YA
The Best Young Adult Mysteries, Thriller and Horror Novels of 2023
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The young adult mystery continues to thrive, along with plenty of YA horror thrillers, and this year was distinguished by quality storytelling, careful constructions, and social justice elements placed front and center. Whether you want to defeat the monsters or be the monster, solve the murder or get your own deadly vengeance, 2023 has an…
Dark Academia: YA Edition
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If you’re anything like me, you’ll find the winter evenings perfect for immersing yourself in a little dark academia. Whether you enjoy the prestigious school settings, the thrown-together friendships that shouldn’t work but do, or simply the higher education of it all, there is one thing in particular that brings readers to this genre in…
What To Read While You’re Waiting for the Next Season of Yellowjackets
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How do you know someone just finished binging both seasons of Yellowjackets? A. They roam around in a daze grabbing random people and asking, “Who is pit girl? Who is pit girl?” I know I’m not the only one obsessed with the Showtime series about a New Jersey high school soccer team, the unspeakable things…
Fighting Toxic Masculinity Through Young Adult Fiction
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When I was dreaming up the plot of my latest young adult thriller, The Revenge Game, I posed the following research question to my social media followers: “It’s hard to phrase, but did you ever experience kids at school/camp participating in, like, sexual conquest competitions? Example: at my camp, the *cool kids* would rank the…
Monster, Survivor, Villain, Victim: The Many Faces of Queer Horror
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Believe it or not, the first time many young queers feel seen in media isn’t in some sweet romcom, it’s in horror. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a queer character in the horror story who makes them feel comforted, or empowered, or even validated. It’s the final girl. It’s the vampire. It’s the werewolf….
Safe Places: On Writing Books for Teens about Teen Issues
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I moved ten times before I turned seventeen. That number doesn’t count temporary moves while waiting for housing, like the time we lived in a hotel on Waikiki for two months. Or the many short stints in apartments, often with no furniture other than the bench seat from our minivan, a television, and some air…
The Backlist: Revisiting Steven Hamilton’s ‘The Lock Artist’ with Elle Cosimano
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When I started writing crime fiction, what I worried about most was all the stuff you had to know. I had never been a criminal, a detective, a private investigator, or a lawyer. I didn’t know how to steal a car or bury a body or fake an alibi. Of course there was always Google,…
The Albatross of Smartphones in Young Adult Mysteries
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There’s a joke among millennials that our favorite childhood television shows would have sucked if the characters had owned smartphones. Videos of Buffy fighting vampires would have been uploaded to TikTok in a second; Joey would have spent her evenings texting Dawson instead of sneaking through his window; and Mulder and Scully could have tracked…
Celebrating the Iconic Suspense of Lois Duncan
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I still own three of Lois Duncan’s books. Growing up, I read so many, but these are the three I have left: Daughters of Eve, Stranger with My Face, and Summer of Fear. The covers are creased and falling apart, and the pages are so fragile that they tear when I try to turn them,…