Six books whose protagonists are "trapped in the in-between"

Daniel José Older is the New York Times bestselling author of the Middle Grade historical fantasy series Dactyl Hill Squad, the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, Star Wars: Last Shot, and the award winning Young Adult series the Shadowshaper Cypher, which won the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, and named one of Esquire’s 80 Books Every Person Should Read.

Older's The Book of Lost Saints, a magic-realist epic about a Cuban-American family, is his first non-Y.A. novel.

At The Week magazine, he tagged six books whose protagonists are "trapped in the in-between," including:

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle (2016).

This is one of my favorite examples of a novel that critically remixes the canon. LaValle takes one of H.P. Lovecraft's most horrific and racist tales — 1924's "The Horror at Red Hook" — and injects it with a heart and new life by adding the perspective of a new character, a young black hustler named Tommy Tester. A tale about an occult presence in an immigrant New York City neighborhood becomes something rebellious and ­ferocious — a masterpiece.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue