REBEL OF THE SANDS
By Alwyn Hamilton
314 pp. Viking, $18.99.

A wily teenage orphan named Amani Al’Hiza tames an immortal horse made out of sand and wind, and then, dodging bullets from the sultan’s army, gallops into the desert with a mysterious stranger. What reader wouldn’t want to follow them? Hamilton’s debut novel, the first in a planned series, invites us to Miraji, a kind of supernatural Wild West full of shape-shifters and sharpshooters, warring princes and steaming locomotives.

Any time a young adult book throws a girl and a guy together, the clock starts running on the countdown to the kiss. But “Rebel of the Sands” is not principally a romance. It’s about a girl who disguises herself as a boy and crosses the desert in a terrifying (and sexist) land, discovering along the way who she is and what she’s capable of and how she figures into an epic uprising. When Amani tries to get hired to protect a caravan, an obnoxious competitor laughs at her scrawniness — so she shoots the booze out of his hand. “You shot me!” he whines, to which she replies coolly, “No, I shot your glass. . . . I don’t need a lot of muscle to pull a trigger.”

“Rebel of the Sands” is a winning bit of storytelling, as well as a homage to storytelling itself. It evokes such disparate influences — “1,001 Arabian Nights,” Hindu lore and Navajo myth, as well as, inevitably, the triumvirate of Tolkien, Lucas and Rowling — that at times you wonder whether Hamilton can pull it all off. She can. She has circled a spot on the map and claimed it for her own.

ASKING FOR IT
By Louise O’Neill
304 pp. Quercus, $16.99.

Try to be brave, grown-ups. O’Neill’s second novel may be scary, but it is riveting and essential. Teenagers will recognize its difficult truth and devour it — behind your backs, if need be.

Emma O’Donovan, a gorgeous 18-year-old Irish girl, is a snob and a boyfriend stealer. She wields her sexuality like somebody waving a gun. At a party, she drinks heavily, ingests a mysterious drug and hooks up with a local soccer star. And then she is gang-raped and dumped unconscious on her porch.

Emma remembers nothing, a small mercy. But photos of the attack have been uploaded to a Facebook page called “Easy Emma,” on which cruel comments bloom by the minute. Her big brother sees it. Her mam. Even her beloved dad, who can’t bear to look at her now.

Because the rape comes back to Emma only in flashes, “Asking for It” depicts less violence against women than many TV shows. O’Neill is most interested in capturing the voice in Emma’s head: She’s so traumatized that her first instinct is to apologize to her attackers, and she’s buried under so much shame that she feels as if “the bones of my skeleton are shifting, moving in like a cage around my heart, squeezing all the air out of my lungs.” You may be staggered by Emma’s inability to make a self-respecting decision, even as her story goes international. But you’ll be lit up with pain and rage on her behalf, and grateful for the few who stand by her. Emma always seems incontrovertibly real. What’s terrifying is that the world she lives in — full of misogyny and deep, communal denial — does too.