We have four books on our calendar for this week. There’s a lot of magic between the covers of several of the books along with a little haunting and a bit of music too.
(S)kin by Ibi Zoboi
Versify
From award-winning, New York Times bestselling author Ibi Zoboi comes her groundbreaking contemporary fantasy debut—a novel in verse based on Caribbean folklore—about the power of inherited magic and the price we must pay to live the life we yearn for.
Fifteen-year-old Marisol is the daughter of a soucouyant. Every new moon, she sheds her skin like the many women before her, shifting into a fireball witch who must fly into the night and slowly sip from the lives of others to sustain her own. But Brooklyn is no place for fireball witches with all its bright lights, shut windows, and bolt-locked doors.… While Marisol hoped they would leave their old traditions behind when they emigrated from the islands, she knows this will never happen while she remains ensnared by the one person who keeps her chained to her magical past—her mother.
Seventeen-year-old Genevieve is the daughter of a college professor and a newly minted older half sister of twins. Her worsening skin condition and the babies’ constant wailing keep her up at night, when she stares at the dark sky with a deep longing to inhale it all. She hopes to quench the hunger that gnaws at her, one that seems to reach for some memory of her estranged mother. When a new nanny arrives to help with the twins, a family secret connecting her to Marisol is revealed, and Gen begins to find answers to questions she hasn’t even thought to ask.
But the girls soon discover that the very skin keeping their flames locked beneath the surface may be more explosive to the relationships around them than any ancient magic.
Reign of the Talons (Talons #3) by Sophie Kim
Entangled: Teen
How do you kill a prophecy?
The Prophecy has arrived…and with her, war.
A prisoner caged within the walls of her own mind, the once-fierce assassin known as Shin Lina can do nothing but watch as a tide of blood and chaos sweeps across the Three Kingdoms. After all, Lina is the one who unleashed the malevolent Prophecy upon her world.
So many secrets. So many lies. And it’s all her fault.
Yet Haneul Rui—the immortal Dokkaebi Emperor who stole her heart—refuses to surrender. He alone leads the armies against the dangerous, serpentine Imugi. He alone wields his scorching fire atop blood-soaked battlefields, and he alone rallies his soldiers against a terrifying future of death and destruction.
Now the red thread of fate ties them all together in love and hatred—Rui, Lina, and the merciless Prophecy herself. And the more Lina fights against her destiny, the tighter the thread becomes.
For they are bound in both life and death; to wound one is to wound them all. To kill the Child of Venom is to kill them all.
And soon, not even the wrathful gods themselves can stop their inevitable ruin.
Ghost Queen by Mahtab Narsimhan
Orca Book Publishers
Hey, Ghosties, this is the Ghost Queen tuning in from the most haunted place in India!
Teen vlogger Malika’s ghost hunter channel is almost popular enough to start earning money to support her family. All she needs is one viral video—and she knows exactly where she’s going to get it. Bhangarh Fort is the most haunted place in India, rumoured to be home to the cursed princess Ratnavati and her wicked captor. Malika convinces her boyfriend to sneak into the fort with her after dark and record the experience for her avid fans and followers. That’s when things go terribly wrong. Can the “Ghost Queen” escape, or is she doomed to spend eternity trapped with a mad magician and the princess who rejected him?
This short novel is a high-interest, low-reading level book for teen readers who are building reading skills, want a quick read or say they don’t like to read! The epub edition of this title is fully accessible.
Dropping Beats by Nathanael Lessore
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Thirteen-year-old Growls (aka Shaun) is an aspiring (awful) rapper who hopes to enter this year’s Raptology competition with his best friend, Shanks (aka Zachariah). After all, what better way to land his crush (Tanisha) and get the respect he finally deserves than winning the contest and going viral?
But when a livestream practice goes epically wrong, the two friends do go viral– and not in the way they’d hoped.
Now the laughingstock of the school, Growls is sure he’ll never have another chance to date Tanisha. Even worse, Shanks has gone MIA, leaving him terribly alone.
But when Growls meets the new girl on the block (Siobhan), things don’t seem so terrible after all. And with some patience, a little luck, and a whole lot of practice, he just might win the Raptology competition and be a hero to both Siobhan and Shanks.
Either way, he’s ready for this. He’s steady for this. It’s comeback season and they call him comeback king for a reason.