Surely she can get Michael to ask her to prom. Liz hopes that her senior year might turn into a real-life romantic fantasy, as an old crush has moved back to town, cuter and nicer than ever.

Liz Buxbaum has always adored rom-coms, not least for helping her still feel close to her screenwriter mother, who died when she was little. There’s not much plot here, but readers will relish the opportunity to climb inside Autumn’s head.Ī grieving teen’s devotion to romance films might ruin her chances at actual romance. Even secondary characters are well-rounded, with their own histories and motivations. Autumn’s coming-of-age is sensitively chronicled, with a wide range of experiences and events shaping her character.

But on August 8, everything changes, and Autumn has to rely on all her strength to move on. In the summer after graduation, Autumn and Finny reconnect and are finally ready to be more than friends. Growing up, Autumn and Finny were like peas in a pod despite their differences: Autumn is “quirky and odd,” while Finny is “sweet and shy and everyone like him.” But in eighth grade, Autumn and Finny stop being friends due to an unexpected kiss. They drift apart and find new friends, but their friendship keeps asserting itself at parties, shared holiday gatherings and random encounters. The finely drawn characters capture readers’ attention in this debut.Īutumn and Phineas, nicknamed Finny, were born a week apart their mothers are still best friends. Several of the characters stand out as interesting individuals, enhancing the entertainment value in the story, along with a few good action scenes. The suspense takes precedence over the romance as Kate follows clues, first to find more information on revenants and then to uncover the spy in their midst. Plum handles the intrigue and builds tension, ending with a major cliffhanger that should compel readers to the final book in the trilogy. Worse, it seems that a spy has infiltrated the revenant community. She knows that she will age and die as Vincent stays young, and the two seek different ways to overcome that difficulty. Kate lives with her French grandparents but spends much time training for combat with the revenants, who have accepted her. Alas, it actually looks like it’s fairly easy to kill revenants, despite their “immortality,” a bit of a flaw in the book’s premise. Human Kate and revenant Vincent fell in love in the first book here they fight the numa, similar but evil undead who plot to kill revenants. These undead creatures have become mostly immortal by sacrificing their own lives to save others. Another human-undead romance produces some good entertainment in this second of a trilogy involving “revenants” in Paris.

Until I Die by Amy Plum