One of the best things about the young adult genre is the pure amount of diversity available in the books published each month. Authors can really push the envelope, anything goes when young readers are your target audience. Sure, there's still a lot of vampire romance (and that's not a bad thing! We at RT are super into Team Human right now), and we're loving all the teens in space as of late, but now even contemporary titles are mixing it up. If you're up for something different, check out these upcoming titles of modern-day teens in extraordinary situations.

The Waiting Sky by Lara Zielin (August, Putnam): Teen storm chasers! Oh yes. This books starts out with a set up we've seen before — girl dealing with an alcoholic mother — but then veers into new territory when Jane heads off to spend the summer with her older brother and his friends (including a cute bad boy, hello), all of whom are tornado chasers! 

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YA author Suzanne Selfors is no novice to writing enchanting stories for young readers, but this year marked the author's first RT Booklovers Convention. Today the author shares her experiences meeting fans at Teen Day, singing books in YA Alley and enjoying a whirlwind weekend in Chicago. 

I wasn’t sure it would be worth it. I’d never been to a romance convention before. I’d never even thought of my books as “romantic.” But other writers told me, “You gotta go. The RT convention is crazy. Crazy in a good way.” So there I sat, on the tarmac in Seattle, while the pilot explained that the tow bar had broken and we’d have to wait for another tow bar. Wait, and wait and WAIT. The passenger next to me was a nervous wreck, wringing his hands and talking incessantly. Turned out he was on his way to jail to serve a three-year term for drug possession. All in all, it wasn’t the most uplifting beginning to my journey.

But my mood changed the second I stepped into the hotel, where three women greeted me. Goggles perched on their foreheads, ample bosoms spilling out of their blouses, they were laughing. “What are the costumes for?” I asked, dazed after the five-hour flight, plus two-hour tarmac delay. “We’re going to a steampunk party,” was the reply. Steampunk party?

Things were looking up.

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The paperback edition of Gabrielle Zevin’s latest YA tale, All These Things I’ve Done, hits stores today and I couldn't be more excited. The series starter was released last September as an RT Top Pick! and took home an RT Reviewers’ Choice Nominee.

Not only is this story now at a more affordable paperback price but it's now got a leaner, meaner paperback cover. The hardcover art was cute but looked a lot like a contemporary read rather than a story set in futuristic NYC. With this (slightly) more colorful and dare I say ”digital-looking" art on the front of the book, I feel like you really get a better sense of what's between these covers.

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Author Franny Billingsley got a chance to talk with RT's Whitney at the second annual RT Teen Day during the 2012 RT Booklovers Convention. The pair go in-depth on Billingsley's latest novel, Chime, a supernatural historical story about a girl who believes that she may be pure evil. Discover the inspiration that this author drew on for the unusual world, how her heroine Briony's struggles resonate with the author — and readers — and then get a sneak peek at the next two stories in the series, which Billingsley says were "percolating" as she worked on Chime.

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Beloved historical romance author Shana Abe debuted in 1998 and received immediate attention for her lush voice. But she certainly didn’t rest on her “published author” laurels for long, after just a few books Abe began adding fantasy elements to her tales, like shapeshifters and time travel. Her Drakon series kicked off with The Smoke Thief, which won an RT Reviewers’ Choice award in 2005 and introduced readers to dragon shapeshifters that would capture our imagination — and our hearts. So we were thrilled to learn that the author will once again be breaking new ground with a new paranormal historical series.

Book one, The Sweetest Dark, will hit shelves on August 21st and features the paranormal and historical elements that are this author’s signature style. When TSD picks up, we’re in England during 1915 — that’s smack dab in the second year of WWI for those of you who don’t normally head historical for your reading — and mysterious circumstances bring seventeen-year-old orphan Lora Jones to the elite (but oh so gothic) boarding school, Iverson. Lora has always been connected to an otherness, and according to the book’s official synopsis, literally, “hears songs that no one else can hear, dreams vividly of smoke and flight, and lives with a mysterious voice inside her that insists she’s far more than what she seems.”

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