Newly released this month, Alexis Henderson’s young adult debut, When I Was Death, brings the author’s signature fantastical horror to a meditation on grief and coming of age. In the year since protagonist Roslyn lost her sister, Adeline, she’s almost completely disconnected from her life. The mysterious circumstances surrounding Adeline’s loss have cast an even longerRead More
A Caravan of Teenage Grim Reapers: When I Was Death by Alexis Henderson Review
A year after her sister, Adeline, dies under mysterious circumstances, a ragtag group of teenage girls descend upon Roslyn Volk’s small Midwestern town and make her an offer that she can’t refuse in Alexis Henderson’s When I Was Death. The girls (Naomi, Skye, Riley, Iona, Chloe, and the enigmatic Shiloh, who catches Roslyn’s eye from theRead More
A Disappointing Folk Horror Story: Hollow by Taylor Grothe Review
Hollow by Taylor Grothe is a book with a lot of potential. The main character, Cassie, has recently moved back to her home town and reconnected with her childhood best friends—but the past few years have been tough for all of them, and they just don’t fit the way they used to. When they go onRead More
Zombies, OCD, and Finding Good Where You Can: If We Survive This by Racquel Marie Review
Racquel Marie’s If We Survive This is in some ways a familiar story. Set in an alternate present where rabies has mutated into what is ultimately a zombie-fying disease, society has collapsed into an apocalyptic wasteland. Following the disappearance of their father, Flora and her brother, Cain, decide to follow him up to the cabin they vacationedRead More
The Troubled Teen Industry and Other Monsters: What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould
In this YA horror novel, five teens are forced to participate in a new “wilderness therapy program” called REVIVE. Some of them are kidnapped in the night and escorted here by force. They face 50 days hiking through the wilderness and talking about their trauma with two unqualified twenty-somethings. This is based on real programsRead More
Small-Town Ghosts: We Don’t Swim Here by Vincent Tirado Review
Tirado’s second young adult horror novel is an alternating POV story following two main characters: cousins, Anais and Bronwyn. Anais has always lived in the small, rural, secluded town of Hillwoods, a place to which Bronwyn is now forced to move so that her entire family may spend time with her grandmother while she’s inRead More
Folk Horror and the Troubled Teen Industry: What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould Review
In European folk and fairytales, a journey through the woods represents the characters’ coming of age—their passage from the pastoral, relative security of familial and familiar hearths into a fraught, shadowy place where metaphors for social anxieties lurk around every corner. Only with wit and friendship can one come out the other side, though theyRead More
The Perfect Pick for Queer Horror-Loving Teens: Come Out, Come Out by Natalie C. Parker
Now that we’re out of October, it’s time to move on from spooky books, right? Wrong. Now is the time to read all the books other people read during October and are rec-ing you. I read Come Out Come Out by Natalie C, Parker in only a couple of sessions, and I found it such an engagingRead More
Murder, Mayhem, and Mascots: Rest in Peaches by Alex Brown
After reading her debut novel, Damned If You Do, Alex Brown has quickly become one of my new favorite authors! As part of this year’s Sapphic September challenge, I read an ARC of her most recent novel, Rest in Peaches, which came out on October 15th of this year. Rest in Peaches follows a highRead More
A Brutal Colonial Horror Story: To the Bone by Alena Bruzas
To the Bone is the story of Ellis, an indentured girl in the Jamestown settlement of the Virginia colony. Ellis aspires toward little more than goodness; born poor in the late 1500s, she can neither read nor count, but understands the world as preachers sketch its edges. She works hard as a servant to the semi-prominentRead More
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