The whispering dark

Andrew's lavish debut, redolent with poetic prose and fantastical happenings, follows 18-year-old Delaney "Lane" Meyers-Petrov, who's Deaf and uses a cochlear implant. Desperate to forge her own identity and sick of being coddled by her family ever since a childhood near-death experience resulted in hearing loss, Lane applies for and receives a scholarship to Howe University's elite Godbole School of Neo-Anthropological Studies, a program considered a "magnet for those who dabbled in the occult" and rumored to teach their students how to step into different worlds. Despite her initial excitement on entering the program, she struggles to navigate a lack of accommodations, ableist professors, her own internalized ableism, and her arrogant and recalcitrant TA, 21-year-old Colton Price. But when Godbole students turn up dead, and she discovers that Colton is a member of a secret occult club that's messing with the boundaries of life and death, she must develop her own burgeoning supernatural abilities to solve the mystery. Andrew handily weaves swoony romance and ominous horror elements to deliver a lush dark academia narrative in which death is always on the horizon. Characters default to white. Ages 14--up. Agent: Josh Adams, Adams Literary. (Oct.)

A deaf scholarship student at an occult university is plagued by ghosts. Delaney Meyers-Petrov is so done with being treated like she's fragile, but she's not sure if she can hack it at Howe University, where the interdimensional travel program is mostly White, old-money kids who've been training for this their whole lives. Between the school's lack of accommodations and her own internalized ableism, she is struggling, and her cochlear implant doesn't help enough for her to keep up. Laney's grateful for assistance from her (hot, muscular, rude) TA, Colton Price, but he hates her for some reason. Little does Laney know that Colton's part of an occult boys' club which plays with the boundary of death itself--a boundary Colton's already crossed once. Laney, a girl with an extremely deliberate goth-adorable aesthetic, is well served by the purple prose ("the shadow-bitten arch of the doorway," "suckling on the teat of decay") and dialogue that wobbles between angst and snark in the style of teen paranormal television. Her unusual necromantic powers make her an irresistible target for the power players at Howe (where every figure with power and authority is male, and her peers and allies are all female), but at least Colton is sexy while he deceives and manipulates her. The worldbuilding is shaky but the romantic agita and ironic wit are present in spades. Most characters default to White. For fans of brooding bad boys and the pastel goth accidental necromancers who love them. (Paranormal romance. 14-18) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.