About Under a Carnivore Sky: Sixteen-year-old Lili is tasked with hunting the monster that’s slowly killing her dad—and every adult in town. Desperate, she teams up with a boy from town to uncover the secrets in the carnivorous swamp that keeps them all trapped. But what they find changes everything she thought she knew about the town, her father, the monster—and even herself.  The story takes place over the length of a hot summer and is perfect for anyone who wants to read botanical fantasy with a splash of horror. Released May 12th 2026.

Nothing says summer quite like a reading list full ghosts, monsters, and magic. My favorite fantasy and horror stories are the ones that inspire us to see the world a little differently—and novels in verse do that best. There’s something about poetry that delightfully demands a shift in perspective. Here are five speculative YA novels in verse to add a little magic and mayhem to your summer reading list.

The Leaving Room by Amber McBride

A finalist for the 2025 National Book Awards for Young People’s Literature, The Leaving Room is about young love, grief, and the stories we tell ourselves. The novel follows the story of Gospel, a Keeper of a Leaving Room, where all young people pass through when they die. Gospel’s job is to help those souls move on. But when an unexpected door opens and Melodee arrives, she starts to wonder if maybe Keepers can fall in love. Put this book on your list if you want to be swept away by gorgeous poetry—and inspiring love.

I Am the Swarm by Hayley Chewins

Every woman in Nell’s family has a different kind of magic. Her mom wakes up a different age every day. When her older sister bleeds, magic flows out of her body. But Nell’s magic feels more like a curse. Every time she has an intense emotion, insects appear. Imagine wasps that appear with her rage, moths with disappointment, and ladybugs with joy. As it gets harder and harder to suppress her emotions, Nell has to decide how far she’s willing to go to bury her feelings and keep the bugs at bay. Add this book to your summer reading for deep emotion and breath-taking magic.

The Ghosts of Rose Hill by RM Romero

Soon after Ilana is sent to live with her aunt in Prague, she discovers a forgotten Jewish cemetery—haunted by a kind ghost named Benjamin. As Ilana works to restore his gravestone, he shows her the hidden side of the city, where ghosts roam and magic lurks. But when she meets a dangerous man with no shadow, she decides to do whatever it takes to save Benjamin—who she loves—even if it means she might never see him again. The Ghosts of Rose Hill is a perfect summer read if you’re looking for rich setting, deep history, and tender-hearted ghosts.

Hekate: The Witch by Nikita Gill

Hekate: The Witch is a retelling of the Greek myth of Hekate—the goddess of witchcraft and necromancy. Fleeing danger, young Hekate is taken to the Underworld to be raised by Hades. She grows up alone in the land of the dead, searching for a place to belong. But when she finally finds her powers and becomes the Goddess of the legend, the other gods and goddesses are terrified of her. When war breaks out, threatening everything and everyone, she’s the only one who can stop it. Add this to your reading list if you love retellings and settings where things can be both terrible and beautiful.

Doe by Rebecca Barrow

Doe is a horror novel in verse that comes out in just a few weeks, on June 23^rd. The novel follows Maris, who will do anything to keep her position as captain of her high school’s cheer team. While sleeping, she encounters a terrible beast in the shape of a massive deer. Doe promises a way to beat her rival and keep her spot as captain. But for Maris to win, someone will have to die. Read Doe this summer if you love supernatural horror that will linger long after you finish the book. 

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About I Am The Swarm: A propulsive YA novel in verse that blends the contemporary magic of Jandy Nelson with the simmering feminist rage of Laurie Halse Anderson’s Shout.

You need to tell the truth. So you use the most beautiful lies you can find.

To talk about a girl’s rage—to talk about how she felt trapped in too-small rooms—you use insects. Wasps. You don’t consciously choose this. The wasps show up in another book, a manuscript you couldn’t make work. You throw out the manuscript but the wasps keep coming. They have something to tell you.

You use insects because of how separate they feel from a body. How, when they land on your skin, you are struck by a sense of the alien. You use wasps because of how you still flinch when you see one in the garden. Because you once dreamed about them writhing under your skin like living blisters.

You want to talk about the squirm of feelings. The horror, sometimes, of having a girl’s body, so easily opened, so soft and pliable. You give the feelings wings and legs. Texture and weight. Movement. Sound. You give them the hum of life, the loudness of machines. The way they start as an itch in the throat, or as tingling on the backs of your hands. The way, sometimes, they swallow you.

You have to talk about separateness. About the unreality of being split off from something vital inside. You use white space (the weight of silence). You use magic.

You want to say there is nothing unusual about anger, let alone a girl’s anger. A girl’s rage is only different—in its own category—because of how it has been disallowed. Exiled from it, the girl pushes it inside, pushes it into someone else. But rage doesn’t cease to exist when it’s shut off. Blessedly, feelings don’t simply evaporate. They sprout and cling, more and more knotted.

When I first started going to therapy, I was anything but angry. I was anxious and I was depressed. But I wasn’t “an angry person.” That’s actually what I told my therapist. As if a feeling were a fixed identity. It took me forever to know (not just head-know, but bone-know) that I could feel angry without it becoming a definitive state.

I didn’t grow up listening to Rage Against the Machine, but my husband did, and he told me that anger is a gift. Anger is information. Anger is energy. Anger is the fed-up-ness of saying, “Nope. Not anymore.” Anger, aimed in the right direction, is protective. All of this I learned from a woman who sat quietly listening to me, who never once raised her voice.

My own anger will always feel strange to me. Foreign, like a language I learned too late in life. But these days I try to see it more as a visitor than an intruder. It’s not a polite visitor, but it isn’t an armed robber, either. Hasn’t come to steal something, hasn’t come to destroy. Here is a truth I have discovered: anger is someone coming in the night to hand me a secret gift. 

We talk about artistic choices as if they are choices. Sometimes they are. But sometimes they are inevitable. A book has to be the way it is in order to say what it has to say.

So, how do you write about female rage?

Flunk out of music school. Forget yourself, then remember her again. (Forget and remember. Forget and remember.) Publish a book. Go to therapy. Slowly, slowly find your voice. Publish another book. Get to a point where you feel like you have failed at everything. Ask yourself: “Why do I write?” Find magic (again). Find poetry (again). Use white space. Use your shame, and your horror. Use wasps.

Put down, clearly, what you remember. Make a story out of it: cleaner and prettier than the original. Write it all down. Spin an exquisite lie to tell the truth.

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