Hey, teen readers! Want a bookish surprise each month? Sign up for our Teen Book Box Program and check out a themed book box from the library—just like a free subscription box! Each box includes a great read, tasty treats, and fun surprises—all yours to keep! The box itself checks out like a library book and needs to be returned, but everything inside is yours. Plus, join us each month to chat about the book and watch a related movie. Don’t miss out—sign up now and get reading!
Teen Book Box
Read Between The Lines Teen Book Club
📅 We’ll meet on Friday, July 11 at 3:30 p.m. to sink our teeth into this genre-bending story full of suspense, horror, and friendship.
🧟♀️ In This Delicious Death, four friends head to a desert music festival for one last carefree trip. The twist? They’re all recovering cannibals—infected during a global event called the Hollowing. Thanks to synthetic supplements, they're safe…until one of them goes feral. As tensions rise and secrets unravel, the group is forced to face what it means to live with monstrous hunger—and whether it's possible to stay human when the world expects you to be anything but.
Gruesome, heartfelt, and darkly funny, this book is perfect for fans of dystopian horror, queer found families, and morally messy survival stories.
Teens Review Teen Reads.
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I Hope This Doesn’t Find You - Ann Liang
Personally, I would keep the details of why I hate my arch-nemesis in my diary, rather than in the form of unsent emails, but maybe that’s just me.
I Hope This Doesn’t Find You is a highschool enemies-to-lovers romance between top students Sadie and Julius. Sadie has everything going for her: she’s very smart, good at sports, and is recognized as an elite among her peers. Except for the fact that Juluis exists within her life as a presence she can’t avoid.
Sadie has hated Juluis since childhood, mostly for being her academic rival. This sounds sort of relatable, maybe, if we stretch it– until we get to the part where she writes him emails about just how much she loathes him. She describes being mean to him, embarrassing him, even wrapping her hands around his neck in a physical display of resentment. Fortunately, she keeps these psychopathic emails in her drafts, never seeing the light of day– until, somehow, they are sent out. Not just to Juluis, but to the entire school.
Now everyone knows that Sadie is a little bit– or, as I would say, very– crazy, including Juluis, who honestly hadn’t even known his actions (which only really amount to a snide comment here and there) were that big of a deal.
As fate has it, Sadie and Juluis are forced together on several group projects for school, and therefore must learn to work past their differences and try to get along. Perhaps a beautiful love story can emerge from all of this drama.
I read this book in two sittings, as it, thankfully, wasn’t very long. I can name one, maybe two scenes I liked out of the whole thing. The rest of it simply wasn’t for me. It read as a recurring saga of Sadie bullying Juluis for no reason until the ending overlooked all of that and wrapped it up as a “cute teen romance.” I don’t really think emotional abuse is cute. This one gets a hard pass.
All of this isn’t to say you should give up on Ann Liang entirely– A Song to Drown Rivers was a wonderful read. Just steer clear of I Hope This Doesn’t Find You. Personally, I hope this doesn’t find me ever again.-Review by Emma Yerly, June 2025
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Once Upon a Broken Heart - Stephanie Garber
In a storybook world, you would think happily ever afters are always around the corner. And they are. Just, in the case of Evangeline Fox, you have to work for them.
Once Upon a Broken Heart is the first in a trilogy of the same name, and certainly does well in building up to the next book. I for one will definitely be checking out the next volume given how this story wraps up.
Follow Evangeline Fox, a pink-haired, recently-orphaned girl who grew up drunk on fairytales and curiosities, as she sets out to avenge her heartbreak– by means of devil worship.
Well, not devil worship exactly, but close enough. Praying to the fated (literally, as deities are known as “Fates” in this story) Prince of Hearts is the last thing Evangeline told herself she would do, yet here we are, watching her do it. A frustrating, albeit somewhat entertaining, aspect of this novel is how often our protagonist convinces herself something is a bad idea only to turn around and do it anyway. Centuries of myth have taught us that making deals with immortals never goes well, and this is just another example.
After becoming bound to the Prince of Hearts via the price she must pay, which has immediately made a mess of her life, Evangeline is invited to the Magnificent North, where supposedly those magic and fables she was raised to love are a part of everyday living. There, she gets a second chance at life– and a second chance at the happily ever after she so desperately covets– all under the chilling gaze of her Fate.
I finished this book in under 24 hours. As a fan of fairy tales and magic-touched worlds, the premise was very exciting and the pieces of fantasy and wonder the story revolved around were just to my liking. As a fan of one-true-loves, however, this doesn’t fit my ideal novel requirements. Though not manifesting all at once, Evangeline ends up caught between three separate love interests during the span of these 400 pages: Luc, her first love who suddenly cuts her off to marry her stepsister; Jacks, primarily known as the aforementioned Prince of Hearts, who is the cold and sly supernatural Evangeline can’t seem to get away from; and Apollo, the crown prince of the Magnificent North, and the one Evangeline hopes to find her happily ever after with.
The characters are interesting and the writing is simple. I like the integration of the empires’ daily newspapers into the story, which periodically unveil new information to both the characters and the reader. If you enjoy fairy tales, romance, and mysteries straightforward enough to understand yet captivating enough to keep you reading, I would recommend this story. But if you can’t handle pet names and angsty immortals, maybe give this one a pass.
4/5 stars– personally, I will be continuing this series.-Review by Emma Yerly, June 2025
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The Cruel Prince - Holly Black
There are three princes in this novel; which one is the cruel one, you may ask? The answer– all of them.
While The Cruel Prince is a fantasy novel, it's a little different from the conventional “all or nothing.” Rather than being a full, completely worldbuilt, fantastical universe, or even being a crazy new dimension unsuspecting humans are sucked into, Elfhame coexists with Earth as we know it today. The characters are able to travel at will between the two, with palaces and faeries in one land and Targets and chicken nuggets in the other. I’m not really a fan of this system, because I like my fantasies being whole and complete; they are fantasies after all– if I wanted to read about the real world, I wouldn’t have picked it up– but this idea may interest others, so read at your own risk.
The story follows Jude, a human raised in Elfhame who wants to rise the ranks of the faerie courts and make a name for herself despite the prejudice she faces for not being of fae origin. This is a protagonist who knows what she wants and stops at nothing to get it. No shy, damsel-in-distress situations– Jude is completely independent and endures the beatings given. Some of the scenes in this are rough to sit through, as Jude gets bullied in some horrible ways by her fae schoolmates, so avoid this if that sounds like too much.
Jude’s primary enemy is Cardan, the youngest prince of Elfhame, who is just the most wicked and, as the name suggests, cruel guy there ever was. That’s what you may think, at least, until you meet any other character in this novel, because almost every single one of them is horrible and commits insane atrocities. Jude’s concern is picking the lesser of two, or hundreds of, evils, to aid her in getting what she wants.
I went into this novel believing it to have romance as a major plot. I was wrong. There is a sort of hint of it in the background, but this is a political fantasy book. Most of what happens is related to conflict of nobles, conflict of families, and conflict of species. Lots of spying, lots of murder.
The Cruel Prince took me several weeks to finish because I wasn’t that motivated to read it. It was not interesting enough to keep my attention and I only read it when I had time to kill at school. It’s the first book in Holly Black’s The Folk of the Air series, which I will not be continuing with, because to me, one was more than enough.-Review by Emma Yerly, June 2025