Staff Picks Audience: Teens

The Storyteller’s Death by Ann Dávila Cardinal [Book]

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The cuentistas in Isla Larsen Sanchez’s family carry their stories through generations. Isla spends summers on the family compound in Puerto Rico with her great-aunt Alma, and lives the rest of the year in New Jersey with her widowed mother. During the summer of her eighteenth year, she learns that she shares the family gift. She experiences the story of each deceased cuentista in visions that repeat at the same time every day until she understands details customarily left out of their telling. In a story shared between her grandmother and great-aunt, Isla witnesses the death of her great-grandfather and, on repetition, is grazed by the bullet that kills him. In order to understand what really happened, she must ask her family and others who were on the estate at the time to reveal what they know, trying to uncover secrets they’ve kept for decades. In the process, Isla learns about her family history and the legacies of racism, sexism, and classism she is inheriting. A great read for fans of stories set in the Caribbean and tales of magic, love, and family.

YA crossover appeal: Isla’s coming of age as a daughter of two countries and traditions will provide a compelling tale for teens.

Revenge of the Librarians by Tom Gauld [Graphic Novel]

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This book will tickle the funny bone of readers and writers alike.

Race for the Galaxy by Tom Lehmann [Library of Things]

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Build a galactic civilization! This incredibly clever and evocative card game (for 2-4 players) has you exploring, settling worlds, developing industries, and producing and trading goods. It’s a competitive game, but interactions with your fellow players are limited. There is a lot of skill involved and there are opportunities to affect your fellow players. Your resources are cards you draw from a facedown pile, so there is no competition there—but each turn you choose a phase to play, and all players get to benefit from that phase. The trick to coming out on top? Choosing phases that benefit you more than they benefit the other players! Each phase—explore, develop, settle, consume, and produce—has its uses, and the player that chose the phase gets a special bonus. It’s a fun mechanic, and one that can be quite exciting as the game nears its end—on the last turn, will you get a chance to both settle and develop? You can only choose one!

The game cards are rich with information: the cost to play them, the points they are worth, and symbols and text indicating what bonuses they give during each phase of play. The system of symbols is elegant and concise but takes some getting used to—the game comes with a large reference card for each player that you will find useful when learning the game, in time you will realize you don’t need it any longer, but it is invaluable when learning the game. The game cards also have wonderful art which I continue to enjoy game after game.

One of the best things about this game is its simple mechanisms and setup. There are only two components: cards, and victory point tokens. Victory point tokens represent extra points at game end. Cards are multipurpose and represent everything else in the game. Cards are your currency—you discard cards from hand to pay for things. Cards are your worlds and developments—when you settle or develop you pay the cost and place the card in front of you, adding it to your civilization. And cards are the goods produced by industry and traded in commerce—a card placed under a world is a good which you can trade (discard to draw more cards into your hand) or consume (discard to draw more cards or gain victory point tokens).

It’s also a pretty quick game once you are familiar with it. My girlfriend and I play often, and we almost always play multiple games in a sitting. Why not? The game is out, quick to setup, quick to play, and it’s lots of fun!

Century Spice Road by Emerson Matsuuchi [Library of Things]

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Century Spice Road is a wonderfully simple and compelling game for 2-5 players. I love it. Here are some of the best things about it:

• Setup is quick–not much more than just shuffling two decks of cards and counting out a few tokens
• The game is easy to learn and quick to play
• The competition is low key
• The art on the cards is beautiful and the pieces (wooden cubes, metal coins, and plastic bowls) are tactilely satisfying
• It’s a deck building game of sorts, but it is refreshingly different from other deck building games I’ve played
• The gameplay is fun whether you win or lose

The premise is that you are a merchant, trading in spices. There are four types of spices in the game, each represented by wooden cubes of a specific color: yellow for turmeric, red for cayenne, green for cardamon, and brown for cinnamon. Market cards let you acquire or trade spices and spices can be traded for victory point cards. The trick is that you must have the have the right spices to pay the card’s cost. That victory card that is worth 20 points may be very tempting, but how are you going to obtain the five cinnamon cubes necessary to pay for it?

Everyone starts out with the same two market cards and a few cubes of turmeric and players compete to acquire market cards and victory point cards from an ever changing supply–each time someone acquires a card the cards to the right of it are slid left and a new card is dealt in the rightmost spot. Some clever mechanics ensure that their is generally an incentive to acquire the leftmost cards (the leftmost victory cards come with coins for bonus points and the leftmost market cards cost the least) which encourages turnover in the supply.

The gameplay can vary a great deal from game to game and there is no one winning strategy. Do you have a good way of obtaining new spices? Are your trades efficient? Are you able to easily obtain any spice you need or do you find yourself with a glut of cayenne or turmeric without a good way of obtaining the other spices you need? It’s different every game.

I very much Century Spice Road. Borrow it from the library and give it a try!

Crying in H Mart [Book]

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Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (also known by her band name Japanese Breakfast) is a beautifully crafted memoir about Zauner’s relationship with her mother and coming to terms with her mother’s slow decline and death. It grapples with themes of identity, loss, love, grief, and culture. She tells us about her and her mothers connection through vivid descriptions of Korean food and how food connects people, families, and cultures. It is a warm and yet heartbreaking story (one that will make you cry within the first chapter) that teaches us how we must not only remember the people who formed us, but also that we have the power to construct our own identities too.

