Have you been waiting for a twisty debut YA that starts off like Friday Night Lights and ends with the power and insight of Dear White People?? Of course you have! Charlene Thomas’ Seton Girls is a smart, fast paced debut novel that examines race, class and misogyny.

Seton Academic High is a prep school obsessed with its football team and their thirteen-year conference win streak, a record that players always say they’d never have without Seton’s girls. What exactly Seton girls do to make them so valuable, though, no one ever really says. They’re just “the best.” But the team’s quarterback, the younger brother of the Seton star who started the streak, wants more than regular season glory. He wants a state championship before his successor, Seton’s first Black QB, has a chance to overshadow him. Bigger rewards require bigger risks, and soon the actual secrets to the team’s enduring success leak to a small group of girls who suddenly have the power to change their world forever.

Before you go rushing to add to your TBR list, check out the stunning cover and then read a short excerpt to get you even more hyped for this August release.

Excerpt from The Seton Story, October 30, 2019

It isn’t easy to create change that lasts.

In fact, it’s really, really hard.

But we did it, here at Seton. And we believed we did it together.

Don’t you remember the stories? All the tales passed on from seniors to freshmen year after year?

Cooper Adams. Who he was. What he meant. How he came in and changed our whole entire world.

The tales I’ve heard go like this:

Once upon a time, thirteen years ago, the heavens placed upon us Cooper Adams. He had dimples that could seduce a housewife and threw a spiral that could dent a brick wall. He inherited a pretty good football team in a really good division, and he led that team to undeniable greatness. An undefeated season that no team—not Billingsley, not St. Mary’s, not Anderson Prep—had ever seen before. And as he did it, he united a school that had only ever cared about football to care about its girls as well. He was our ally. A feminist before it was even cool.

How, you ask?

Well, the tales say that during the summer of 2006, just before he would take over as Seton Academic High School’s Varsity quarterback, he sat in his basement and penned a cheer. When it was finished, he taught it to his team. And then, at Seton’s first game of the season, right after halftime, the entire football team stood on benches and faced the crowd—faced us—as they recited the legendary Seton Girls cheer for the very first time.

Cooper Adams did other cool stuff, too. He convinced the school to create Seton Girls swag to go with all the Seton Football stuff sold in the online bookstore. He donated the proceeds from the football team’s Season of Giving bake sale to a women’s shelter, instead of to another junior football league.

Cooper Adams saw us. Cooper Adams loved us.

Why, you ask?

Because he couldn’t have had his perfect season without us.

Those were his words. On October 27, 2006, in the very first center spread quarterback feature that Seton ever ran, he was asked why he cared so much about the girls. What was it that made us special? What did he want the rest of the world to know?

And he said: “I want all those girls to know that we couldn’t have had this perfect season without them.”

I read the quote myself when I was researching whatever the hell it is I’m writing now, which I know is the exact opposite of the “I-cannot-tell-a-lie/Isn’t he a hero?” quarterback feature that all of you were expecting to see. I want to say I’m sorry, but I’m not. I just want us to be okay.

I imagine, at the time that Cooper’s words were first published, our Seton girls everywhere sighed longingly and collapsed into the nearest arms like they were at a BTS concert. Because Cooper was so perfect. Because he was, and continues to be, our star.

Every year that followed, Seton quarterbacks stood on the foundation of what he built. Undefeated season after undefeated season, like we were magic. But Cooper was only replicated, never duplicated.

Until now.

Because we get to have his kin. His blood. His brother, with his own delicious dimples and killer spiral.

But if you thought, like I did, that that made us the lucky ones . . .

You were wrong.

Get your copy of the Seton Girls today