The Long Game

Tess Kendrick Keyes is back in Jennifer Lynn Barnes’ second installment of The Fixer series: The Long Game. This time, Tess is trying to help her classmate win a school election. What could be a simple high school story instead deals with corruption, terrorism, and even the #metoo movement. Barnes does not shy away from unhappy and uncomfortable situations and topics. People die. Characters aren’t exactly who you think they are. Barnes takes risks, particularly for a young adult novel, and I respect her for it—and for expecting her YA readers to take those risks with her.

Be Prepared

Vera Brosgol’s graphic novel Be Prepared is based on her experiences as a child at summer camp. Vera, a young Russian immigrant in New York, doesn’t quite fit in with the other girls at her school. Every summer, her friends go off to summer camp, so Vera jumps at the chance to attend a camp for Russian diaspora. She longs to have the camp experience and to fit in with other children. However, camp isn’t exactly what she was hoping for. Vera’s feelings of loneliness and isolation and her longing for acceptance is a universal human experience than any reader can relate to.

Bring Me Back

Finn’s girlfriend, Layla, disappears under puzzling circumstances at the beginning of B.A. Paris’s Bring Me Back. Several years later, Finn is engaged to Layla’s older sister, Ellen, and starts receiving mysterious messages from his past. Bring Me Back is an easy and fast read. I was happy to finally have an unreliable narrator that is male but surprised that Paris decided to resolve some of the mystery so early on in the novel. As such, I suspected the ending, but it was still a fun and painless ride.

The Death of Mrs. Westaway

Hal, a young, impoverished tarot card reader, is surprised when she learns of the passing of her grandmother, Mrs. Westaway—particularly since her grandmother had died before Hal was born. Hoping to alleviate some of her financial distress, Hal attends Mrs. Westaway’s funeral and discovers everything isn’t as she initially imagined.

The premise of Ruth Ware’s latest novel, The Death of Mrs. Westaway, is intriguing. However, it took me a long time, almost to the last 80 pages, to feel hooked on this book. The execution is slow and sometimes rather dull, but ultimately the story grabbed me and I had to know the ending.