cover image Sunrise Nights

Sunrise Nights

Brittany Cavallaro and Jeff Zentner. Quill Tree, $19.99 (400p) ISBN 978-0-06-332453-4

High schoolers Florence, a dancer, and Jude, a photographer, meet while participating in the traditional “sunrise night,” the last day of art camp, during which campers stay out all night. Despite the pair’s individual challenges—Florence worries that a worsening eye condition will end her ability to dance and Jude struggles with heightened anxiety in the aftermath of his parents’ divorce—they make each other laugh, and think, and hope. They know there’s something between them, but since Jude has a girlfriend, and he and Florence live nowhere near each other, they agree not to talk again until the next sunrise night. Coauthors Cavallaro (Manifest) and Zentner (In the Wild Light) employ spot-on banter to deliver a romance teeming with an ambiance of endless possibility on the precipice of devastating heartbreak. As the teens bond over their shared love and conviction for their craft, between them spins a love story that is truly suspenseful. The will-they-won’t-they plot, ferried along by the duo’s alternating perspectives, will have readers struggling between racing toward the ending and lingering over the luminous verse. Protagonists read as white. Ages 13–up. Agents: (for Cavallaro) Taylor Haggerty, Root Literary; (for Zentner) Charlie Olsen, InkWell Literary. (July)