Lucas Stoffel

You've Reached Sam Book Review: Here is what I can tell you about Dustin Thao after reading both his novels. He writes loneliness the way most writers write romance. It is the thing he keeps his eye on. You've Reached Sam is his debut, and it is where he figured out that grief in YA does not have to be loud.

You've Found Oliver Book Review: When Dustin Thao announced a companion novel to You've Reached Sam, I expected a gentle variation on the original. A different narrator, same grief, same magical realism, slightly different angle. What I got was a book that takes the rules of the first novel and quietly breaks them, and then uses the broken pieces to tell a queer love story that no one else in YA is writing right now.

"Red, White & Royal Blue" Book Review: I was not expecting this book to matter to me as much as it did. I picked it up thinking it would be a fun, frothy enemies-to-lovers romance between the First Son of the United States and the Prince of Wales, and it is that — it absolutely is that — but Casey McQuiston also wrote something that sneaks up on you and becomes genuinely moving in ways that the premise doesn't advertise.

Fans of the Impossible Life is the quietest book on my shelf that hit the hardest. Kate Scelsa wrote a YA novel about three teenagers — Mira, Jeremy, and Sebby — whose friendship becomes the only safe place any of them have, and she did it without a single moment of false comfort.