Buzz Books YA Spring Summer 2016

Buzz Books 2016
Young Adult Spring/Summer Edition
E-book free from NetGalley.com

I've written before about the Buzz Books, a marketing collection of excerpts of upcoming books. (You can get it for free from NetGalley.com if you so desire.)

Buzz Books as an idea is fun because it gives me as a reader information that lets me identify books that I am excited about before they come out, including some that I might not have noticed without the excerpt provided. There's two volumes, the adult version, which includes both fiction and non-fiction, and the fiction-only YA version. I'm still working my way through the adult version, which has some real gems in it.

Buzz Books YA is particularly useful for me because, frankly, I find the tremendous majority of YA to be not worth my time. However, I can't just dismiss the genre as a whole, because the good ones are so good, and can be easy to miss because the bad ones (or at least vapid) ones are so prevalent.

So my approach to the YA Buzz Books is to try to find these gems, and thankfully there are some that I am interested in excerpted here. Here's the three that I will be trying to get the full galleys for:

Girl in the Blue Coat - A story of a young girl in WWII Nazi-occupied Amsterdam who works as a "finder" of black market items, and who apparently ends up searching for a missing Jewish girl who was hiding in the home of one of her clients. The promise of the complexity of the story it clear from the first few pages, and I want to read more.

Every Exquisite Thing - Written by the author of The Silver Linings Playbook (which is a very beautiful story about very broken people). This one is about a young person and reading and "the very formidable power of story." These are things that I like, and so I am going to read it.

Highly Illogical Behavior - A story of a young boy with agoraphobia and a young, super ambitious girl who has decided to save him. I found myself relating to the super-ambitious young woman who is interested in psychiatry (I wonder why), and I think that the possibility of reading something written from the perspective of a person with agoraphobia interesting, since I think that this a disorder which is relatively neglected in the realm of psychiatric illness narratives.

There are a couple of others on the list with vague potential, but those three are the only ones that actively made me want to seek them out. So that's what I'll do. Here's hoping that you'll be seeing reviews of these three sometime around the time they are released right here on this blog.

Note: As stated in the beginning of this post, I got Buzz Books YA for free from NetGalley.com. That did not influence the content of this post at all, although it did make the existence of this review more likely, since review rate matters for getting future books.