14 must-read new YA releases to beat the August heat
By Lacy Baugher
August 2021 release: Phantom Heart – Kelly Creagh
A YA retelling of Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera? Sign me up for that right now. Granted, Kelly Creagh’s Phantom Heart also sounds as though it owes a not-so-insignificant debt to Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, but I’ll take what I can get.
A mix of Gothic romance and horror, the story follows seventeen-year-old Stephanie Armand, who doesn’t entirely believe all the rumors swirling about how the crumbling Victorian mansion she and her family have just moved into may house a monster. She rolls her eyes at her younger sister’s insistence that a masked figure is secretly living in her closet, and she doesn’t buy her new classmate Lucas’s obsession with the supernatural.
At least until a mysterious British boy named Erik, who may or may not be connected to the man in the mask, starts appearing in her dreams.
The official synopsis describes the story as follows.
"Seventeen-year-old Stephanie Armand doesn’t believe in ghosts or spirits. Despite her six-year-old sister, Charlie, insisting a masked figure is hiding in her closet, and the rumors at school, Stephanie isn’t convinced her father’s latest renovation project–a crumbling Victorian mansion–houses the soul of a monster. So when the very charming (and paranormal obsessed) Lucas Cheney takes an interest in both Stephanie and her notorious home, the supernatural and romantic activity escalates to an all-time high. And that doesn’t even take into account the dashing, British-accented eighteen-year-old boy, Erik, who’s taken up residence in Stephanie’s nightly dreams. A boy who may have something to do with the man in the mask, and the strange occurrences taking place at Moldavia."
Phantom Heart is available on August 17.