The B&N YA Podcast

TK

Our guest for today's episode is Akwaeke Emezi, the author of the new YA novel Pet, which is a finalist for this year's National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Emezi burst onto the literary scene with their novel Freshwater, a powerful story of a young woman inhabited by multiple spirits, and her journey to understanding her many-sided self. Now, writing for Christopher Myers's Make Me a World YA imprint, Akwaeke brings us the story of Jam, a teenager living in the city of Lucille, a community that prides itself on having been through a revolutionary change — one that eliminated what are known as monsters — those who abused, imprisoned, or did violence to others; where a black trans girl like Jam lives in a happy community with her loving parents Bitter and Aloe. But when Jam accidentally invokes the magic that lies dormant in her mother's powerful artwork, a strange being emerges, one that calls itself Pet. Pet is a hunter and it has come, it tells Jam, because there are still monsters in Lucille. I talked with Akwaeke Emezi about this ingenious and spellbinding tale, and their lifetime of making worlds out of story.

A Halloween treat for readers -- we return to our wide ranging interview with the queen of shadowy fantasy, Holly Black! Black's books straddle the real world and the realm of the fey, or reimagine reality to include magical mobsters, walled vampire cities, and haunted toys. In The Wicked King, sequel to last year’s The Cruel Prince, human girl Jude, raised in Faerie by her parents’ murderer, has seized control of the fey courts through puppet king Cardan. But, says Black, while book one was about what Jude would do to seize power, book two is about what she’ll do to keep it. We talked to the author about pleasure reads, how she writes, and why we’re more likely to forgive villainy if it’s on an epic scale.

Nic Stone entered the YA canon with her blistering debut, Dear Martin, in which a contemporary Black teen writes letters to Martin Luther King, Jr, following a galvanizing incident of racial profiling. Her next book was the cliche-cracking love triangle tale Odd One Out, and her latest, Jackpot, is a story of income inequality, teens growing up too soon, and the irresistible allure of a lottery win. I talked to Stone about destabilizing her characters, driving plot through dialogue, and writing the books that become a teen reader’s landscape.

Laura Ruby is the author of books including the fairy-tale inflected award-winner Bone Gap, the York trilogy, a steampunk series for younger readers, and her latest Thirteen Doorways, Wolves Behind Them All, a ranging, layered historical tale told by a ghost who can't stop tangling with the living. She watches over Frankie, a girl consigned to an orphanage in World War II era Chicago in a story of heartache and survival that mixes worlds both haunted and achingly real. We talked to Ruby about what shaped her as a writer and her new book — recently named as a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature.