Lady Business

Welcome to The YA Agenda, a monthly column that’s mostly just an excuse for me to squee over young adult novels new and old. For my inaugural column, I’m delighted to welcome S. A. Chakraborty, whose debut novel City of Brass comes out this month from Harper Voyager. It’s not technically YA, but one of the items on my eponymous Agenda is that I get to decide when adult fiction is YA-ish enough to be included.



City of Brass tells the story of a con artist and healer in eighteenth-century Cairo who accidentally summons a djinn and has to cope with everything that comes next. It has an extravagantly beautiful cover and a cast full of complicated, angry, interesting characters trying to find their footing in a rapidly changing world.

And now: Five Questions for YA Authors (and one just for S. A. Chakraborty)

( Read more... )

November Releases

Every month here at The YA Agenda, I'll be highlighting a few new releases that I'm excited about. Have you read any of these yet? Are there other YA books that have caught your eye? Get at me in the comments and let me know!

Rosemarked by Livia Blackburn
The marketing copy compares this book to Melina Marchetta’s Lumatere Chronicles, so I was sold right away. Rosemarked is about a girl stricken by the rose plague (what is a rose plague??? I do not know but I am so excited to find out!) and a boy determined to free his people from the oppressive rule of Empire. Together they infiltrate the capital city as spies. I love a political fantasy and can’t wait to read Rosemarked.

The November Girl by Lydia Kang
This book is about a girl who is a literal, non-metaphorical storm and who falls in love with a boy who is a regular human and not a weather phenomenon. That is amazing. I will just be listening to Neko Case’s "This Tornado Loves You" on repeat until I can get my hands on this book.

Not Now, Not Ever by Lily Anderson
I have deeply failed the universe in some way that it did not let me know until just now that there’s an Afro-Latina author writing teen drama adaptations of literary classics. Lily Anderson apparently has a book called The Only Thing Worse than Me Is You, a retelling of Much Ado about Nothing, and now there’s a sequel called Not Now, Not Ever, which is inspired by The Importance of Being Earnest. Assuming this isn’t all an Oscar Wilde fangirl fever dream I’m having.

And that’s a wrap for the inaugural installment of The YA Agenda! Hit me up on Twitter any time you want to scream about books, or stop by my blog, Reading the End, to be relentlessly enthused at over every book I love and every episode of Black Sails that broke my heart.

Jenny is the charming and effervescent co-host of the Reading the End bookcast. She blogs about books and other sundries at the delightful and educational Reading the End, where you will gain many excellent book recs and also learn of books about various parts of Africa that you didn't know existed before Jenny brought them into your literary life. She also makes a mean plate of cheese fries.