Lucas Stoffel

The Impossible Fortress is set in 1987, and it absolutely nails it. Jason Rekulak wrote a coming-of-age novel about a fourteen-year-old boy named Billy Marvin whose initial goal — stealing a copy of Playboy from the local convenience store — accidentally leads him into a friendship with the store owner's daughter, Mary, who is the best computer programmer he's ever met. What follows is a novel about first love, betrayal, and the Commodore 64 that is far better than it has any

The Fates Divide picks up where Carve the Mark left off and does what good sequels do — it expands the scope while deepening the personal stakes. Where the first book was about Akos and Cyra surviving, this one is about them choosing. And the choices are terrible. Cyra and Akos are separated for much of the novel, and Roth uses that distance to give each character their own arc rather than tethering them to the romance. Cyra is drawn into the political upheaval of the...

Carve the Mark is Veronica Roth's first post-Divergent novel, and you can feel her stretching into a bigger canvas. Where Divergent was one city, one system, one test — this is an entire galaxy of planets connected by a sentient energy field called the current, and every person in it is born with a currentgift that shapes who they become. It's ambitious, messy, and more interesting than it has any right to be. The story follows two characters from opposite sides of a confl

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.

The Romeo Catchers is the second book in Alys Arden's Casquette Girls series, and it does what every good sequel should — it takes the world you thought you understood and flips the floorboards to show you what's living underneath. If The Casquette Girls was about surviving Hurricane Katrina and discovering that vampires exist in New Orleans, The Romeo Catchers is about what happens when the city starts to rebuild and the monsters are already embedded in the foundation.