All Girls by Emily Layden [Book]

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Layden’s debut novel, set in the fictional all-girls Atwater boarding school, is filled with longstanding traditions, social complexities, shifting alliances, and shocking secrets. The story of an academic year is told through the eyes of nine different students, month by month. From a freshman legacy student whose grandmother and mother both attended to a talented senior who is the school’s poster girl, each young woman reveals her motivations and concerns as she attends classes, participates in events, and lives her life. A twenty-year-old scandal resurfaces as students arrive to begin the year, and the school’s handling of the situation at the time has lasting effects for the institution itself and the students readers grow to care about over the months. Readers will find themselves thinking about the vividly and compassionately rendered characters long after their chapters end, and considering decisions they would make in the same situations. Give it to grown up fans of Gossip Girl and readers of Curtis Sittenfeld and Emma Straub. YA crossover appeal for, again, fans of Gossip Girl and aspirational prep school students.

The Queen’s Thief Series [Book]

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With some of the most unexpected twists in young adult literature, this “best series you have never heard of” is a great match for those looking for a mixture of Greek Mythology, adventure, humor, political intrigue, and mystery. The series follows that character of Gen, who begins the first novel languishing away in prison. With the proclamation “I can steal anything!” Gen is sent on a mission that brings him face to face with the gods and his destiny. The novels mature in both theme and writing style, much like the Harry Potter series, and by the end readers will have jaws tired from dropping from the twists that this intentionally vague review is leaving out. Lovers of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson and genuinely good writing should flock to this series. Start with The Thief and make your way through the realm of Attolia, you won’t regret it!

Pandemic (Board Game) by Matt Leacock [Library of Things]

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Though we all may be sick of the subject matter, this team-style board game is a great way to escape from the pandemic by defeating it! This game has elements of Risk and other strategy games but would appeal to a group of friends or a family that want to work together instead of against each other to take down a global virus that spreads with every roll of the dice. Roles for players to take on include Epidemiologist, Field Operative, and Containment Specialist and the Geography of the world is explored from Manila to Lagos to Bogata to Miami. This fast-paced, cooperative, addictive game will be a favorite both pre and post pandemic.

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo [Book]

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In 1950’s San Francisco, seventeen-year-old Lily Hiu’s Chinatown community, including her parents, are constantly under scrutiny for not being “American enough.” Lily works hard to fit in at school and with her friends, but she has a secret she can’t share with anyone: she’s attracted to other girls, a dangerous realization that could put her family’s citizenship at risk. When classmate Kathleen Miller invites Lily to the Telegraph Club, a bar for San Francisco’s underground lesbian community, Lily is torn between her duty to her family and her fascination with the forbidden Telegraph Club—and with Kathleen. At turns hopeful and heartbreaking, Last Night at the Telegraph Club paints a vivid portrait of mid-century San Francisco and the people whose lives were endangered by the fear-mongering and needless moral panic of the Red Scare.

The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde [Book]

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The Big Over Easy is a nonsensical but compelling police procedural. Detective Inspector Jack Spratt heads the Nursery Crimes Division, an underfunded and overworked department of the Reading Police Department, with jurisdiction over People of Dubious Reality. In this alternate universe, Reading, Berkshire, is home to a not insignificant number of characters from nursery rhymes, fables, fairy tales, and the like. From the the three little pigs to Old Mother Hubbard and a substantial number of woodcutters and millers’ sons, Reading is full of folks whose identities as storybook characters are obvious to everyone but themselves.

The story begins when Sergeant Mary Mary is assigned to work with DI Spratt on what seems a straightforward case: Humperdinck Jehoshaphat Aloysius Stuyvesant van Dumpty has fallen off a wall. Their investigation soon reveals, however, that Humpty’s death was anything but accidental. Forensics quickly reveals that Humpty was shot, but further conclusions are harder to come by due to the lack of ballistics research on large egg. Inquiries into Humpty’s past reveal all sorts of shady dealings, including involvement in a straw-into-gold racket. And interviews with Solomon Grundy, Rapunzel, and Wee Willie Winkie bring up more questions than answers.

The Big Over Easy is a delightful read, prefect for when you want something both clever and silly.

The Truth Is by NoNieqa Ramos [Book]

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Author of The Disturbed Girl’s Dictionary, NoNeiqa Ramos’ second book, The Truth Is, explores LGBTQ+ identities, teenage homelessness, grief and trauma through the eyes of Verdad, a fifteen-year-old Puerto Rican queer kid who is just trying to get by.

After losing her best friend to gun violence, Verdad is not okay. And by the end of the book, she is still not okay. That’s what is so amazing about this novel. There are no easy outs or tidy endings. It demonstrates how messy (and joyful) life can be, especially for those with underrepresented and marginalized identities. Verdad’s friends have diverse races, genders and sexualities, and they are all fully developed characters with charms and flaws just like the next person. Their identities are pieces of who they are, but they aren’t all of who they are. Even as an adult I felt so much joy and recognition in these pages. If you’re looking for a YA book to read this spring, pick this up! You won’t regret it.

By Any Name by Cynthia Voigt [Book]

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Voigt, a revered writer of teen fiction (Homecoming, Dicey’s Song), presents her first novel for adults. By Any Name is the story of a woman’s life told primarily through the eyes of her youngest daughter, Beth, with remembered interjections from her other three daughters, Meg, Jo, and Amy. Rida was an orphan who, by virtue of the heightened emotion and reduced social barriers of World War II, finds herself married to Spencer Howland, scion of a large and wealthy New England family. Consistently described as unconventional, Rida resists assimilation into Boston and Cape Cod society, supporting her professor husband in a comfortable lifestyle through strategic investment and management of his trust fund. She fiercely advocates for her daughters, rousting a lecherous teacher and disrupting a debutante ball as a protective parent. A compelling woman equally admired, loved, and resented by her girls, she allows them to grow into themselves, strong and uncompromising and ultimately happy. The story will appeal to now-grown Voigt fans, as well as teens interested in tales of large and complicated families.