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2022 New YA & Adult Book Releases (Part 2)

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It’s that time again!! When I help overload your TBR pile.

Unapologetically as always, I must admit. Also the true issue here is that I overload my own tbr pile (I’m currently on a book ban but also 😩 I suffer time to treat myself). At least I’ve caught up on my reading goals this year and I’m currently 6 books ahead an on track for 200 reads for 2022.

You can catch part 1 of my list here, with releases from January to April. Now onwards to the books 👀👇🏻

This is a mix of Young Adult 2022 new upcoming releases with a few adult titles mixed in that I’m keen for!

 

Title: The Book of Night by Holly Black
Release Date: May 3rd 2022
Genre: Adult Fantasy
Goodreads
It’s HOLLY BLACK. I really love her work, and this one seems reminiscent of her YA Curseworker series which is maybe my favourite of her books. I’m excited to see what she’ll do with adult!

In Charlie Hall’s world, shadows can be altered, for entertainment and cosmetic preferences—but also to increase power and influence. You can alter someone’s feelings—and memories—but manipulating shadows has a cost, with the potential to take hours or days from your life. Your shadow holds all the parts of you that you want to keep hidden—a second self, standing just to your left, walking behind you into lit rooms. And sometimes, it has a life of its own.

Charlie is a low-level con artist, working as a bartender while trying to distance herself from the powerful and dangerous underground world of shadow trading. She gets by doing odd jobs for her patrons and the naive new money in her town at the edge of the Berkshires. But when a terrible figure from her past returns, Charlie’s present life is thrown into chaos, and her future seems at best, unclear—and at worst, non-existent. Determined to survive, Charlie throws herself into a maelstrom of secrets and murder, setting her against a cast of doppelgangers, mercurial billionaires, shadow thieves, and her own sister—all desperate to control the magic of the shadows.

With sharp angles and prose, and a sinister bent, Holly Black is a master of shadow and story stitching. Remember while you read, light isn’t playing tricks in Book of Night, the people are.

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Title: The Stardust Thief by Chelsea Abdullah
Release Date: May 17th 2022
Genre: Adult Epic Fantasy
Goodreads
This sounds very fun with criminals and cowardly princes and a magic lamp so 👀 Would like to try.

Loulie al-Nazari is the Midnight Merchant: a criminal who, with the help of her jinn bodyguard, hunts and sells illegal magic. When she saves the life of a cowardly prince, she draws the attention of his powerful father, the sultan, who blackmails her into finding an ancient lamp that has the power to revive the barren land.

With no choice but to obey or be executed, Loulie journeys with the sultan’s oldest son to find the artifact. Aided by her bodyguard, who has secrets of his own, they must survive ghoul attacks, outwit a vengeful jinn queen, and confront a malicious killer from Loulie’s past. And, in a world where story is reality and illusion is truth, Loulie will discover that everything—her enemy, her magic, even her own past—is not what it seems.

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Title: Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak
Release Date: May 10th 2022
Genre: Adult Horror
Goodreads
So I love a good horror and this one the classic “woman with secrets nannies an odd paranormal little kids” which is just a good trope and I like.

Fresh out of rehab, Mallory Quinn takes a job in the affluent suburb of Spring Brook, New Jersey as a babysitter for Ted and Caroline Maxwell. She is to look after their five-year-old son, Teddy.
Mallory immediately loves this new job. She lives in the Maxwell’s pool house, goes out for nightly runs, and has the stability she craves. And she sincerely bonds with Teddy, a sweet, shy boy who is never without his sketchbook and pencil. His drawings are the usual fare: trees, rabbits, balloons. But one day, he draws something different: a man in a forest, dragging a woman’s lifeless body.
As the days pass, Teddy’s artwork becomes more and more sinister, and his stick figures steadily evolve into more detailed, complex, and lifelike sketches well beyond the ability of any five-year-old. Mallory begins to suspect these are glimpses of an unsolved murder from long ago, perhaps relayed by a supernatural force lingering in the forest behind the Maxwell’s house.
With help from a handsome landscaper and an eccentric neighbor, Mallory sets out to decipher the images and save Teddy—while coming to terms with a tragedy in her own past—before it’s too late.
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Title: You, Me, And our Heartstrings by Melissa See
Release Date: May 31st 2022
Genre: YA Contemporary
Goodreads
Um disabled YA alert!! Disabled YA!! Celebral palsy and anxiety rep here. Plus music 😭 Feels like it was specifically designed for me.

