Ruta Sepetys, OUT OF THE EASY

A very good YA, set in 1950s French Quarter, New Orleans. Seventeen-year-old Josie Moraine's mother is a prostitute who's as narcissistic and selfish and foolish as they come. So Josie's grown up early, with the help of Willie (the benevolent Madame) and a few other interesting characters (generous older man, kind prostitutes who look out for her). Man comes to town, ends up murdered--and Josie's mother has something to do with it. With the help of an Uptown girlfriend, Josie discovers that she wants to go to college, far away from the Big Easy; and while the obstacles are somewhat predictable, the book doesn't take the easy way out. Loved this one.

Judy Blundell, STRINGS ATTACHED

Another very good, beautifully written YA novel from the writer of WHAT I SAW AND HOW I LIED, with the same sort of high stakes and rich emotion. 17-year-old Kit Corrigan from Providence goes to New York to pursue her dream of becoming a dancer and actress. Providence and New York are linked through her--because she connects Billy Benedict, the angry boy she loves, with his father Nate, who is a mob lawyer and longs to make amends by giving Kit an apartment in New York when she desperately needs it (though there are "strings attached"), with her father who once was Nate's bootlegging partner, and with her aunt Delia who was once Nate's mistress in that very apartment. Her past is full of lies and bribes, deaths and sudden disappearances that she doesn't know about or understand, and this book slowly unwinds that past until she does.

Celia Rees, WITCH CHILD

Excellent read. Recalls Witch of Blackbird Pond, some of Ann Rinaldi's historical YA novels. Fourteen-year-old Mary Newbury travels from England to Salem with a woman who befriends Mary after her grandmother dies. She believes she's a witch, though she comes off as merely an intuitive, intelligent girl who has a knack for finding herbs and learns healing from Martha. Mary writes in a journal, which she then stitches inside a quilt; the frame narrative is that a woman named Allison Ellman of Boston, MA finds the journal and compiles the papers. (Not sure why the frame is necessary.) I'll look for the sequel.