Two Emotional YAs

I was out of town for work and didn't have the bandwidth to read literary fiction or sci-fi, so young adult it was, of course. Both of these made me cry. 

Message Not Found (by Dante Medema) 

A girl who loses her best friend in an accident makes an AI she can text to try and uncover the real reason why her friend died.  It's a bit slow, and the twist is fairly obvious, but it's emotional and moving as it deals with our main character processing grief and other complicated feelings about her friend. 

When You Get the Chance (by Emma Lord) 

As an adopted person and musical theater fan, this was 100% for me.  Our main character is Millie (a much more endearing version of Rachel from Glee) who digs up clues in her father's Livejournal from 2003 (!) as to who the mother is who abandoned her as a child. She narrows it down to three suspects so of course the musical theater references, which come hard and fast, include plenty of Mamma Mia ones. I thought Lord did a great job of building the "who is the mother?" suspense while also dealing with Mille's complicated journey of self-discovery.  The ending wraps up way too neatly but by then I was - yes, you guessed it - crying, so I went along for the ride.  Loved this one!