Albertalli, Becky. Amelia, If Only.

NY: HarperCollins, 2025.

When it comes to portraying the experiences, relationships, and problems of LGBT young people in the 21st-century world, Becky is simply one of the best there is. This is her ninth novel since breaking out with the bestselling Simon and the Homo Sapiens Agenda, and it certainly maintains her high standard with its skillful mix of dry humor, authentic banter, and serious life issues. And I will note that if you’ve read Imogen, Obviously (and you should have), the protagonist, Amelia Appelbaum, lives in the same upper Hudson River Valley universe.

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Scalzi, John. When the Moon Hits Your Eye.

NY: Tor, 2025.

An ancient trope in writing science fiction is to ask the question, “What if?” Or more specifically, “If this happens, what comes next?” An experienced author thinks “Well, . . .” — and then off he goes, hopefully with interesting results that make a good story. But only John Scalzi would come up with a (ahem . . .) luna-tic what-if like “What if the Moon were actually made of cheese?” So, on one ordinary day, a little before 5:00 p.m. EST, our Moon, heretofore composed of basalt and similar rocky stuff, abruptly becomes globe of much more reflective white matter. Th director of the John Glenn Museum in Ohio, which owns a moon rock, notices the same change, opens the display, and discovers it smells like . . . cheese. President Brett Boone is informed of the change by his Chief of Staff (in carefully chosen small words) and NASA is driving itself cray. And you ain’t seen nothing yet.

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Rickloff, Alix. The Way to London.

NY: Morrow, 2017.

Okay, I’m old. I was born during World War II. And everywhere I look these days, there are “historical novels” being published that take place during the war. I have to say, it’s a bit disconcerting to read a story marketed as “historical” that’s set at a time when I was already alive. Ah, well. Most of this new crop aren’t battlefield yarns, either, but “women’s novels” set on the home front. (That’s a marketing label I flatly ignore, by the way. There are no sections at the bookstore called “Men’s fiction,” are there? Besides, a book is either well written or it isn’t, and that’s all that matters.)

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Roth, Lucy. When Sally Killed Harry.

NY: HarperCollins, 2025.

This one got my attention because of the title (as the author intended, of course), and it’s one of the best revenge thrillers I’ve read in quite some time. Not to put too fine a point on it, Sally Parker is a closeted psychopath — but, given the way she was raised, you can say she came by it honestly. And she tells you on page 3 that she did, in fact, kill Harry Collins, “sweet, dangerous Harry,” and she has no regrets about it. But you will also come to understand why Harry had it coming.

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Smyth, Ciara. Not My Problem.

NY: Harper, 2021.

This well-written YA novel is built around the theme of how one thing often leads to another, whether you intend it to or not. For Aideen Cleary, the narrator, an intelligent but somewhat feckless high school student somewhere in Ireland (the author doesn’t specify where, but she herself grew up in Belfast), the big change in her life begins when she’s cutting class, as usual, and comes across her classmate, Méabh Kowalska, having a complete, sobbing, screaming meltdown in the girls’ restroom. Méabh (another spelling of “Maeve”) is an intense, superior overachiever “with no hobbies other than winning,” and she’s also the only child of the school’s principal, who assumes she’s perfect in every way. (No pressure there, right?) She’s the one who always has her hand in the air first in class, who becomes a proselytizing activist for every noble cause, who runs for every class office (and expects to win), who also does dance and yoga, and who is thoroughly despised by the rest of the student body. But she doesn’t have enough time in her life these days to do everything — she even schedules her bathroom breaks in advance — and the pressure is just becoming too much to bear.

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Doctorow, Cory. Picks and Shovels.

NY: Tor, 2025.

