"Fangirl," by Rainbow Rowell, and More FANGIRL By Rainbow Rowell St. Martin's Griffin, $18.99. In her first semester at the University of Nebraska, nearly everything that once made Cath feel happy and safe comes undone. Her father's manic episodes are getting worse. Her mother, who walked out on the family 10 years ago, suddenly wants to be friends. And her identical twin sister - the socially adept and stylish one - is living in another dorm and partying hard. But for thousands of online readers, Cath is more than an unhappy freshman, eating protein bars in her room to avoid the cafeteria. She's "Magicath," the prolific author of fan fiction that remixes the hugely popular Simon Snow novels. They bear a tongue-in-cheek resemblance to the Harry Potter series. But Cath's ease plotting the lives of young wizards doesn't translate to how she manages her own. Rowell, whose last young adult novel was "Eleanor & Park," specializes in young misfits charting their way in the world. She doesn't disappoint here. Though the theme of a young writer finding her voice may be familiar, Rowell brings to it fresh humor, heart and more than a few surprises. Cath's relationships, tender and untidy, ring true. Excerpts from Simon Snow novels and Magicath's fan fiction appear between chapters, offering echoes of Cath's struggle. "I'll find a way for us to be together," Sahar, 17, tells her secret girlfriend. She's been in love with Nasrin since they were 6 years old and dreams of marrying her. But they live in Tehran, where same-sex relationships are illegal and brutally punished. Sahar's quest leads her deep into Iran's underground LGBT scene. There she meets Parveen, a transwoman, whose circumstances reveal a surprising fact: Iranian law upholds transsexuals" rights. The state even subsidizes gender-­reassignment surgery. Sahar starts to wonder: Could she become a man, sacrificing her identity to openly marry Nasrin? She devises a scheme that - even for a teenager drenched in the heady hormones of first love - feels staggeringly naïve. Never mind that she fails to mention this plan to Nasrin, a fairly flat character, whose idea of devotion is amassing a prodigious collection of shoes. Farizan's prose is frank, funny and bittersweet, enjoyable even when Sahar's rashness strains belief. And her secondary story lines ring out memorably, especially the speakeasy-style gatherings of Iran's gay subculture and Sahar's relationship with her father, a listless widower. ROSE UNDER FIRE By Elizabeth Wein Hyperion, $17.99. Shuttling Spitfires between British factories and air bases is the closest Rose, 18, a transport pilot and fledgling poet from Pennsylvania, is supposed to get to the Allied war effort. But on a rare flight over France, Rose pursues a self-piloted bomb and knocks it off course. Exultation turns to terror when Nazi fighter jets ground her plane in Germany and she is sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious women's concentration camp. Presumed dead by her parents, Rose joins a ragtag prison family of French spies, Red Army servicewomen and Polish "rabbits," the survivors of grotesque Nazi medical experiments. Their acts of solidarity help keep her alive. Her poetry also provides sustenance: an inmate offers bread in exchange for original verses and Rose recites a counting rhyme to survive a vicious beating. Wein's second World War II adventure novel - the first, "Code Name Verity," was highly praised last year - captures poignantly the fragility of hope and the balm forgiveness offers. Rose frames it best in a poem beseeching soldiers to fight "not to destroy all the world's wrong, but to renew its good." THE WAKING DARK By Robin Wasserman Knopf, $17.99. Oleander, Kan., is dying: foreclosures are up and jobs are few. The townsfolk are a cast of meth cookers, doomsday preachers, sneering jocks, absentee parents, alienated kids and raging drunks. And then things get worse. A single day leaves a trail of gore: a mass shooting in a drugstore, a stabbing between lovers, a crucifixion, a gruesome vehicular homicide, the smothering of an infant. Things get so bad that the town is quarantined. Tanks and razor wire fences prevent escape. No one knows why. Is it connected to the secretive corporation leasing the town's old power plant? A recent tornado? The Christmas Day fire in 1899 that wiped out the town's founding citizens? Five teenage misfits struggle to help Oleander, or at least save themselves. Wasserman's previous novel, "The Book of Blood and Shadow," followed a single heroine driven by a murder to solve an ancient mystery; in "The Waking Dark," life and death feel cheaper. She describes relentless killings with the kind of sensory fascination usually reserved for food criticism. There's little promise of redemption, only the dream of escape and a sinister Hobbesian suggestion: What if we're all barely repressing the evil within us? THE GOLDEN DAY By Ursula Dubosarsky Candlewick, $15.99. This unsettling and atmospheric novel unfolds in 1967 at a girls" school in Sydney. Once or twice a week, Miss Renshaw, a teacher with the charisma of Miss Jean Brodie, leads 11 of her students on a field trip to the Ena Thompson Memorial Gardens. While they write verses, Miss Renshaw flirts with the grounds­keeper; she says he is a poet and a conscientious objector. But one morning, the two adults lead the girls into a seaside cave to see Aboriginal paintings. Spooked, the girls leave first and wait outside, but the tide is coming in, "so without making a particular decision," they "step back along the rocky edge of the world" and leave Miss Renshaw behind. She never returns. When they encounter her - or is it her ghost? - eight years later, her explanation of her disappearance is at once credible and at odds with the facts the girls have come to believe. Dubosarsky's spare prose explores the space between innocence and adulthood. Shaped by the girls" growing awareness of the world, her scenes are uneasy dreamscapes. Questions about responsibility, violence, sex, fear and death bloom beneath their placid surface. Unanswerable, they linger past the end of this slender but powerful volume. Jessica Bruder teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism and is the author of "Burning Book: A Visual History of Burning Man."