Hostage

Hostage, Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith, book two of what turns out to be a planned four-book series. I, um, may have accidentally stayed up all night reading this because I couldn't put it down and was too deep in it to notice the passage of time. This one only came out in January so now I have to wait for the next one but they're self-publishing them, thank goodness, so that's more like "months" than "years" I think. I was thinking more about readalikes and, you know, I think these books have certain features in common with some of my very favoritest YA ever, Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy - lots of well-written action, inventive creatures, maybe some similar-feeling handling of some underlying emotional arc stuff about "what kind of place would I want in the adult world/what kind of place could be possible for me". (I always like to have "if you liked x" comparisons for things I want to recommend to people...)