Happy (belated) new year! It’s been a while since I’ve posted — but I am finally back from my impromptu hiatus. Anyway, let’s get straight into it!
*PS: All synopses are taken from Goodreads. Some have been shortened for easier reading.
1. Drawing Deena by Hena Khan
This is by far my most anticipated release of 2024. I mean, just look at this beautiful cover!
Drawing Deena follows a young Pakistani American artist navigating anxiety and finding her creative voice. Deena discovers the power of art to soothe her worries and decides to use her talents to help her family through tough times. Through her small business journey, Deena learns the value of asking for help and finds beauty in life’s journey.
2. I Hope This Doesn’t Find You by Ann Liang
This young adult contemporary gives me major “To All the Boys I’ve Ever Loved Before” vibes!
Straight-A student Sadie is perfect on paper. However, instead of sending love letters, she vents her frustrations into unsent emails. One of which targets her infuriating co-captain, Julius Gong. When her emails are accidentally sent out, her carefully curated life unravels, and she must navigate the fallout, including an unexpected development with Julius.
3. Womb City by Tlotlo Tsamaase
Womb City is by far the most unique 2024 release I’ve seen.
Steeped in rich Botsowana culture and folklore, the story follows Nelah — a woman trapped in a loveless marriage controlled by her husband’s microchip. After a hit-and-run, Nelah and her accomplice bury the body. However, their actions unleash a vengeful ghost, forcing Nelah to confront societal injustices and her own darkness, to protect her loved ones.
4. The Good, the Bad, and the Auntie by Jessie Q. Sutanto
This is the third installment in Sutanto’s Aunties series!
Meddy and Nathan’s Chinese New Year in Jakarta takes a dramatic turn when a suitor from Second Aunt’s past arrives, accidentally sparking a business feud. What starts as a simple gift exchange escalates into a dangerous journey, putting Nathan and the Aunties at risk. With wit and the Aunties’ help, Meddy must navigate the chaos to save her family.
5. Dungeons and Drama by Kristy Boyce
Isn’t this cover the cutest?
Musical lover Riley has big aspirations to become a director on Broadway. Desperate to bring back her high school’s spring musical, Riley takes her mom’s car without permission. Unfortunately, this risky move ends up with Riley being grounded, and stuck with the worst punishment: spending her after-school hours working at her dad’s game shop. Riley can’t waste her time working when she has a musical to save, so she convinces Nathan—a nerdy teen employee—to cover her shifts and, in exchange, she’ll flirt with him to make his gamer-girl crush jealous. But Riley didn’t realize that meant joining Nathan’s Dungeons & Dragons game…or that role-playing would be so fun. Soon, Riley starts to think that flirting with Nathan doesn’t require as much acting as she would’ve thought…
6. Otherworldly by F.T Lukens
I was lucky enough to receive an ARC for this book, and cannot wait to get started. F.T Lukens just does cozy fantasy right!
Seventeen-year-old Ellery is a non-believer in a region where people swear the supernatural is real. Sure, they’ve been stuck in a five-year winter, but there’s got to be a scientific explanation. If goddesses were real, they wouldn’t abandon their charges like this, leaving farmers like Ellery’s family to scrape by. Knox is a familiar from the Other World, a magical assistant sent to help humans who have made crossroads bargains. But it’s been years since he heard from his queen, and Knox is getting nervous about what he might find once he returns home. When the crossroads demons come to collect Knox, he panics and runs. A chance encounter down an alley finds Ellery coming to Knox’s rescue, successfully fending off his would-be abductors. Ellery can’t quite believe what they’ve seen. And they definitely don’t believe the nonsense this unnervingly attractive guy spews about his paranormal origins. But Knox needs to make a deal with a human who can tether him to this realm, and Ellery needs to figure out how to stop this winter to help their family. Once their bargain is struck, there’s no backing out, and the growing connection between the two might just change everything.
7. The Curse of Eelgrass Bog by Mary Averling
Lately I’ve found myself gravitating towards whimsical stories, and this one seemed to fit that perfectly!
Nothing about Kess Pedrock’s life is normal. Not her home, interests, or best friend. But things get even stranger than usual when Kess meets the new girl in town, Lilou Starling, who comes to Kess for help breaking a mysterious curse. This leads the pair to the center of Eelgrass Bog. Everyone knows the bog is full of witches, demons, and possibly worse, but Kess and Lilou are determined not to let that stop them. As they investigate the mystery and uncover long-buried secrets, Kess begins to realize that the curse might hit closer to home than she’d ever expected, and she’ll have to summon all her courage to find a way to break it before it’s too late.
8. Somewhere in the Deep by Tanvi Berwah
This looks like such a unique fantasy!
Seventeen-year-old Krescent Dune is buried under the weight of her dead parents’ debt and the ruinous legacy they left behind. The only way she can earn enough money to escape her unforgiving island is by battling monstrous creatures in an underground fighting pit. After a fight goes terribly wrong, she’s banned from the pits. Now hopeless, she is offered a deal: in exchange for the erasure of her debts, she must join and protect a hunting party for a rescue mission deep within the mining caves beneath the island. But someone doesn’t want her to make it out alive. And she’ll have to figure out who before she’s left alone… in the dark.
9. No One Can Know by Kate Alice Marshall
Who doesn’t love a good family mystery?
Emma hasn’t told her husband much about her past. He knows her parents are dead and she hasn’t spoken to her sisters in years. Then they lose their apartment, her husband gets laid off, and Emma discovers she’s pregnant―right as the bank account slips into the red. That’s when Emma confesses that she has one more asset: her parents’ house, which she owns jointly with her estranged sisters. They can’t sell it, but they can live in it. But returning home means that Emma is forced to reveal her secrets to her husband: that the house is not a run-down farmhouse but a stately mansion, and that her parents died there. Were murdered. And that some people say Emma did it. Emma and her sisters have never spoken about what really happened that night. Now, her return to the house may lure her sisters back, but it will also crack open family and small-town secrets lots of people don’t want revealed. As Emma struggles to reconnect with her old family and hold together her new one, she begins to realize that the things they have left unspoken all these years have put them in danger again.
10. Tender Beasts by Liselle Sambury
Sunny Behre has four siblings, but only one is a murderer. With the death of Sunny’s mother, matriarch of the wealthy Behre family, Sunny’s once picture-perfect life is thrown into turmoil. Her mother had groomed her to be the family’s next leader, so Sunny is confused when the only instructions her mother leaves is a mysterious note: “Take care of Dom.” The problem is, her youngest brother, Dom, has always been a near-stranger to Sunny…and seemingly a dangerous one, if found guilty of his second-degree murder charge. Still, Sunny is determined to fulfill her mother’s dying wish. But when a classmate is gruesomely murdered, and Sunny finds her brother with blood on his hands, her mother’s simple request becomes a lot more complicated. Dom swears he’s innocent, and although Sunny isn’t sure she believes him, she takes it upon herself to look into the murder—made all the more urgent by the discovery of another body. And another. As Sunny and Dom work together to track down the culprit, Sunny realizes her other siblings have their own dark secrets. Soon she may have to choose: preserve the family she’s always loved or protect the brother she barely knows—and risk losing everything her mother worked so hard to build.
I love reading other bloggers’ anticipated releases, so I hope you enjoyed reading this list! See you next post!
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