Read Recently -- May -- "Eating your baby" jokes would be too easy
Dingo by Charles deLint
Do I even have to write about this one? Buy it! Read it!
Oh, all right.
Miguel lives with his father in a small town outside of Newford. He works after school in his father's used comics-and-records store, and it's there that he meets Lainey, a beautiful girl who has just moved to town from Australia. She has a weird-looking dog, which isn't really a dog, it's a dingo. Its name is Em, and it (she) doesn't like Miguel. But Lainey does, or seems to. Except that on their second meeting, it's reversed: the dog likes him and the girl won't give him the time of day.
It doesn't take Miguel long to find out that, in fact, they're not a girl and her dog, nor even a girl and her dingo. They're twin sisters, Lainey and Em, and they're animal people: magical creatures neither human nor animal but taking the form of each. Due to an enemy pursuing them, they cannot both go out in human form at the same time. Trust me, in the cosmology of deLint's fictional world it all makes sense. Lainey likes him, Em doesn't. The first time they met, Lainey was the girl; the second time, it was Em.
Can Miguel help the girls? And what role is local bully Johnny Ward going to play, since he refuses to be a stereotypical bully and insists on being a complex character?
deLint has yet to strike a wrong note with the YA stories, and this is no exception. Highly recommended.