Upcoming April 2024 Book Releases to Look Forward to

The following books listed are upcoming releases for the month of April! There are many new books being released each month, but these are the ones that caught my eye. They are not ranked by number but displayed randomly. Happy reading, everyone!

1. I'll Be Waiting for You by Mariko Turk is releasing April 30, 2024. 

Synopsis:

Natalie and Imogen are inseparable, and wildly different—Imogen is infuriatingly humble and incredibly intelligent, while Natalie is brave, jumping into danger and new adventures. Still, one thing ties them together: their love of the supernatural. Every summer, they vacation with their parents at the famously haunted Harlow Hotel. Imogen is a true believer, while Natalie sees ghost stories as nothing but pure fun.

Then, Imogen suddenly passes away from an undiagnosed heart condition that no one saw coming, and Natalie is left to take on the summer before senior year alone.

Without Imogen, Natalie throws herself into her senior project. Her passion is still horror, so she plans to spend her summer back at The Harlow Hotel recording fun fake footage that will get her on the teen ghost hunting show of her dreams. And her plans would be a lot less complicated if Leander, her irritatingly attractive arch rival from school, wasn’t working on his senior project at the very same hotel.

The longer Natalie stays at the Harlow Hotel, the more she realizes that Leander might be helpful for her project. After all, she could use an extra hand to help record her fake footage.

But, when strange things start happening at the Harlow, Natalie wonders, could there really be something to these ghosts after all?  

Publisher Website: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/mariko-turk/ill-be-waiting-for-you/9780316703444/?lens=little-brown-books-for-young-readers  

2. One Last Word by Suzanne Park is releasing April 16, 2024.

Synopsis:

Sara Chae is the founder of the app One Last Word, which allows you to send a message to whomever you want after you pass. Safeguards are in place so the app will only send out when you’re definitely, absolutely, 100% dead, but when another Sara Chae dies and the obituary triggers the prototype to auto-send messages that Sara uploads on one drunken night—to her emotionally charged mother, to a former best friend who ghosted her, and to her unrequited high school crush Harry—she has to deal with all the havoc that ensues and reopen old wounds from the past. 

She applies for a venture capital mentorship and is accepted to the program, only to find out that the mentor she’s assigned is none other than her former crush and VC superstar Harry Shim, and her life goes from uncertain to chaotic overnight.

Publisher Website: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/one-last-word-suzanne-park?variant=41083835973666  

3. Right Here, Right Now by Shannon Dunlap is releasing April 9, 2024. 

Synopsis:

Worlds turn. Particles spin. Love endures.  

There are infinite universes in which Elise never dies. Her best friend, Anna, never has to mourn her or choose between the weight of her grief and the weight of her ambition. Her cousin, Liam, never has to lose another loved one or fight to find purpose in a life that already doesn’t feel like his own. 

But Liam and Anna do not get to choose the universe in which they live. Across multiple worlds, their paths collide as they wrestle with what it takes to save someone else and how to face love and loss on a quantum scale.

This moving, lyrical novel introduces two teens on the cusp of finding out who they are while finding each other again and again.

Publisher Website: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/shannon-dunlap/right-here-right-now/9780316415422/  

4. What's Eating Jackie Oh? by Patricia Park is releasing April 30, 2024.

Synopsis:

Jackie Oh is done being your model minority.

She just hasn’t told her second-gen Korean American parents yet. They would never understand her unconventional dream to become a professional chef. Just ask her brother Justin, who hasn't heard from them since he was sent to Rikers Island.

For now, when she isn’t avoiding studying for AP World History, Jackie is improving her French cooking techniques and working at her grandparents’ Midtown deli Melty’s.

Then the most unexpected thing Jackie gets recruited for a casting audition for the teen edition of Burn Off!, her favorite competitive cooking show. Even more unexpected, Jackie becomes a contestant.

Jackie is thrown headfirst into the cutthroat competitive TV show world filled with psych outs, picky mom critiques, and dreaded microaggressions to lean into her heritage.

All Jackie wants to do is cook her way. But is her way to cook traditional French cuisine? Lean into her heritage? Or is it something more? To advance through the competition, Jackie must prove who she is on and off the plate.

Publisher Website: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/705945/whats-eating-jackie-oh-by-patricia-park/#:~:text=About%20What's%20Eating%20Jackie%20Oh,of%20a%20TV%20cooking%20show.  

5. Kill Her Twice by Stacey Lee is releasing April 23, 2024.

Synopsis:

Los Angeles, 1932: Lulu Wong, star of the silver screen and the pride of Chinatown, has a face known to practically anyone, especially to the Chow sisters—May, Gemma, and Peony—Lulu's former classmates and neighbors. So the girls instantly know it's Lulu whose body they discover one morning in an out-of-the-way stable, far from the Beverly Hills mansion where she moved once her fame skyrocketed.

The sisters suspect Lulu's death is the result of foul play, but the LAPD—known for being corrupt to the core—doesn't seem motivated to investigate. Even worse, there are signs that point to the possibility of a police cover-up, and powerful forces in the city want to frame the killing as evidence that Chinatown is a den of iniquity and crime, even more reason it should be demolished to make room for the construction of a new railway depot, Union Station.

Worried that neither the police nor the papers will treat a Chinese girl fairly—no matter how famous and wealthy—the sisters set out to solve their friend’s murder themselves, and maybe save their neighborhood in the bargain. But with Lulu’s killer still on the loose, the girls’ investigation just might put them square in the crosshairs of a coldblooded murderer.

Publisher Website: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709586/kill-her-twice-by-stacey-lee/

6. A Whole Song and Dance by Sarvenaz Tash was released April 4, 2024.

Synopsis:

A freshman in NYU’s prestigious musical theater program, Nasrin spends her days prepping for auditions, sweating through dance classes, and belting her heart out for the viral streaming show she’s been cast in. But on calls with her maman and baba, she’s their jigar talah, the golden child who put her theater dreams aside to follow in their entrepreneurial footsteps as a business major.

At least her whole life isn’t a lie—she is taking a single business course. Except she’s kind of failing it. Cue jazz hands?

Nasrin needs to bring her grade up fast if she’s going to keep her parents in the dark, so she grudgingly signs up for tutoring with the infuriatingly smug and annoyingly attractive Max. And yet...as the semester rushes by, the sparks of anger that first flew between them start to turn into a very different kind of spark. The kind she definitely does not have time for.

Except when Nasrin’s charming though devious cousin takes an interest in Max too, Nasrin has to figure out exactly what has been an act—and what’s for real. Can Nasrin decide what—and who—is truly worth fighting for, and find a way to step into the spotlight as her full self?

Publisher Website: https://books.disney.com/book/a-whole-song-and-dance/