10 must-read new YA book releases to make your December merry
By Lacy Baugher
The Ballad of Ami Miles – Kristy Dallas Alley
Kristy Dallas Alley’s moving YA debut, The Ballad of Ami Miles, has one of the more original premises you’ll encounter this month, mixing family secrets, a post-apocalyptic dystopia, and what is essentially a fertility cult to create a truly unique coming of age tale.
It follows the story of Ami Miles, a young girl being raised in rural Alabama in an America that no longer looks much like our own. She has been raised in the trailer park compound founded by her great-great-grandfather her whole life, and for most of that time, she’s been told it’s her sacred duty to have children. Preferably as soon as possible. (Most women are now barren, you see, the result of a virus that swept the globe years prior.)
But when her grandfather brings home a man she’s never met and informs her that he’s to be her husband, Ami realizes she can’t live this life anymore. So she sets off to find her birth mother, who somehow escaped the compound when Ami was born. On this journey, she’ll have to learn about the world she’s spent so many years in hiding from – and the person she wants to become in it.
The official synopsis has more details about the story.
"Raised in isolation at Heavenly Shepherd, her family’s trailer-dealership-turned-survival compound, Ami Miles knows that she was lucky to be born into a place of safety after the old world ended and the chaos began. But when her grandfather arranges a marriage to a cold-eyed stranger, she realizes that her “destiny” as one of the few females capable of still bearing children isn’t something she’s ready to face. With the help of one of her aunts, she flees the only life she’s ever known, and sets off on a quest to find her long-lost mother (and hopefully a mate of her own choosing). But as she journeys, Ami discovers many new things about the world… and about herself"
The Ballad of Ami Miles is available on December 1.