New YA Book Releases for March 5, 2025

Dear Manny by Nic Stone

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Ridhi and Nilesh used to be best friends. But not anymore.

Ridhi, who has always been a nature lover, desperately wants to become part of the enchanted forest kingdom. She’s spent so long begging the yakshas to let her in.

Nilesh shows up at Ridhi’s door after learning that his parents’ marriage is anything but true. He’s also been suspended from school. Nilesh is not in a great place—but Ridhi struggles to help him, knowing that he’s just accepted an offer from the yakshini of magic.

Ridhi bargains with one of the noblewomen of the yaksha court, and they strike a deal. Ridhi will help Lady Sulochana fix her reputation and in return, Lady Sulochana will give Ridhi the opportunity to be a yaksha.

Then, Nilesh becomes trapped in the yakshas’ world, and Ridhi’s read on the leaves is anything but promising for either Nilesh nor her. Could the forest be a mortal danger to both of them? Even if they can band together, it might be too late to save themselves from what’s about to come.

It might also be too late to save the tatters of their already difficult relationship.

Caerus controls all of society, and they’re able to do that by bankrupting the lower class. Inesa lives among the poorest in society, and she and her brother run a taxidermy shop to try to survive. Her father, a prepper, is long gone, and her mother is constantly sick—”sick”—and racking up untold amounts of debt. Her mom has so much debt that Inesa has been tapped as the next Lamb for Caerus’s televised assassination event.

Melinoë is a trained Caerus assassin. She’s just come off a run where she was forced to kill a small child, and she’s also struggling with the failure of Caerus’s technology to wipe her memory of what happened. She keeps having terrible flashbacks, and though she’s determined to do her job as an assassin, it’s made harder as her memory keeps popping up before her eyes.

It’s now Inesa who Melinoë needs to kill. But what happens when the two girls find themselves outside the realm of technology thanks to some glitches? Do they keep playing the roles they’re assigned from Caerus? Or do they take a different route and work to help one another survive?

If you like classic dystopian YA like The Hunger Games but wish it were a little more Sapphic, you’ll dig this one. It’s eerily prescient, too, to our current reality.

Matilda Young was a real woman in history known for being the youngest American suffragist to be arrested and imprisoned for picketing the White House. She was there demanding women’s voting rights. This book is a verse novel based on Young’s life.

Set against World War I, this work of historical fiction follows Matilda as she grows up in a home that has varying views on politics. Much as Matilda wanted to follow the radical path of her older sister, her fear oftentimes kept her back. The story follows as she finds her voice and her footing in the suffragist movement.

If you liked Stacey Lee’s Kill Her Twice, add Liu’s new historical fiction set in 1924 Los Angeles to your TBR ASAP. This one is less a mystery, but it will capture a lot of the same time period, characters, and feel.

Ruby is 16, and she sees herself as an independent Chinese American girl who can do what she pleases. But her dating of a white boy explodes before her eyes and leads to her parents needing to do something and quick. They’re very traditional and worried about their family’s reputation, so they hire a matchmaker to find Ruby a nice Chinese husband.

Ruby won’t simply accept it, though. So when she meets 19-year-old budding film star Anna May Wong—another young Chinese American woman making a life for herself outside of cultural expectations—Ruby thinks she’s found a great model for how she can escape the future her parents are planning for her.

But dangers abound. How can Ruby find a way to live her life on her terms while also accepting the importance of preserving the cultural heritage her parents want her to consider?

After a destructive hurricane in Mercy, Louisiana, a red algae bloom has taken over the town. It’s always been a monstrous town but made worse so with the rising tides. This is truest at the center of town in the Cove.

While Noon and her mom found a way to create a life, it requires them to keep the harbormaster at bay by feeding it mutated wildlife. Though it’s hard, it’s a distraction for Noon. Noon had a life-altering experience at a party in the Cove just before the hurricane hit.

