Join us for an evening of soul-searching YA Summer Reads with authors Dana Davis, Julie Buxbaum, Julia Walton, and Ava Dellaira, moderated by bookseller and YA book club leader Constance.
Dana Davis is an actress, motivational speaker for teens, and author. She played super-powered mimic Monica Dawson on Heroes, and currently stars on the animated series Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Craig of the Creek, and She-Ra. She is the author of Tiffany Sly Lives Here Now, and her newest novel The Voice In My Head grapples with spirituality, family, life, and death. It is a deeply poignant novel about facing the impossible, dealing with family chaos, and making sense of who you are.
Julie Buxbaum is the New York Times bestselling author of Tell Me Three Things, and What to Say Next. Her newest, Hope and Other Punchlines, is about resilience and reinvention, first love and lifelong friendship, the legacies of loss, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. It has been heralded by Jodi Picoult, who says she “[wishes she] can tell every teen to read it. Buxbaum’s book sounds, reads, breathes, worries, and soars like real adolescents do.”
Julia Walton’s Words on Bathroom Walls is soon to be a major motion picture. It was an ALA-YALSA Best Book for Young Adults and a CBC 2018 Teen Choice Book Awards Nominee. Adam is a regular teen, but struggles with navigating high school life while living with paranoid schizophrenia. He tries an experimental drug promising to help him deal with his illness, and desperately wants to be a normal, great guy for Maya, the girl of his dreams. But how long can he keep this secret?
Ava Dellaira is the author of the beloved Love Letters to the Dead and the more recently released In Search of Us. Told in two perspectives, In Search of Us is an intergenerational parallel story of a mother and daughter each at age seventeen. Marilyn’s set in Los Angeles in the late 90s and Angie’s now, depicting an “achingly vibrant” (Kirkus Reviews) story about mothers and daughters, love and loss, holding on and letting go.