Lucas Stoffel

Magical children, a grumpy bureaucrat finding love, and a six-year-old Antichrist named Lucy who collects buttons and just wants people to like him. That's The House in the Cerulean Sea, and I'm not even slightly embarrassed by how much I loved it. TJ Klune — who won the Alex Award for this novel — writes the kind of fantasy that feels less like escapism and more like therapy.

Here is the pitch: aliens show up, flatten every building on Earth, and kill everyone who was outside. The survivors get dropped into a massive underground dungeon — a multi-floor death game broadcast live to the entire galaxy for entertainment. Carl, our guy, was outside in a bathrobe walking his ex-girlfriend's cat when the world ended. The cat, Princess Donut, gains the ability to talk. She immediately becomes the most famous celebrity in the known universe and demands to

Aiden Thomas first caught my attention with Cemetery Boys, which was one of those debuts that made you sit up and go "oh, this person is going to be important." The Sunbearer Trials confirms that instinct and then some. Thomas has built an entire world here—Reino del Sol—rooted in Mexican mythology, Aztec-inspired gods, and a competition structure that borrows from the Hunger Games playbook but does something genuinely fresh with it...