A fresh and fun teen romance starring a girl with cerebral palsy, and a boy with severe anxiety.
Daisy and Noah have the same plan: use the holiday concert to land a Julliard audition. But when they’re chosen to play a duet for the concert, they worry that their differences will sink their chances.
Noah, a cello prodigy from a long line of musicians, wants to stick to tradition. Daisy, a fiercely independent disabled violinist, is used to fighting for what she wants and likes to take risks. But the two surprise each other when they play. They fall perfectly in tune.
After their performance goes viral, the rest of the country falls for them just as surely as they’re falling for each other. But viral fame isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. No one seems to care about their talent or their music at all. People have rewritten their love story into one where Daisy is an inspiration for overcoming her cerebral palsy and Noah is a saint for seeing past it.
Daisy is tired of her disability being the only thing people see about her, and all of the attention sends Noah’s anxiety disorder into high speed. They can see their dream coming closer than it’s ever been before. But is the cost suddenly too high? 
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Title: The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester by Maya MacGregor
Release Date: May 3rd 2022
Genre: YA mystery
Goodreads
The way this is an autism book from a big publisher made me preorder instnatly. It also is a murder-solving mystery and the MC is trans.

Sam Sylvester’s not overly optimistic about their recent move to the small town of Astoria, Oregon after a traumatic experience in their last home in the rural Midwest.
Yet Sam’s life seems to be on the upswing after meeting several new friends and a potential love interest in Shep, the pretty neighbour. However, Sam can’t seem to let go of what might have been, and is drawn to investigate the death of a teenage boy in 1980s Astoria. Sam’s convinced he was murdered–especially since Sam’s investigation seems to resurrect some ghosts in the town.
Threatening notes and figures hidden in shadows begin to disrupt Sam’s life. Yet Sam continues to search for the truth. When Sam discovers that they may be closer to a killer than previously known, Sam has a difficult decision to make. Would they risk their new life for a half-lived one?
In this queer contemporary YA mystery, a nonbinary teen with autism realizes they must not only solve a 30-year-old mystery but also face the demons lurking in their past in order to live a satisfying life.
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Title: Summer’s Edge by Dana Mele
Release Date: May 31st 2022
Genre: YA Horror
Goodreads
This is comped to The Haunting of Hill House which immediately has me like 👀 It sounds like a bit of a huanted house with teen group dynamics and a ghost, so I’m keen to read.

Emily Joiner was once part of an inseparable group—she was a sister, a best friend, a lover, and a rival. Summers without Emily were unthinkable. Until the fire burned the lake house to ashes with her inside.
A year later, it’s in Emily’s honour that Chelsea and her four friends decide to return. The house awaits them, meticulously rebuilt. Only, Chelsea is haunted by ghostly visions. Loner Ryan stirs up old hurts and forces golden boy Chase to play peacemaker. Which has perfect hostess Kennedy on edge as eerie events culminate in a stunning accusation: Emily’s death wasn’t an accident. And all the clues needed to find the person responsible are right here.
As old betrayals rise to the surface, Chelsea and her friends have one night to unravel a mystery spanning three summers before a killer among them exacts their revenge.
I Know What You Did Last Summer meets The Haunting of Hill House  in this atmospheric, eerie teen thriller following an estranged group of friends being haunted by their friend who died last summer.
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Honourable Mentions

 

 

Title: Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph white
Release Date: June 7th 2022
Genre: YA Fantasy
Goodreads
Another queer autistic book (ownvoices I believe) from a mainstream publisher and this sounds unapologetically wild and is also full of monsters. I like. Will take one now thanks and please.

Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him—the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world’s population. Desperately, he searches for a place where the cult can’t get their hands on him, or more importantly, on the bioweapon they infected him with.
But when cornered by monsters born from the destruction, Benji is rescued by a group of teens from the local Acheson LGBTQ+ Center, affectionately known as the ALC. The ALC’s leader, Nick, is gorgeous, autistic, and a deadly shot, and he knows Benji’s darkest secret: the cult’s bioweapon is mutating him into a monster deadly enough to wipe humanity from the earth once and for all.
Still, Nick offers Benji shelter among his ragtag group of queer teens, as long as Benji can control the monster and use its power to defend the ALC. Eager to belong, Benji accepts Nick’s terms…until he discovers the ALC’s mysterious leader has a hidden agenda, and more than a few secrets of his own.
A furious, queer debut novel about embracing the monster within and unleashing its power against your oppressors. Perfect for fans of Gideon the Ninth and Annihilation. 
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Title: Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane
Release Date: June 7th 2022
Genre: Adult Fantasy Retelling
Goodreads
This is an Achilles retelling as a transwoman!! Absolutely so keen for it and have preordered this one too. Although I expect it to be super different from Song Of Achilles (no Patroclus romance).

Achilles has fled her home and her vicious Myrmidon clan to live as a woman with the kallai, the transgender priestesses of Great Mother Aphrodite. When Odysseus comes to recruit the “prince” Achilles for a war against the Hittites, she prepares to die rather than fight as a man. However, her divine mother, Athena, intervenes, transforming her body into the woman’s body she always longed for, and promises her everything: glory, power, fame, victory in war, and, most importantly, a child born of her own body. Reunited with her beloved cousin, Patroklos, and his brilliant wife, the sorceress Meryapi, Achilles sets out to war with a vengeance.
But the gods—a dysfunctional family of abusive immortals that have glutted on human sacrifices for centuries—have woven ancient schemes more blood-soaked and nightmarish than Achilles can imagine. At the center of it all is the cruel, immortal Helen, who sees Achilles as a worthy enemy after millennia of ennui and emptiness. In love with her newfound nemesis, Helen sets out to destroy everything and everyone Achilles cherishes, seeking a battle to the death.
An innovative spin on a familiar tale, this is the Trojan War unlike anything ever told, and an Achilles whose vulnerability is revealed by the people she chooses to fight…and chooses to trust.
Drawing on ancient texts and modern archeology to reveal the trans woman’s story hidden underneath the well-known myths of The Iliad, Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing weaves a compelling, pitilessly beautiful vision of Achilles’ vanished world, perfect for fans of Song of Achilles and the Inheritance trilogy. 
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Title: Juniper & Thorn by Ava Reid
Release Date: June 21st 2022
Genre: Adult Fantasy
Goodreads
I’ve heard this one is very raw and powerful, and I also have the author’s debut (still need to read it oops) but this is pitched as a “gothic retelling of the Juniper tree” so YES.

A gruesome curse. A city in upheaval. A monster with unquenchable appetites.
Marlinchen and her two sisters live with their wizard father in a city shifting from magic to industry. As Oblya’s last true witches, she and her sisters are little more than a tourist trap as they treat their clients with archaic remedies and beguile them with nostalgic charm. Marlinchen spends her days divining secrets in exchange for rubles and trying to placate her tyrannical, xenophobic father, who keeps his daughters sequestered from the outside world. But at night, Marlinchen and her sisters sneak out to enjoy the city’s amenities and revel in its thrills, particularly the recently established ballet theater, where Marlinchen meets a dancer who quickly captures her heart.
As Marlinchen’s late-night trysts grow more fervent and frequent, so does the threat of her father’s rage and magic. And while Oblya flourishes with culture and bustles with enterprise, a monster lurks in its midst, borne of intolerance and resentment and suffused with old-world power. Caught between history and progress and blood and desire, Marlinchen must draw upon her own magic to keep her city safe and find her place within it.
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Title: Not Good For Maidens by Tori Bovalino
Release Date: June 14th 2022
Genre: YA Fantasy
Goodreads
A goblin market retelling, and I have to admit the cover is totally my bookstagram aesthetic so 🤣 I have my eye on this one.

Louisa doesn’t believe in magic, until her teenage aunt Neela is kidnapped to the goblin market.
The market is a place of magic, where twisting streets, succulent fruits, glimmering jewels, and death are on offer to the unwary human. An enticing place that her mother and aunt barely escaped seventeen years ago, paying a terrible price.
With only three days before the market disappears, Lou must navigate the treacherous market, controlled by bloodthirsty goblins who crave vengeance against her family. She must learn the songs and tricks of the goblins to save Neela, or the market might just end up claiming her too.
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Title: Katzenjammer by Francesca Zappia
Release Date: June 28th 2022
Genre: YA Horror, Thriller
Goodreads
You know I am on a horror kick lately!! I also really liked this author’s debut, Made You Up, so I’d love to read more (plus the author is illustrating this).

From acclaimed author Francesca Zappia, American Horror Story meets the dark comedy of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis as Cat searches for a way to escape her high school. Katzenjammer is a tale of family, love, tragedy, and masks—the ones others make for us, and the ones we make for ourselves. Eerie and thought-provoking, this novel will haunt fans of Chelsie Pitcher’s This Lie Will Kill You and E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars. Features illustrations by the author throughout.
Cat lives in her high school. She never leaves, and for a long time her school has provided her with everything she needs. But now things are changing. The hallways contract and expand along with the school’s breathing, and the showers in the bathroom run a bloody red. Cat’s best friend is slowly turning into cardboard, and instead of a face, Cat has a cat mask made of her own hardened flesh/
Cat doesn’t remember why she is trapped in her school or why half of them—Cat included—are slowly transforming. Escaping has always been the one impossibility in her school’s upside-down world. But to save herself from the eventual self-destruction all the students face, Cat must find the way out. And to do that, she’ll have to remember what put her there in the first place.
Told in chapters alternating between the past and the present, Francesca Zappia weaves a spine-tingling, suspenseful, and haunting story about tragedy and the power of memories. Much like the acclaimed Eliza and Her Monsters, Katzenjammer features black-and-white illustrations by the author throughout the novel. Fans of Marieke Nijkamp’s This Is Where It Ends and Karen McManus’s One of Us Is Lying will lose themselves in the pages of this novel—or maybe in the treacherous hallways of the school. 
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Title: Our Crooked Hearts by Melissa Albert
Release Date: June 28th 2022
Genre: YA Paranormal
Goodreads
The author of the Hazelwood is writing something new! I have to admit I really don’t like the cover unfortunately 💀 So might do this one via audiobook. But I think it’s a mix of mystery x horror also which is great.

THE SUBURBS, RIGHT NOW
Seventeen-year-old Ivy’s summer break kicks off with an accident, a punishment, and a mystery: a stranger whose appearance in the middle of the road, in the middle of the night, heralds a string of increasingly unsettling events. As the days pass, Ivy grapples with eerie offerings, corroded memories, and a secret she’s always known—that there’s more to her mother than meets the eye.
THE CITY, BACK THEN . . .
Dana has always been perceptive. And the summer she turns sixteen, with the help of her best friend and an ambitious older girl, her gifts bloom into a heady fling with the supernatural, set in a city of magical possibilities and secret mystics. As the trio’s aspirations darken, they find themselves speeding toward a violent breaking point.
Years after it began, Ivy and Dana’s shared story will come down to a reckoning among a daughter, a mother, and the dark forces they never should’ve messed with.
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Honourable Mentions

Title: They Drown our Daughters by Katrina Monroe
Release Date: July 12th 2022
Genre: Adult horror
Goodreads
Atmospheric horror with a sea setting and an old lighthouse!! Say no more just hand it to me. I also believe it’s queer.

For fans of Jennifer McMahon and Silvia Moreno-Garcia comes a haunting and atmospheric new novel from debut author Katrina Monroe.
They say Cape Disappointment is haunted.
That if you can hear the call of the water
It’s already too late…
Tourists used to flock to Cape Disappointment in droves to visit the rocky shoreline and the creaky old lighthouse. But the tourists are gone now, and when Meredith Strand returns to her childhood home on the eve of her divorce, young daughter in tow, the Cape seems more haunted by regret than any malevolent force.
But her mother, suffering from Alzheimer’s, is convinced the stories are real. Not only is there something in the water, but it’s watching them. Waiting for them. Reaching out to Meredith’s daughter the way it has to every woman in their line for generations—ready to reclaim what once was stolen.
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Title: Wake the Bones by Elizabeth Kilcoyne
Release Date: July 12th 2022
Genre: YA Paranormal
Goodreads
More Ya paranormal with horror vibes just for me — also the cover is fantastic and I may have slipped and preordered this one too.

