sunny, a hardworking girl with secrets of her own, bears witness to their struggles. When Qiang reappears in Shanghai after decades on the run with a local gang, the family must finally come to terms with the past.

From a silk-producing village in rural China, up the corporate ladder in suburban America, and back again to the post-Maoist nouveau riche of modern Shanghai, WHAT WE WERE PROMSED explores the question of what we owe to our country, our families, and ourselves.

 

The Wonder Down Under by Nina Brochmann and Ellen Støkken Dahl (February 2019)

The Wonder Down Under is a comprehensive guide to a miraculous and complex part of the body that too few of us (regardless of gender) are all that familiar with–the vagina. With wisdom, humor, and scientific aplomb, medical student Ellen Støkken Dahl and Dr. Nina Brochmann take readers on a fascinating journey of female sexual organs and sexual health–from the clitoris to contraception to cervical cancer.

More than a user’s manual, this book is the funny, frank tribute to the vagina that we have been waiting for. The Wonder Down Under is filled with astonishing, essential, and little-known information–relayed with both medical expertise and genuine empathy. Did you know, for instance, that female and male sex organs are merely variations on the same basic structure? Or that there’s no such thing as a virginity test–because examining the hymen cannot meaningfully indicate whether or not someone’s had sex?

Brochmann and Dahl have written a tour-de-force about the biology, anatomy, and reality of the female body, examining the many ways in which widespread misinformation and silence about the vagina have been harmful to women over time. The Wonder Down Under makes crucial contributions to the discussion: the book was an instant bestseller that sold out in its native Norway in just three days. Since then it has been acquired by publishers in more than two dozen countries around the world.

The Wonder Down Under is a joyful and indispensable book that will educate readers of all kinds and equip a new generation to make informed choices about their sexual well-being.