Kendra, young-adult fiction by Coe Booth, in ARC. Sweet and salty, both attractive to reluctant readers and compelling for me personally; right up next to Speak for non-preachy non-fake-edgy non-babytalk non-mediocre great-voice-just-happening-to-appeal-to-y
oung-people YA quality.
I worry a tiiiiiiiny bit about giving kids a book in which the bad boy repeatedly takes sexual advantage of the protagonist's neediness early on but [SPOILER ALERT] eventually finds his inner romantic hero out of passion for her (okay, now that I write it down, it sounds awfully Romance Novel, and maybe it is, but it's enough of a remix that I didn't notice til just now) but I suppose I can't complain about didacticism half the time and this the other half, and anyway it's too late now, because I was reading it at school and so there's a line six kids deep for it.
(And seriously, teachers, there are maybe four or five books that almost any teenager at any reading level is guaranteed to finish quickly -- it's like magic, they discover a whole different relationship to reading -- and this is one of them.)