Authors are Superheroes, and You Can't Change My Mind About It

2020 literally sucks. We've all noticed, and we're not gonna dwell on it. But in the midst of all the sucky-ness, there has been one saving grace for nerds and YA fiction fans like myself: our favorite authors.

Several well-known writers of young adult fiction have released new books or made announcements to excite their fanbases, which everybody has really needed in the past few months.

Soman Chainani, author of The School for Good and Evil series, released the final novel in the six-book series yesterday. I have read the first four books (I know, I’m a little behind), but I will eventually get around to finishing it. XD Seeing the hype on his Instagram story has reminded me that I kinda forgot about the series, but I have a really giant list of books to get through, sooo…. I’ll finish it...eventually.

Another long-awaited book release was Suzanne Collins’s A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, the prequel to the Hunger Games trilogy. It was released in mid-May, and there is already a copy in my house, which I get first dibs on after my mom finishes reading it. It’ll be interesting to see into the mind of the nefarious President Snow. Was he always so despicable? We shall see. In the meantime, I’ll keep chugging away at my other books so I can prioritize it when I get to it.

And now for the upcoming and the speculative.

Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight (scowl if you want, won’t change my opinion), has announced the release of the long-awaited (and boy, do I mean long) Midnight Sun, which retells the first novel’s events from Edward’s perspective. I have already pre-ordered it, so you better believe I’ll start devouring that book when it gets here on August 4th.

In a couple of elusive and vague social media posts, James Dashner suggested that there may be a new Maze Runner book coming to us soon. We don’t have any confirmation of this yet, but all we know is if it does happen, we’re going to learn more about Newt (my favorite character) and what happened many years after the Maze. Don’t mind me, I’ll just be over here losing my mind until I get more details.

And Percy Jackson fans, rejoice! We have rumors (are they confirmed yet?) of a series about our favorite group of demigods coming to Disney+. Hopefully, this one does the series more justice than the two movies that exist did. Yikes. :0 From what I understand, Rick Riordan is going to be pretty involved, so he can make sure his fans get what they want.

Literature is our escape when life is hard, and our authors delivered. This is doubtlessly not a comprehensive list of all the superheroes trying to make our year a little bit better, but merely a few of my personal highlights in dark times. We’ve never needed them more, because Earth without art is just eh...or worse, really.