With her mother, Noon is navigating Mercy as they search for what her mother believes are the members of the dead family reincarnated as sea life. But her past at the Cove and her belief that she is not in the right shape herself are haunting Noon more than she can admit. With a new storm approaching and the town’s predatory leader breathing down her shoulders, Noon’s going to have to do something about her past in order to have a future.

Dear Wendy by Ann Zhao

I love a time loop story like no one’s business, so I’m stoked to see Morgan Matson is bringing one to us in a paperback original.

Cass, who is 18 and a senior in high school, has never really set down roots. Her dad is a house flipper and so she’s had a whole life of moving, changing, adjusting. It’s easier not to get too attached to anything, knowing that leaving would be inevitable.

She is, however, looking forward to Grad Night at Disneyland, where she’ll be able to say bon voyage to high school forever. Cass is excited to spend the evening with bestie Bryony before she goes on her merry way once again.

Things don’t go as magically as planned, though, and Cass ends up meeting a cute British bassist named Freddie Sharma. Then…she ruins his big break. Then…Cass gets into a big fight with Bryony.

Where Cass would otherwise revel in a cut and run, she finds herself now stuck in a time loop, living this terrible messy night over and over and over again.

This book is told in dual timelines, and it’s one that comes with a pre-story content warning—it’s not an easy read, so take care.

The first timeline is in 1999, in San Jose, California, and it follows Jane, who is 17, just about to graduate from high school, and who has a big secret she’s been keeping: she got into her dream college and will be moving away at the end of the summer. This is a big secret for several reasons, including the fact that she’s sort of the glue holding her family together. Mom disappeared, and Jane has stepped in to be her little brother Paul’s rock. She feels obligated to be that way because of their demanding and, at times, physically abusive father. She is scared to tell Paul she’s leaving because she’s worried he’ll feel like she’s abandoning him and leaving him to fend for himself. At the same time, Jane knows this is her opportunity to finally live her own life rather than live the life she believes she’s supposed to live. Plus, she’ll get away from the rigid expectations of her father. 

The second timeline is 1975, and it follows Phuc, who is attempting to leave his war-torn country of Vietnam during the war. It’s been a brutal war and one where even family has been split in their loyalties. But for Phuc, getting out of Vietnam is not easy in the least. Every attempt to get out has left him battered or in danger of losing his life. When he finally does get the chance to get out, even the boat becomes a place of fear. He witnesses murder, death, and the limits of human suffering—all of which he feels deeply and which embeds in him in each attempt to escape. When he finally gets to America, he marries and moves to San Jose. But even if there is no war in America, he carries with him the burden of survival, as well as the challenges that come from being an immigrant. 

Phuc is Jane and Paul’s father, and this is not a spoiler—you know early on that you’re seeing both sides of what has been a traumatic immigration experience, one riddled with violence, pain, and suffering. This split perspective gives insight into why Phuc behaves how he does toward his children, never apologizing for it but giving it context; it also gives Jane a lot to think about when it comes to why she feels the pull to be as similar to her white American classmates as possible and eschew her Vietnamese heritage. This will shift and change through the story as Jane is able to reconnect with family overseas and comes to see that her best friend—also a second-generation immigrant—may be misguided in her attempts to forget her family’s past. 

This is a slow read, without romance, and it is a powerful story of family, immigration, trauma and its effect on mental health, intergenerational trauma, and what it is to make a life for yourself when the world has been the furthest thing from kind for you. Both Jane and Phuc are deeply flawed characters, but their flaws are what makes their stories so compelling.

Riley left her church a year ago because it was not a welcoming place for a bisexual girl like her and because of how the church treated her sister when she got an abortion.

So when Riley is sent to the principal’s office for smacking a girl who was talking poorly about her sister, she doesn’t anticipate being given the opportunity to avoid suspension by attending a church camp. She’ll take that option, in part because her best friend Julia will be there, too.

But Julia’s dad is in charge of the camp, and Riley has no interest in repenting. Instead, she’s going to use the week-long camp to dive deep into the seven deadly sins. It might help her peers understand that life doesn’t need to be about strict piety to be good.

There’s a hitch in the plan though, and it’s a big one. Riley is falling for Julia and hard.