Rutabaga's Reads 2025: Part 3

It has arrived, my first YA compilation of 2025. If you read YA, what’s already caught your interest this year? What new releases are you anticipating?

Beastly Beauty (May 7, 2024) by Jennifer Donnelly.

<This is a standalone novel.>

What makes a girl “beastly?” Is it being too stubborn? Being fiery and strong instead of sweet and compliant? Wanting to study architecture instead of attending balls? Is it simply wanting too much?

            In the band of thieves, Beau is the handsome one and is always tasked with being the charming seducer, stealing hearts along with jewels, gold and silver. When the bridge crumbles behind his thieving comrades, Beau is left to face the monster that roams the castle at night. He knows the monster is real, but no one seems to believe him. Certainly not Valmont, who doesn’t hide his utter disdain for the thief. And who are the children who claim they aren’t children? There’s a strange, sizable clockwork, and then there’s the beautiful and cold Lady Arabella with her contingent of vicious ladies-in-waiting with names like Lady Espidra, Lady Rega, Lady Hesma and Lady Iglut. Once bold and independent, much to the chagrin and disapproval of her titled parents (she’s the only child of a duke and duchess), she’s turned inward, crumbling like a ruin once full of hope, faith and love, now weighed down by despair, rage, shame, guilt and more. Arabella’s understanding is that, to break the curse, a boy must love her for her true self, which is a cruel assignment for someone who appears “beastly” on the inside and out. After all, who could ever love ... a beast?

            While I can understand Beau’s desperation to reunite with his brother, I did not like him for most of the story. It’s not only the thieving that turned me off from the character, but his greasy charm and cocksure personality. He is redeemable in the last chapters, but it’s too little too late, and I couldn’t fully appreciate the story. Fortunately, Donnelly is a skilled storyteller and invites readers into a gender-swapped retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” that manages complicated characters in daunting circumstances surrounded by a historically rich backdrop and emotional turbulence. There are glimmers of humor amidst the hopelessness and the mucky, macabre moat monsters. It’s a story of family dynamics and their complications, personal truths and battling to accept oneself, “beastly” aspects and all.

The Encanto’s Daughter (Mar. 5, 2024) by Melissa de la Cruz.

<This is the first novel in a duology.>

Command attention. Project authority. That is what Maria Josephina “MJ” Robertson-Rodriguez must do to stand her ground against the courts that oppose her ascension to the throne. MJ is a princess of the Sirena Court, which is the most powerful and thus is the overall ruler of Biringan, but she’s spent much of her life hiding in the human world, switching towns and schools at the earliest sign of danger. MJ is hapcanto: half-human, half-encanto. (Encantos or engkantos in her father’s language, but they’re also called fairies.) With her father’s sudden death, MJ must go to Biringan to claim her place as the rightful heir. She must win over a council who disapproves of her hapcanto status and that she’s a she, and don’t even get her started on those of the other courts who disapprove of her half-human side. Yep, bigotry is alive and well in Biringan, too. She doesn’t know what her magic is, which she’ll need to showcase at her coronation in less than a month, and she won’t even admit it to her first real friend Phoenix “Nix” Xing, a runaway from Jade Mountain. When she hears that her father’s death was from unnatural causes, she adds investigating his death to her already busy agenda. Nix is there to help, and MJ forges an unlikely alliance with the irritatingly handsome Sir Lucas Invierno. Where his dad once worked for the Court of Sirena, Sir Lucas now resides in the Court of Sigbin and is the realm’s highest-ranking knight. Don Elias, MJ’s godfather and the late King Vivencio Basilio Rodriguez’s most trusted advisor, suspects Sigbin Court of harboring a mambabarang, witches that practice black magic. So. Find the nasty sorceress, discover her father’s murderer, figure out her magical ability and learn all there is to know about Biringan and being royal. If MJ can do all that in less than a month’s time, she can bear the weight of the crown. Right?

            This fantasy duology opener steeped in Filipino mythology makes for a culturally rich tale of magic, family betrayal, court politics and investigation. The downside is that I usually didn’t like MJ’s character. Yes, her life has been upended, and I know she’s trying to assert herself, but she oftentimes comes across as petulant, downright annoying and, well, entitled. She redeems herself with her release of an innocent person, someone she knew had to be innocent from the get-go. Being accepted as the one true heir in only a month’s time – when she’s been gone since toddlerhood – seems far-fetched, but the stakes are high, the plot is action-driven and there’s adventure to be had. Although so-so for me, it may just be what a YA fantasy lover is looking for.

            P.S. Surprise! Maria Josephina isn’t actually her given name. What is it?

Icon and Inferno (June 11, 2024) by Marie Lu.

<This is the second novel in a duology.>

The world’s favorite pop superstar and one of the world’s elite spies are back. Winter Young has thought of Sydney Cossette every day, hoping she’ll randomly show up. She never does, until the day she shows up in his private practice room. Sydney is there to convince him to take another mission with Panacea Group, the secret operation located within Claremont Hotel, a [fictional] luxury resort hotel in St. Paul, MN, featuring a Michelin-starred restaurant called Food for the Gods. They need to make contact with an agent who’s gone dark. It’s the Arsonist, code name for Tems Bourton, and he’s, loosely, Sydney’s ex. Panacea is tracking a plot to assassinate U.S. President Rosen, and Tems is supposed to be their eyes-on-the-ground. Winter and Sydney head to Singapore for the Warcross Championships, Winter getting in with his celebrity status and Sydney joining in once again as his bodyguard. On Winter’s arm is Gavi Ginsburg, his on-again-off-again, no-strings-attached, globe-trotting socialite girlfriend/fling. The intense chemistry between Winter and Sydney remains, but it is tempered with the exes in the mix. Not that they have time to hash out feelings. They have a suspect responsible for plotting the president’s assassination, but there are definitely more people involved. Who are the rogue operatives?

            Sydney doesn’t want to admit it, but she’s struggling. It’s her last mission with Niall O’Sullivan and Sauda Nazari as the head agents/operatives, because it’s Niall’s last mission. He’s retiring! He plans to visit his daughter, Quinn, for the first time in a decade. Niall is the closest to a father figure that she’s ever had. She’s already missing him and is a little jealous of his actual daughter (not that she’ll admit it).

            The Stars and Smoke duology closer is a dramatic, YA spy fiction sequel to its predecessor. It’s action-packed and sometimes violent, occasionally spitting and a little steamy (the scene does leave much of it up to the reader’s imagination). The sexy, romantic tone that Lu incorporated didn’t impress me, but the emotive characters with their abusive, psychologically pain-filled pasts and Lu’s enigmatic writing make this caper dynamic and propulsive. Undoubtedly, there is beauty and ferocity where there is international intrigue surrounding attractive people. But don’t forget that these characters are handy with weapons while playing with fire. Beware getting in the crosshairs.

            Favorite line: “How strange an emotion love was, how powerful it must be to fuel kindness and hatred and empathy and revenge and grief, all at once.” --Sydney, p. 282

            Book One: Stars and Smoke