This is both the final and the first volume in a trilogy relating the adventures of forensic accountant Martin Hench, and it’s just as fascinating and involving and as much fun as the first two (but later) books. See, the first one was set in the present day, when Marty is in his sixties and contemplating retirement, but the second one was set twenty years earlier, and this new one tells of Marty’s origins and early life at M.I.T. in the mid-’70s (where he washed out after he discovered the new Altair 8800, the first step in the Computer Revolution, and quit going to classes), and then dives into the neolithic age of Silicon Valley. (Its earliest development, which is what the title alludes to.) But — this being Cory Doctorow — it all works. Though you’ll enjoy all three books more if you read them in published order, not by internal chronology.

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Monaghan, Annabel. Nora Goes Off Script.

NY: Putnam, 2022.

This is a pretty good romcom, at least partly because of the two very well-drawn main characters, their in-depth personalities, and the way they express themselves. There’s also a nice little throw-away in that nearly all romantic comedies are formulaic by design, following an accepted series of plot points — which the reader expects and will be disappointed and annoyed if the author doesn’t deliver — and the fact that Nora Hamilton, the protagonist and narrator, makes her living writing equally formulaic eighty-minute light romcom film scripts for the Romance Channel (think Hallmark TV movies). In fact, suggest an occupation for the heroine, a location, and a “community activity” as the setting for the climax, and Nora can lay out the basic structure of the plot in seconds. As she says, they’re all different, but they’re all the same.

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Swierczynski, Duane. Secret Dead Men.

London: Titan Books, 2024.

This was Duane’s very first novel, first published in 2004, but I didn’t discover it until after I had read a couple of his early noir crime novels, Revolver and The Wheelman, which hooked me on his idiosyncratic style. Secret Dead Men is very different from his later work; the theme is organized crime but the structure of the story is strongly science fictional, and he pulls off the genre-bending very successfully. This new 20th anniversary edition has been reworked and heavily reedited in the light of two decades of subsequent writing experience, and the style is now much smoother that I remember.

The protagonist, if you can call him that, is Del Farmer, and he’s literally a dead man walking. Five years ago, he was an investigative journalist working a story about a criminal organization based in Las Vegas, but the people he was looking into took it poorly and ha him blown up. Now he’s a collector of other souls and he’s still investigating the Bad Guys, but he’s also out for revenge.

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Benway, Robin. Audrey, Wait!

NY: Penguin, 2008.

High school junior Audrey Cuttler of suburban Los Angeles thinks of herself as a pretty standard sort of girl, except when it comes to music. Because rock ‘n’ roll is her jam. She knows hundreds of lyrics (adding more every week), can tell you who composed and recorded probably thousands of songs, and with the right music in the right setting, she loves nothing more than to dance all night long. But she’s also a straight-A student, so that’s all right. Aubrey has also had a boyfriend for a while now, a rock singer called Evan who has a local band called the Do-Gooders, and they work very hard to kickstart the career they want. And she loves his music, but all he talks about, thinks about, is the band, and it’s wearing thin on her, so she finally decides she’ll have to cut him loose. So she does, though she’s crying while she does it, because she’s a nice person and she really doesn’t want to hurt him. And as she hurries down the stairs from his room afterward, he calls down after her, “Aubrey, wait!” But she doesn’t. And she’s really going to wish she had.

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Dawson, Maddie. A Happy Catastrophe.

Seattle: Lake Union, 2020.

This is a sequel to the very popular Match Making for Beginners, and it’s at least as good as the first one — though it’s somewhat more serious in some of its themes and even a bit darker. There’s far too much backstory that you really need to know, which the author doesn’t spend a lot of time on, so while this one can theoretically be approached as a standalone, I strongly recommend you read the first (excellent) book first. So, Marnie And Patrick have been together for about four years now in her inherited Park Slope brownstone, surrounded by their friends (some of them inherited, too), and he’s finally getting used to the idea of going out in public where people — especially easily frightened small children — can see and react to the dreadful burn scars on his face, and he’s beginning to produce art again. He even has a show coming up. And she’s happily making matches — a matchmaker is what Marnie is at her very core — and running her flower shop, though that’s largely just an excuse to hang out in the salon (in the 19th century sense) that she has established in the back room for everyone in need of a listener, or just a place to be.

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