Whole New Crowd

Whole New Crowd follows Taryn, who has spent her adolescence bouncing between foster placements, largely defined by her relationship to brothers Jace and Brian Lanser — Brian her on-and-off boyfriend, struggling with addiction and prone to volatility, and Jace a powerful figure in the local gang. When Taryn is adopted into a stable, wealthy family, she enrolls in a new school determined to build a life apart from that past.

That plan unravels almost immediately: a classmate who recognizes her from before threatens to expose what she'd rather keep buried, using it as leverage, while at the same time she draws the attention of the school's most popular and influential guy. Tijan builds the book around the tension between the safety Taryn has been handed and the loyalty and danger of the family she can't fully leave behind.

As a young-adult contemporary drama, the novel is less concerned with tidy resolution than with Taryn's ongoing negotiation between two selves — the girl shaped by the Lanser brothers and the one trying to become someone else — and ends without fully resolving which version of her life will win out.