The sleepy little farm that Laurel Early grew up on has awakened. The woods are shifting, the soil is dead under her hands, and her bone pile just stood up and walked away.
After dropping out of college, all she wanted was to resume her life as a tobacco hand and taxidermist and try not to think about the boy she can’t help but love. Instead, a devil from her past has returned to court her, as he did her late mother years earlier. Now, Laurel must unravel her mother’s terrifying legacy and tap into her own innate magic before her future and the fate of everyone she loves is doomed.
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Title: Black Mouth by Ronald Malfi
Release Date: July 19th 2022
Genre: Adult Horror
Goodreads
This one is pitched as similar to the friend group in IT 👀🙌🏻 And confronting your childhood horrors … plus hopefully a haunted house considering the cover.

For nearly two decades, Jamie Warren has been running from darkness. He’s haunted by a traumatic childhood and the guilt at having disappeared from his disabled brother’s life. But then a series of unusual events reunites him with his estranged brother and their childhood friends, and none of them can deny the sense of fate that has seemingly drawn them back together.
Nor can they deny the memories of that summer, so long ago – the strange magic taught to them by an even stranger man, and the terrible act that has followed them all into adulthood. In the light of new danger, they must confront their past by facing their futures, and hunting down a man who may very well be a monster.
Perfect for fans of Stephen King’s IT, a group of friends return to their hometown to confront a nightmare they first stumbled on as teenagers in this mesmerizing odyssey of terror.
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Title: Her Dark Wings by Melinda Salisbury
Release Date: July 7th 2022
Genre: YA Fantasy
Goodreads
Modern Hades x Persephone retelling? 👀 Plus I have to say that cover is a feast for the eyes. I also really enjoyed the author’s historical horror Hold Back The Tide a few years ago (totally recommend it) so I’m sure I’ll enjoy this!

The great love of Corey’s life has always been her best friend, Bree: closer than sisters, their bond is unbreakable.
Or so Corey believes, until Bree betrays her, and Corey’s world is shattered.
Corey finds herself heartbroken, furious and alone…
Only to discover that the Underworld – and Hades, Lord of the Dead – is closer than she thinks…
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Title: A Darkness At The Door (#2) by Intisar Khanani
Release Date: July 21st 2022
Genre: YA Epic Fantasy
Goodreads
The Theft Of Sunlight (book 1) was my absolute favourite last year!! It was just such a refreshing and excellent YA fantasy, with thoughtful themes and deep world building. So I absolutely need the sequel 😩👌🏻💛 Hyped for this.

Only Rae knows the extent of the corruption at the heart of the kingdom of Menaiya, from the noble lord who betrayed her, to the Circle of Mages whose wards protect the slavers from discovery. Injured and imprisoned on a slave ship, Rae’s options are quickly running out. When a desperate escape attempt goes terribly wrong, she finds herself indebted to a terrifying Fae sorceress.
Now Rae will not rest until she has rescued her fellow prisoners and freed her land from the darkness that has taken hold. To succeed, she’ll need every ally she can find—including Bren, the thief who may have stolen her heart. But Bren is hiding his own bloody secrets, and the curses that encircle Rae have sunk their claws into her mind. With her debts coming due and time running short, all the truths in the world may not be enough to save her kingdom, or herself.
“I’ve been cursed, betrayed, and sold into slavery – but the truth I carry can’t be allowed to die.”
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Title: A Strange And Stubborn Endurance by Foz Meadows
Release Date: July 26th 2022
Genre: Adult Epic Fantasy
Goodreads
What I need in life is more queer epic fantasy and this one has political arranged marriages and I have to say the cover is Stunning.

