Foreword calls Renée Watson’s EVERYTHING NEW AGAIN a “gorgeous…sweet, aching romance novel” in starred review
★ Everything New Again by Renée Watson
Bloomsbury YA (Oct 13, 2026)
Hardcover $20.99 (304pp)
978-1-5476-2166-8
“Two teenagers form a life-changing connection in Renée Watson’s tender romance novel Everything New Again. Seventeen-year-old Bliss loves her family’s funeral home. While her classmates find her life creepy, Bliss appreciates her role giving grieving families a beautiful final goodbye. Still, she longs for adventure. Then Bliss meets Solomon, who comes to town hoping to reconnect with his mother.
The story spans two weeks of winter break as Bliss and Solomon meet and fall in love. Both are delightful narrators, equal parts jovial and thoughtful as they navigate the hazards of growing up. They reflect, for example, on the challenges of being the only Black teenagers in town as Solomon bonds with his mother in her flower shop; they also find time to giggle and dream.
The prose matches the dual tone. At times, its sentences are short, breathless, and anticipatory; at other times, they are more lyrical, even somber, as the teenagers face age-old questions of love and loss. In the book’s gorgeous opening pages, for example, Bliss explains that there is beauty to be found even in death, like “the bare trees, the solemn-skied mornings.”
The story’s end is shocking, abrupt, but fitting. Innocuous phrases from earlier scenes take on double meaning here, and the ever present motif of death crystallizes into a single, heartbreaking realization. What seems a straightforward tale of first love becomes an ode to how much life can be lived in a short span. The internal divisions according to the days of winter break serve as a helpful timeline and, unbeknownst until the end, a tragic countdown. Yet the story’s final pages are tinged with hope: composted funeral flowers, for example, symbolize new beginnings.
Young love blossoms in the sweet, aching romance novel Everything New Again.”
—VIVIAN TURNBULL (September / October 2026)