Lawless Spaces

Corey Ann Haydu is one of my favorite YA authors, and I eagerly snagged an advance copy of this novel-in-verse as soon as I laid eyes on it. In Lawless Spaces, Mimi, fifteen-turning-sixteen, grapples with her self-image and her responsibility to represent herself as the right kind of girl. She has the sort of body people feel entitled to comment on, and sometimes just entitled to, full stop. It's the same body her mother had, and her mother before her. When she turns sixteen, Mimi's mother gifts her a journal to write in; it's a family tradition—or perhaps a family curse. In writing her own nuanced experience for herself instead of writing captions on photos to an impersonal and sometimes cruel internet following, Mimi begins to uncover and investigate her own hurt. In reading the stories of the women who came before her, she unearths generations of trauma: written down but left unspoken. This gorgeously complex story kept me up reading all night—dare I say, like a teenager?—and made me ache, cry, and hope. (14 and up)