Velasin vin Aaro never planned to marry at all, let alone a girl from neighboring Tithena. When an ugly confrontation reveals his preference for men, Vel fears he’s ruined the diplomatic union before it can even begin. But while his family is ready to disown him, the Tithenai envoy has a different solution: for Vel to marry his former intended’s brother instead.
Caethari Aeduria always knew he might end up in a political marriage, but his sudden betrothal to a man from Ralia, where such relationships are forbidden, comes as a shock.
With an unknown faction willing to kill to end their new alliance, Vel and Cae have no choice but to trust each other. Survival is one thing, but love—as both will learn—is quite another.
Byzantine politics, lush sexual energy, and a queer love story that is by turns sweet and sultry. A Strange and Stubborn Endurance is an exploration of gender, identity, and self-worth. It is a book that will live in your heart long after you turn the last page. (
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Title: The Book Of Gothel by Mary McMyne
Release Date: July 26th 2022
Genre: Adult Fairy Tale Retelling
Goodreads
A Rapunzel retelling (these feel so rare??) but by the witch’s perspective!! I absolutely love it when retellings come from another POV so this was slammed instantly on my wishlist.

Everyone knows the tale of Rapunzel in her tower, but do you know the story of the witch who put her there?
Haelewise has always lived under the shadow of her mother, Hedda—a woman who will do anything to keep her daughter protected. For with her strange black eyes and even stranger fainting spells, Haelewise is shunned by her medieval village, and her only solace lies in the stories her mother tells of child-stealing witches, of princes in wolf-skins, of an ancient tower cloaked in mist, where women will find shelter if they are brave enough to seek it.
Then, Hedda dies, and Haelewise is left unmoored. With nothing left for her in her village, she sets out to find the legendary tower her mother used to speak of—a place called Gothel, where Haelewise meets a wise woman willing to take her under her wing.
But Haelewise is not the only woman to seek refuge at Gothel. It’s also a haven for a girl named Rika, who carries with her a secret the Church strives to keep hidden. A secret that unlocks a dark world of ancient spells and murderous nobles behind the world Haelewise has always known…
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Honourable Mentions

Title: The Drowned Woods by Emily  Lloyd-Jones
Release Date: August 16th 2022
Genre: YA
Goodreads
Okay I’m genuinely so hyped for this because I LOVED Bone Houses, and this is set in the same world but following new characters. And it has curses and magic and alllll the good things. You know I preordered. 😪👌🏻

Once upon a time, the kingdoms of Wales were rife with magic and conflict, and eighteen-year-old Mererid “Mer” is well-acquainted with both. She is the last living water diviner and has spent years running from the prince who bound her into his service. Under the prince’s orders, she located the wells of his enemies, and he poisoned them without her knowledge, causing hundreds of deaths. After discovering what he had done, Mer went to great lengths to disappear from his reach. Then Mer’s old handler returns with a proposition: use her powers to bring down the very prince that abused them both.
The best way to do that is to destroy the magical well that keeps the prince’s lands safe. With a motley crew of allies, including a fae-cursed young man, the lady of thieves, and a corgi that may or may not be a spy, Mer may finally be able to steal precious freedom and peace for herself. After all, a person with a knife is one thing…but a person with a cause can topple kingdoms.
The Drowned Woods—set in the same world as The Bone Houses but with a whole new, unforgettable cast of characters—is part heist novel, part dark fairy tale. 
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Title: These Fleeting Shadows by Kate Alice Marshall
Release Date: August 9th 2022
Genre: YA Horror
Goodreads
This is the Haunting of Hill House MEETS KNIVES OUT. EXCUSE ME YES. Literally so excited for this I wheeze. 😂 I haven’t read the author’s previous book yet but I shall do that asap.

Helen Vaughan doesn’t know why she and her mother left their ancestral home at Harrowstone Hall, called Harrow, or why they haven’t spoken to their extended family since. So when her grandfather dies, she’s shocked to learn that he has left everything—the house, the grounds, and the money—to her. The inheritance comes with one condition: she must stay on the grounds of Harrow for one full year, or she’ll be left with nothing.
There is more at stake than money. For as long as she can remember, Harrow has haunted Helen’s dreams—and now those dreams have become a waking nightmare. Helen knows that if she is going to survive the year, she needs to uncover the secrets of Harrow. Why is the house built like a labyrinth? What is digging the holes that appear in the woods each night?And why does the house itself seem to be making her sick?

