Author Camryn Garrett
Publisher Disney Hyperion
DOP May 12, 2026
Quick Take
In Between Days takes something almost too painful to look at directly and holds it up to the light anyway. Told through diary entries, text messages, and book reviews, Camryn Garrett’s fifth novel follows seventeen-year-old Mira as she processes the death of her father and discovers there was an entire side of him she never got to know. Fresh in structure and devastating in emotional logic, it stands as one of the most honest accounts of queer grief in recent YA fiction. Read it with tissues nearby.
About the Author
Camryn Garrett was born and raised in New York and ranks among the most consistently celebrated voices in queer YA fiction. She is an NAACP Image Award-nominated author and filmmaker. Her debut novel, Full Disclosure, earned wide critical praise for its sex-positive, HIV-centered story. Friday I’m in Love, her third book, was an IndieNext Pick with a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Her work has been translated into nine languages.
In Between Days is Garrett’s fifth YA novel, and it marks a creative leap. Garrett’s earlier books announced her talent, but this one confirms her range. She writes here about grief, family silence, and the particular ache of loving someone you never fully knew. She does it with structural inventiveness and emotional precision that puts this among the best work of her career.
What Is In Between Days About?
When a stranger named Richard shows up at her father’s funeral, seventeen-year-old Mira Howard does not know who he is. Her mother turns him away at the door, tight-lipped and furious, and refuses to explain. Snooping through her father’s belongings, Mira discovers the truth: Richard was her father’s boyfriend. Her father was gay. Her family apparently decided to bury that fact along with him.
Desperate to feel close to the father she is only now beginning to understand, Mira reaches out to Richard in secret. An unlikely but deeply affecting friendship follows. Richard gives Mira her first real window into who her father was outside the role he played for the family. He also gives her a way into her own emerging queerness, which she navigates alongside a new crush on a co-worker. The closer she and Richard become, the harder it is to keep him hidden. Eventually Mira must decide what it means to honor her father’s memory in a family that preferred not to talk about him.
The Epistolary Form Is Doing Everything Right
In Between Days unfolds through diary entries, text messages, and book reviews, and the form is not a gimmick. It is the story. Garrett uses the fragmented, non-linear quality of the epistolary novel to mirror how grief actually works: in pieces, out of order, with long stretches of apparent normalcy interrupted by moments that knock the floor out from underneath you.
The diary entries give us Mira’s interior life with real intimacy. The text messages between Mira and Richard carry much of the book’s warmth. The book reviews Mira writes are a quiet masterstroke. They let Garrett show us what Mira cannot say directly: how literature becomes the language she uses to process loss, queerness, and the strange shape of the life she thought she knew.
The form also makes the book feel genuinely fresh. Epistolary YA is not new. But epistolary YA that uses book reviews as emotional disclosure very nearly is.
Queer Grief and the Families We Never Get to Fully Know
The emotional core of In Between Days is a loss that resists clean grieving. Mira loses not just her father, but the relationship with him she never got to have. She knew him as her dad. She never knew him as a queer man. Richard’s presence makes that absence devastatingly concrete. He carries a version of her father she was never allowed access to.
Queer fiction rarely explores this territory with such specificity. The grief of losing someone before you could come out to them, or before they came out to you, compounds in both directions. Mira grieves her father and also grieves the conversations they could have had, the shared language they might have found, the father who might have helped her understand herself.
Garrett refuses to make any of this sentimental. Mira’s mother is not a villain, but her silence causes real damage, and the book does not flinch from that. Richard is not a substitute father figure. He is a complicated person carrying his own grief. The found family Mira builds in the margins of her loss feels genuinely earned because Garrett has shown us exactly what was missing.
Is In Between Days Worth Reading?
Wholeheartedly yes. This is the book for readers who want their YA to feel true: messy, warm, and heartbreaking, with something real to say about growing up in a family that keeps secrets. It is particularly essential for queer readers who have experienced loss before they could share their full selves with the people they loved.
One caveat: the book deals directly and repeatedly with grief, and that emotional weight runs consistently throughout. Readers who need distance from loss right now may want to wait until they’re ready. When you are ready, it rewards every bit of what it asks of you.
Final Verdict
In Between Days is Camryn Garrett at her most ambitious and most tender. It is structurally inventive, emotionally devastating, and refuses to let grief be tidy. It is fresh where so much YA grief fiction is familiar, and it earns every tear it draws. One of the essential queer reads of 2026.
