Unspoken

Kami Glass is the kind of 17-year-old who can roll a sentence like “I can defenestrate my own thugs” off her tongue. She’s working on becoming an investigative reporter, and someone in her tiny English village of Sorry-in-the-Vale is trying to kill her. Almost as distracting as that fact are the Lynburn cousins, Ash and Jared, scions of the manor house family—Ash because he’s gorgeous, and Jared because he’s been the voice in Kami’s head for all of her life. Like its characters, the kickoff to Brennan’s Lynburn Legacy series is charming, awkward, and smart, occasionally biting off a bit more than it can chew. In the acknowledgments, Brennan (the Demon Lexicon trilogy) notes her debt to two centuries of gothic novelists, but many plot elements—the light boy and the dark boy, the inexplicable family curse, the emergence of magic as an explanation—owe as much to manga (and indeed Kami is part Japanese). The dialogue, if sometimes improbable, is frequently a laugh-out-loud delight. A promising launch with a dark cliffhanger of an ending. Ages 12–up. Agent: Kristin Nelson, Nelson Literary Agency. (Sept.)