Caitlyn Paxson

Girls are pushed to their limits and have to decide how far they are willing to go to survive, be remembered and protect what they love in these three spring young adult releases.

You know you're in for something a little different when a YA novel begins with an exploding penis.

An amateur art historian uncovers the story of a mysterious woman who inspired some of the great works of Alexandre Dumas, Lord Byron, and Eugène Delacroix in this delightful romp through the City of Lights.

National Book Award nominee Samantha Mabry returns with a ghostly tale of four Latinx sisters – three of them living, one dead.

The Torres sisters are a charismatic but prickly bunch, always straining against their widower father's smothering grip and trying to figure out how to run towards something better. But when Ana, the eldest, falls to her death trying to sneak out her bedroom window one night, it shatters her sisters and leaves them alone with their regrets and fears.

It's 1617. A storm blows up so suddenly that it seems like evil magic and wipes out the entire male population of Vardø, a little fishing village off the coast of Norway. The women watch as the sea consumes their husbands, fathers, and brothers whole. Left on their own, they swallow their grief and set about trying to survive.

Fiber art magic brings Bolivian-inspired fantasy to life in Isabel Ibañez's debut novel, Woven in Moonlight.

Kane Montgomery is in trouble. He had some sort of car accident that wiped out both an old derelict building and his memory of the crash, and now the police are asking questions and his family — especially his sister, Sophia — want information he can't quite piece together. Even the charismatic doctor that he assumed was assigned to his case by the police is an enigma. Are they a therapist? A detective? A drag queen?

Steph is used to starting over. She and her mother have been on the run from her father for as long as she can remember, moving from town to town and school to school, always leaving when it seems like there's a chance he could find them. The only thing that remains consistent in her life is the close connection she's made with a chat group on a website called CatNet. They upload photos of cute animals, they talk about being teenagers, they encourage each other — all from a safe, anonymous distance.

A girl in disguise, a king in need of protection, and a conspiracy so deep that even those at its heart don't know the whole truth: The Guinevere Deception takes the familiar trappings of Arthurian legend and spins them into an earthy fantasy.

Ruta Sepetys last tore our hearts out with Salt to the Sea, her exploration of the human condition as seen through the eyes of refugees fleeing World War II. In her new book, The Fountains of Silence, she is intent on once again slaying us with history that is full of both beauty and terror, this time set in 1950's Spain — a country held tight in the grip of General Francisco Franco's blood-soaked dictatorship.

Heidi Heilig is the kind of author who comes up with the kind of clever premises that make other writers wring their hands in envy. In her first book, The Girl from Everywhere, she asked: What if there was a boat that could sail through time? In her new series, which began last year with For a Muse of Fire, she turns from time travel to necromancy. Jetta is a shadow puppeteer who animates her puppets with the souls of dead animals.

Printz Award winner Laura Ruby returns with a new Depression-era young adult drama that poses a question: When there are wolves behind all the doors, how do we find the courage to open them anyway?

In Carry On, Rainbow Rowell offered us an alternate universe fanfic-inspired love letter to Harry Potter, wherein the chosen one, Simon Snow, falls in love with his nemesis Baz and comes face to face with the fact that being the chosen one is really not so great. In Wayward Son, Rowell picks up where she left off. What happens once the ultimate battle against evil is over, the world is saved, and the chosen one is left traumatized?

Rutendo Tavengerwei offers us a glimpse into the lives of two struggling teens in her young adult debut, Hope Is Our Only Wing.

We begin with a new student arriving at a boarding school in Zimbabwe. Shamiso has spent most of her childhood in England with her mother and journalist father, an investigative reporter intent on telling hard truths about his beloved homeland and its many corruptions. When her father dies in what looks like a car accident, they are forced to return home to bury him and try to set up a new life in Zimbabwe.

In Akwaeke Emezi's Pet, angels have rid the city of Lucille of all its monsters. That's what Jam has been taught, and she has no reason to doubt it, as she lives a happy life surrounded by her loving parents and her best friend, Redemption. No reason, until a strange and frightening creature crawls out of one of her mother's paintings, intent on hunt down a monster hiding in their midst. The creature is called Pet, and it tells Jam that her duty is to help search out the evil that has taken root in Redemption's house.

There's occasionally a burst of talk about "new adult" as a channel that could exist between the inland lake of young adult fiction and the wide-open ocean of books written for adults. It could be sexier and edgier than young adult but still about teens or early 20-somethings working out their feelings! It's a topic that comes and goes without gaining much traction.

In her previous works of historical fiction, Stacey Lee offered readers a Chinese-American perspective on the Old West and turn-of-the-century San Francisco. Now, with The Downstairs Girl, she turns to the post-Reconstruction era South.

Maia Tamarin is the best tailor along the Great Spice Road. The problem is that girls aren't allowed to be tailors, so she has to hide her work behind the facade of her father's shop. And with her family torn apart by war and her father's illness, she's beginning to wonder if maybe it's time to give up on her talent and marry to save her family and secure her future.

Rory Power's debut novel Wilder Girls combines grotesque physical metamorphosis with the intense bonds of love between teenage girls to create a unique variety of feelings-heightened body horror. If you took the creeping biological corruption that one expects from Jeff VanderMeer and the angry, intense teen girl relationships centered by Nova Ren Suma and mashed them together, they would mutate into this — something fresh and horrible and beautiful.

In this tale of a family with dark secrets and divinatory gifts, Lambda Literary Award winner Rebecca Podos ponders the inevitable question: If you can read the future that lies ahead, do you also have the power to change it?

When Ruby Chernyavsky hit her teen years, she had a premonition — a vision of the moments leading up to her death. Knowing her "Time" was something she always expected, since all of the women in her family forsee their own, but what none of them know is that Ruby's days are numbered. Her Time is her 18th birthday, so in a little over a year, she'll be dead.

A fantastical silk road city comes to life in Nafiza Azad's richly detailed debut novel, The Candle and the Flame.

In With the Fire on High, Elizabeth Acevedo's follow-up to her National Book Award winning debut, The Poet X, she explores a different kind of creative talent through the story of a teenage girl, Emoni Santiago, who many would foolishly dismiss as a classic cautionary tale.

America's most macabre poet is tormented by his muse — literally — in this young adult imagining of Edgar Allan Poe's teenage years.

Emerge from winter hibernation and get your blood moving with three young adult novels featuring girls who realize they must take a stand against unjust establishments, regardless of the personal cost.

In 1943, a German university student named Sophie Scholl was executed for distributing pamphlets that criticized the Nazi regime. White Rose, named for the resistance group that Sophie belonged to, tells the story of how Sophie went from being a carefree member of the League of German Girls to a brave rebel who was willing to give up her life to undermine the Nazis.

At the high school theater auditions of my youth, 29 out of 30 girls were guaranteed to stand up on the stage and warble "On my owwwwwwn, pretending he's beside me." What teenage girl doesn't identify with Éponine, the girl who does all the work and has all the brains but is overlooked by her crush because he only has eyes for the gorgeous bimbo who can sing the high notes? I'm not sure if today's teenagers are inclined to obsess over Les Mis the musical the way that my generation did, but I do know that bittersweet love triangles are timeless.