February means a few things: school is back, summer is coming to an end, and there’s a bumper crop of exciting new young adult titles to read and events to attend.

Come along to our first YA Bookclub

We’re excited to announce that we’ve started a book club for YA readers!

The first meeting of the Readings YA Book Club will be held at our St Kilda shop on Wednesday 17 February. Come along to discuss Alison Goodman’s Lady Helen and the Dark Days Club, a book that’s being touted as Pride and Prejudice meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The event is free, but please book here.

Young adult prize winners from January

The Victorian Premier’s Awards have been announced, and the winner of the young adult category is Marlee Jane Ward’s Welcome to Orphancorp. Ward presents readers with a chilling dystopian vision of corporatized industrial orphanages that the judges called a ‘brawl of a novella set amongst darkness and violence’.

In response to Ward’s win, our digital content coordinator Bronte Coates wrote a a thoughtful examination on the particular thrill she gets from being invited into futuristic, magical and bizarre reimaginings of Australia in YA books.

The Costa Book of the year was also announced last month and the winner was a YA novel from the talented Frances Hardinge. The Lie Tree is the story of a 14-year-old girl who’s father has been found dead under mysterious circumstances. The chair of the judges described is as ‘part horror story, part detective story and part historical novel’.

February YA releases we’re excited about

Can you feel that in the air? It’s excitement over this month’s batch of new releases! With a strong selection of excellent reads from Australian authors, it’s good to see that there are even more reasons to #LoveOzYA than ever.

• Our February YA Book of the Month is from the immensely talented author Glenda Millard. The Stars at Oktober Bend is about Alice, a girl with an acquired brain injury who writes poetry to express the heartbreak she feels. When kids at school make fun of her, Alice starts to withdraw from the world, until she meets Manny, an ex-child soldier who runs to escape the memory of his past. This is a lyrical and ultimately uplifting read.
  
  
• Superstar author Justine Larbalestier has another book out this month, the delightfully chilling My Sister Rosa. Che is convinced his ten-year-old sister is a psychopath: she’s charming, naturally talented, and she likes to kill things. With his parents in New York, it falls to Che to take care of his little sister and keep her safe from the world, and the world safe from her.
  
  
• Beautiful Broken Things by Sara Barnard is ‘compelling story about strong female friendship and the devastation that mental illness can wreak’. Caddy and Rosie are inseparable best friends – that is until Rosie meets Suzanne. Suzanne is beautiful and exciting, but she’s also damaged. How much can Rosie and Caddy’s friendship withstand?
  
  
• After Boy 23 is taken out of his surroundings and dumped in the middle of the woods, he must learn to get by, and to further complicate things a voice tells him to run if he wants to survive. Boy 23 is an edge-of-your seat read, perfect for fans of Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy.
  
  
• Falling on the older end of the young adult age range (and probably straying more into New Adult territory) is Kirsty Eagar’s Summer Skin: Girl meets Boy, Girl steals from Boy, seduces Boy, ties Boy to a chair and burns Boy’s stuff. This is the book that Clementine Ford called ‘as smart as it is hot’.
  
  
• ‘Young adult fiction at its finest’ – so says Nick Earls of Megan Jacobson’s brilliant debut novel Yellow. Life isn’t going well for Kirra. She’s being bullied by her supposed friends, her mum is an alcoholic and now a ghost is haunting her. But if the pact she makes with the ghost works out, things might start to look up for Kirra.

Holly Harper