FIRSTS AND LASTS

Multigenre short stories penned by a wide range of YA authors focus on pivotal teenage firsts and lasts.

From a first date with a vampire to a teen’s last breath, this collection of 16 stories (eight firsts and eight lasts) runs the gamut of styles and life experiences. In the “Firsts” section, chapter titles signal the usual suspects—such as Nina Moreno’s “The First Kiss” and Yamile Saied Méndez’s “The First Job”—alongside more unusual milestones, such as Tess Sharpe’s “The First Time We Buried a Body.” The “Lasts” section is less general, yet no less relatable, with titles like “The (Hopefully) Last Demon Summoning” by Kika Hatzopoulou and “The Last Purity Ball” by Joy McCullough. Each story flows nicely into the next, almost like new friends swapping stories. Many are set near the end of high school or beginning of college, heightening the overall sense of liminality. The contributors include newer and more established voices who mirror the diversity of the characters’ identities. Alongside each milestone’s potential universality, each short story revels in specificity to create glimpses of fully realized characters. Many characters are LGBTQ+. The entries that are rooted in trauma or sadness, especially, demonstrate the fictional adolescents’ incredible resilience and maturity as they process these novel experiences. Content warnings helpfully flag individual stories before the table of contents.

Beautifully sentimental and utterly relatable.