Four teens fall in and out of longing, love and violence: Kyle, the motorcycle-riding musician, Miguel, the unpredictable poet haunted by a violent past, Natalie, a mischief-making cutter, and Tricia, a biracial teen uncomfortable in her own skin. Told in minimalist free-verse vignettes, their lives crash, simmer and smolder together in the science lab, on the soccer field, at the coffee house and more.  Phillips adeptly spins complex, provocative, sharp-imaged lines of poetry in this first novel that is mostly told by the four main characters with some well-intended but pandering commentary by the school faculty, including their English teacher, who assigned them to write many of the poems for class. Though fully realized in structure, tonality and word choice, several poems lack voice, particularly those written by male characters. Readers can identify the speaker because the author has assigned names to stanzas, but any sense that the characters could be living, breathing, talking teenagers stops there. However, although much of the climatic action happens offstage, there are enough razor blades, lust, jealousy and revenge to keep readers breathlessly hooked until the very end. (Verse novel. 14 & up)

To hear the more than 50 contributors tell it, one might think that queer adults mostly end up living in ritzy corners of New York City and becoming published authors.

That, perhaps, is the necessary consequence of this project, which compiles lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer writers' letters to their younger selves. Big names in adult, teen or children's literature have contributed, including Michael Cunningham, Armistead Maupin, Marion Dane Bauer, Arthur Levine, Gregory Maguire and Amy Bloom. A number of comics artists—including Michael DiMotta, Jennifer Camper and Jasika Nicole—have penned letters in comic form. Many authors use their short (usually two- to three-page) letters to talk about the future. Some letters read like a memoir in second person; some describe past addictions, suicide attempts and other grim circumstances; many give advice. Comparisons to the It Gets Better video campaign, in which LGBT adults promise queer and questioning teenagers that life improves after high school, are inevitable. Contributors Jacqueline Woodson and Erik Orrantia even use the language of “getting better” outright. Yet the disproportionate achievement of fame, wealth and successful careers in the arts among the authors here seems an unfair promise to make to most readers.