With each twisted revelation, Helen questions what she knows about Harrow, her family, and even herself. She no longer wonders if she wants to leave…but if she can.

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Title: The Monsters We Defy by Leslye Penelope
Release Date: August 9th 2022
Genre: Adult Fantasy
Goodreads
1920s Jazz age and magic and heists? Sign me up, quite frankly. The pitch also says it’s full of folklore so I’m keen about that as well.

Clara Johnson talks to spirits, a gift that saved her during her darkest moments in a Washington D. C. jail. Now a curse that’s left her indebted to the cunning spirit world. So, when the Empress, the powerful spirit who holds her debt, offers her an opportunity to gain her freedom, a desperate Clara seizes the chance. The task: steal a magical ring from the wealthiest woman in the District.
Clara can’t pull off this daring heist alone. She’ll need help from an unlikely team, from a jazz musician capable of hypnotizing with a melody to an aging vaudeville actor who can change his face, to pull off the impossible. But as they encounter increasingly difficult obstacles, a dangerous spirit interferes at every turn. Conflict in the spirit world is leaking into the human one and along D.C’.s legendary Black Broadway, a mystery unfolds—one that not only has repercussions for Clara but all of the city’s residents.
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Title: The Undead Truth of Us by Britney S. Lewis
Release Date: Jf
Genre: YA Fantasy
Goodreads
The cover fits into my aesthetic of: flowers and faces. Which I collect and am unashamed about it. but also zombies!! Also I think she has a romance with an undead boy so that seems cute.

Death was everywhere. They all stared at me, bumping into one another and slowly coming forward.
Sixteen-year-old Zharie Young is absolutely certain her mother morphed into a zombie before her untimely death, but she can’t seem to figure out why. Why her mother died, why her aunt doesn’t want her around, why all her dreams seem suddenly, hopelessly out of reach. And why, ever since that day, she’s been seeing zombies everywhere.
Then Bo moves into her apartment building―tall, skateboard in hand, freckles like stars, and an undeniable charm. Z wants nothing to do with him, but when he transforms into a half zombie right before her eyes, something feels different. He contradicts everything she thought she knew about monsters, and she can’t help but wonder if getting to know him might unlock the answers to her mother’s death.
As Zharie sifts through what’s real and what’s magic, she discovers a new truth about the world: Love can literally change you―for good or for dead.
In this surrealist journey of grief, fear, and hope, Britney S. Lewis’s debut novel explores love, zombies, and everything in between in an intoxicating amalgam of the real and the fantastic. 
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Title: Babel by R.F. Kuang
Release Date: August 23rd 2022
Genre: Adult Dark Academia
Goodreads
Like of course I’m SO curious for this one because dark academia is my thing (and the author has shot to staggering stardom so fast). I wasn’t the biggest fan of Poppy War but still liked reading it, so…👀👀

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation — also known as Babel.
Babel is the world’s center of translation and, more importantly, of silver-working: the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation through enchanted silver bars, to magical effect. Silver-working has made the British Empire unparalleled in power, and Babel’s research in foreign languages serves the Empire’s quest to colonize everything it encounters.
Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, is a fairytale for Robin; a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge serves power, and for Robin, a Chinese boy raised in Britain, serving Babel inevitably means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to sabotaging the silver-working that supports imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide: Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? What is he willing to sacrifice to bring Babel down?
Babel — a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal response to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell — grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of translation as a tool of empire. 
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Title: A Taste of Iron And Gold by Alexandra Rowland
Release Date: August 30th 2022
Genre: Adult Epic Fantasy
Goodreads
So this is the royalty + the bodyguard romance trope, and make it queer, and I’ve heard (I believe) that the prince has severe anxiety?! All the good things.

