Teen Magical Realism

One stormy Irish summer night, Olive and her best friend, Rose, begin to lose things. It starts with simple items like hairclips and jewelry, but soon it's clear that Rose has lost something much bigger, something she won't talk about, and Olive thinks her best friend is slipping away. Then seductive diary pages written by a girl named Laurel begin to appear all over town. And Olive meets three mysterious strangers: Ivy, Hazel, and her twin brother, Rowan, secretly squatting in an abandoned housing estate.

In 17th-century England, civil war rages and witches have become pawns in a plot to oust the king. Red-haired Evey does not want to be a witch, but she cannot deny the magick coursing through her veins. In a country seething with civil war, superstition, dread and dark forces are at work. A storm is coming. After witnessing the brutal murder of her mother by witch-hunters, Evey vows to avenge her and track down her killers. Fury burns in her bright and strong. But she has promised her mother that she will keep Dill, her little sister, safe.

Echo Brown is a wizard from the East Side, where apartments are small and parents suffer addictions to the white rocks. Yet there is magic...everywhere. New portals begin to open when Echo transfers to the rich school on the West Side, and an insightful teacher becomes a pivotal mentor. Each day, Echo travels between two worlds, leaving her brothers, her friends, and a piece of herself behind on the East Side. There are dangers to leaving behind the place that made you.

In a world where vampires and witches live in secrecy, 16-year-old Larissa Norton's life is turned upside down when her vampire parents are murdered and a dark presence begins pursuing her. Forced to flee into hiding, Larissa discovers she is not who she thought she was. She learns her real name is Larissa Dubois, a powerful witch born in 1920s New Orleans.

The mages push Earth closer to a war that no one can win. Kristen and her team are all that stands between them and the utter annihilation of everyone she loves. But the mages may not be the worst threat she has to face! In the shadows, someone lurks, manipulating others for his own gain. The Mage assassins are no longer content to hide in the shadows. Their day has arrived, and they will rise to remake the world into a place without dragons.

Vira, Ronak, Kaleb, and Riya may be siblings, but they've never been close or even liked each other that much. Torn apart by the different paths their lives have taken, only one thing can bring them back together: the search for the Ivory Key, a thing of legend that will lead the way to a new source of magic. Magic is Ashoka's biggest export and the only thing standing between them and war with the neighboring kingdoms—as long as their enemies don't find out that the magic mines are nearly depleted.

When two teens discover that they were both sexually assaulted at the same party, they develop a cautious friendship through her family’s possibly magical pastelería, his secret forest of otherworldly trees, and the swallows returning to their hometown, in Anna-Marie McLemore's The Mirror Season....

Ever since his mother was killed, 17-year-old Cayder Broduck has had one goal - to see illegal users of magic brought to justice. People who carelessly use extradimensional magic for their own self-interest, without a care to the damage it does to society or those around them, deserve to be punished as far as Cayder is concerned. Because magic always has a price. So when Cayder lands a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to apprentice under a premier public defender, he takes it.

Sam Green thinks her life is pretty normal. Almost. She does have a strange affinity for animals, weird dreams, and a mysterious staff in her closet. But Sam’s calm life is shattered when a dragon poisons her father and the mother of her best friend Jake. She is further shocked when a shapeshifting giant cat and powerful faerie ask her to fulfill a prophecy.

Seventeen-year-old Aris has always been obsessed with dreams, even if she can't remember most of them. She's spent her life waiting for something to happen, chasing a memory always just eluding her grasp. That is, until she meets Alek—a boy with golden eyes and a knack for avoiding injury. A tarot reading leads him and his friends to believe she's the key to finding Krysidia—the hidden realm from which their ancestors were banished—but only if Aris can learn to trust her newfound abilities does she stand a chance at fulfilling the deck's prophecy.

In modern-day Mexico, Sitlali has no family left and has caught the attention of a gang leader. She has no choice but to make the perilous trip to the US border and track down her long-absent father. The night before her journey, she finds a conch shell detailed with ancient markings. In 1521, Calizto is an Aztec young warrior in Tenochtitlan, fighting to save his city from Spanish imperialists. With his family dead and the horrors of war surrounding him, Calizto asks a sacred moon conch for guidance. Connected by the magical conch, Sitlali and Calizto can communicate across centuries.

When smallpox kills her parents, Camille must find a way to provide for her younger sister while managing her volatile brother. Relying on magic, Camille painstakingly transforms scraps of metal into money to buy food and medicine they need. But when the coins won’t hold their shape and her brother disappears with the family’s savings, Camille pursues a richer, more dangerous mark: the glittering court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

The Walls Around Us introduces Violet, a dancer on the cusp of stardom, and Amber, who's been jailed in a juvenile detention home for years. Tying them together is the home's long-dead Orianna, who holds the key to dark mysteries.

It's been two years since Sam broke up with the only other eligible gay guy in his high school, so to say he's been going through a romantic drought is the understatement of the decade. When Meg, his ex-Catholic-turned-Wiccan best friend, suggests performing a love spell, Sam is just desperate enough to try. He crafts a list of 10 traits he wants in a boyfriend and burns it in a cemetery at midnight on Friday the 13th.

People come from everywhere to forget. At the Memory House, in Tumble Tree, Texas, Lucy’s father can literally erase folks’ heartache and tragic memories. Lucy can’t wait to learn the family trade and help alleviate others’ pain, and now, at sixteen, she finally can. But everything is not as it seems. When Lucy practices memory-taking on her dad, his memory won’t come loose, and in the bit that Lucy sees, there’s a flash of Mama on the day she died, tinged red with guilt. Then Lucy wakes up the next morning with no memory of what happened.

Wilson Moss entered the town’s top-secret contest in the hopes of resurrecting her ex-best friend Annie LeBlanc, but that doesn’t mean she thought she’d actually win. Now Annie’s back and Wil’s ecstatic—does it even really matter that Annie ghosted her a year before she died…? But like any contest, there are rules, and the town’s resurrected dead can only return for thirty days. When Wil discovers a loophole that means Annie might be able to stay for good, she’s desperate to keep her alive. The potential key? Their third best friend, Ryan.

In Shajarpur, everyone is always happy. The weather is always perfect. But newcomer Savi, a lonely teenager, doesn’t know what happiness means anymore. If she were to make a list of things that were the absolute worst, moving to Shajarpur would be right on top. Well, right after missing her father, who just died of a heart attack. As Savi grapples with loss in a strange new town, she discovers something startling. Not only can she communicate with her father’s plants—all forty-two of them—she can talk to the giant ficus tree behind her school.

Emlyn Perry never expected to be demon hunting in the most notorious haunted house in Savannah, Georgia. Before her mother died, Emlyn was an average teenager, preparing for her senior year with her best friend and boyfriend. After discovering a secret Emlyn's parents kept hidden for 17 years, Emlyn embarks on a journey to embrace a lineage of Celtic magic but soon realizes a life of witchcraft comes with consequences. As soon as she accepts her powers, Emlyn becomes the target of the Ainbertach Coven, a powerful organization of dark witches with roots dating to early-1300 Ireland.

The Last Elephant in New York City is the story of Maxwell, a Ghanaian wildlife ranger, Jessie, an American researcher, and the elephant that united them. On a decades-long mission of compassion, this is a journey of heartbreak, hope, and redemption, laid out in snapshots, like memory itself. Illustrating the worst and best of humanity, it's a glimpse of parallel worlds - the ongoing sorrows of African elephant poaching and the struggles of life for elephants in zoos. Listen to it with someone you love.