Kadou, the shy prince of Arasht, finds himself at odds with one of the most powerful ambassadors at court—the body-father of the queen’s new child—in an altercation which results in his humiliation.
To prove his loyalty to the queen, his sister, Kadou takes responsibility for the investigation of a break-in at one of their guilds, with the help of his newly appointed bodyguard, the coldly handsome Evemer, who seems to tolerate him at best. In Arasht, where princes can touch-taste precious metals with their fingers and myth runs side by side with history, counterfeiting is heresy, and the conspiracy they discover could cripple the kingdom’s financial standing and bring about its ruin.
The Goblin Emperor meets “Magnificent Century” in Alexandra Rowland’s A Taste of Gold and Iron, where a queer central romance unfolds in a fantasy world reminiscent of the Ottoman Empire.
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Title: Belladonna by Adalyn Grace
Release Date: August 23rd 2022
Genre: YA Fantasy
Goodreads
Fantasy murder mystery with gothic vibes and mysterious wealthy estates? Yesss. Also I really love this UK cover. Everything about it is 😙👌🏻

For as long as Signa Farrow has been alive, the people in her life have fallen like stars . . .
Orphaned as a baby, nineteen-year-old Signa has been raised by a string of guardians, each more interested in her wealth than her well-being – and each has met an untimely end. Her remaining relatives are the elusive Hawthornes, an eccentric family living at Thorn Grove, an estate both glittering and gloomy.
Its patriarch mourns his late wife through wild parties, while his son grapples for control of the family’s waning reputation and his daughter suffers from a mysterious illness. But when their mother’s restless spirit appears claiming she was poisoned, Signa realizes that the family she depends on could be in grave danger, and enlists the help of a surly stable boy to hunt down the killer.
Signa’s best chance of uncovering the murderer, though, is an alliance with Death himself, a fascinating, dangerous shadow who has never been far from her side. Though he’s made her life a living hell, Death shows Signa that their growing connection may be more powerful – and more irresistible – than she ever dared imagine.
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Honourable Mentions

Let me know if any of these books caught your eye, or which ones you plan to read too!

 

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Comments

  1. I’m so excited for When Women Were Dragons, it sounds like so much fun! Babel I’m definitely also intrigued by, but I wasn’t a massive fan of The Poppy War so it’s probably not something I’ll be running out to get, rather I’ll probably get the audiobook at some point in the future. I’ve been on a real historical and non-fiction kick in the past couple of years, so those make up a lot of the books I’m excited for, though of course there’s still some fantasy thrown in there, because I’m me!

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  2. I can always count on you to fill up my TBR list, haha. I’m probably most excited for The Stardust Thief and The Drowned Woods!

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  3. I just preordered You Me And Our Heartstrings by Melissa See earlier this week!! I’m so excited for it even tho I haven’t been in a mood for YA Contemporary lately. OWNVOICES DISABILITY REP IN YA!!! SO IMPORTANT. And I’ve seen Melissa speak about her book and she’s so passionate about it I’m so looking forward to it!!
    also excited for Hell Followed With Us and Babel, of course. Waiting for the books to release so I can get cracking on them!

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  4. I can’t wait for The Book of the Night! It’s been a while since I read any of Holly Black’s books but I’m still excited to see how she does adult fantasy 😀 Ooh, and Hidden Pictures sounds so good too! Actually all of the horror titles you mentioned sound good, I added them all to my tBR already 😀

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  5. I’m so excited for These Fleeting Shadows, I love a good creepy mystery!!! I’m also dyyying for The Butterfly Assassin by Finn Longman which is out this month (May 26th, I think?) It’s a gorgeous, heart-wrenching thriller about a traumatized teenage assassin trying to live a normal life after she escapes the secret program that trained her (and that wants her back….) I did read an ARC of this a little while ago but I’m planning on rereading when I get the finished copy, so I can slow down & really enjoy the writing this time, Last time I just sort of tore through with all the twists & turns and then sat there devastated after – but, like, in the best way (obviously, hence the re-read)!

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  6. literally every single one of these sounds amazing 😌😍 why so many books, so little time??! 📚📚📚📚

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  7. I was all “Ha, this time at least I won’t fill my TBR up too much, I’m not feeling fantasy and am on a thriller and horror kick instead”…….. Oh. There goes my TBR. 😂

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  9. Ahhh all of these books look so good!! I mean, would you look at all those GoRgEoUs covers?! 😍(definitely judging them by their covers). Greats Recs!!❤

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