In a 2018 essay for Time magazine, the actress Gabrielle Union lamented Hollywood’s lack of imagination when it comes to casting people of color. Why, she asked, is it so hard to make movies about black and brown people that tell “the same nonsensical and mundane stories as white women and men”? It’s now two years later, and the only actor of color nominated for an Oscar is Cynthia Erivo for her portrayal of Harriet Tubman.

So the heart rises when cracking open Echo Brown’s audaciously titled BLACK GIRL UNLIMITED (Christy Ottaviano/Holt, 291 pp., $17.99; ages 12 and up). And then deflates when on the first page the young protagonist, 6 years old and living in a cramped East Cleveland apartment, struggles to wake up her naked mother from their bathroom floor. Smoke pours into the apartment, her little brothers scream from their crib, the mother humiliated in a crack stupor. Oh, this wretched oft-told story.

But hang in there through that first scene of chaos. There is nothing played-out or reductive about this genre-bending debut, which is equal parts memoir and high fantasy. Brown has written a guidebook of survival and wonder.

Told through a series of magic-infused lessons on how to unlock one’s own quantum wizard — “a wizard with unresolved rage will keep unleashing terror” — the book reads like a training manual for a superhero. We travel with Echo through her first kiss, her brother’s incarceration, a friend’s coming out, her mother’s overdose, sexual assault, college acceptance. Never once, in this swirl of drama and trauma, does our hero seem to exist at a remove. The reader doesn’t gawk at her tragedy and resilience.

Brown’s greatest gift is evoking intimacy, and as she delicately but firmly snatches the reader’s attention, we are allowed to see this girl of multitudes and her neighborhood of contradictions in full and specific detail. Stereotypes, like the bitter myth of the strong black woman, wither on the page. “They have said wizards are unbreakable, but I’m not sure anymore,” Echo says. “They call us warriors because we survive it and they call us strong because it doesn’t topple us. They call us magic because we manage to make miracles out of it. ‘Wow! Look at her take it all! She’s so strong!’ But for us, it’s not a victory. It’s a blood bath.”

Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. The movie “Titanic” and the television series “Saved by the Bell.” White Jesus, grape Kool-Aid. Who can tell what holds a girl up through adolescence? Each of these plays a role in Echo’s rise, as do her Iranian best friend and the five other smart kids hoisting their heavy backpacks at her high school. Her devoted English teacher does too, and her dreamer baby brothers, whom she refuses to let languish on the corner.

Echo is an extraordinary girl from extraordinary people. She is also an ordinary girl with recognizable loves, and what saves her in the end is the magic of self. She learned well the 12th lesson of wizard training, which is to choose and honor a singular purpose — in her case a determination to reach and soothe girls like herself whose light the world wants to dim. “One story that will drive your life forward. Without one, you will crumble into insanity or apathy; both are unbearable. Your purpose … is the most important story you tell yourself about why you exist.”

The queer Latinx author Anna-Marie McLemore tells two stories in DARK AND DEEPEST RED (Feiwel & Friends, 306 pp., $17.99; ages 14 and up), straddling 16th-century Alsace — where a Romani girl and trans boy battle suspicion and prejudice — and the modern-day United States, where the Mexican daughter of celebrated shoemakers becomes entangled with a science-obsessed boy himself descended from Romani people. A pair of enchanted red shoes ties these young couples together. If they are to survive the shoes’ dark magic, history must be both confronted and integrated.

While writing this retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s famously dark “The Red Shoes,” McLemore, the author of four previous novels, including the National Book Award-longlisted “When the Moon Was Ours,” embraced a non-gender-conforming identity. In an author’s note, McLemore describes a research trip to Strasbourg with their transgender husband. “People of color existed in medieval Europe. As did the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community, though their conception of their own identities would likely have been far different from today …. Girls like me were here 500 years ago. So were the boys like the one alongside me now.”

Five hundred years separate the brown teenage girls in “Dark and Deepest Red,” and yet both instinctually seek protection from the popular white girls in town. “The brown of her skin has drawn the suspicion of a city,” Lavinia worries in ancient Strasbourg. “Maybe these girls, with their complexions that seem poured from spring cream, can veil her from it.” In a modern-day town called Briar Meadow, 16-year-old Rosella monitors her own appearance, straightening her hair and snacking on lemon slices to keep up with the Pipers and Sylvies in her high school.

McLemore is a writer of extreme lushness, and these characters see the world in magnificent color. Fabric is the “same blue-touched green as wet sage.” A mother has “eyes like juniper berries. Green and brown and purple all at once.” The young scientist Emil tries to flirt with Rosella from his garden shed chemistry lab, turning a flame “the bright yellow of a field daffodil.” To read this novel is to fall into a trance of language.

That sense of dreamy reverie is more successful in the old Strasbourg sections, where Lavinia battles an accusation of witchcraft, suspected of being the evil source of the dancing plague that has overtaken the city. She panics less for her own self than for the safety of her love, Alifair, who binds his chest and is prettier than any other boy in town. And one wishes too that this tale, the sexier and sweeter of these two love stories, were told less in moments of flashback and more in the urgent present tense that McLemore writes so well.

But the crescendo of the novel, with both romances spiraling to feverish conclusions, takes the breath away. McLemore offers what will be for many readers a kind of wish fulfillment — the joy of being able to simply say “Finally!” when same-sex crushes couple up.

The same matter-of-fact approach distinguishes the gay teenage hero in Adam Silvera’s INFINITY SON (Harper Teen, 368 pp., $18.99; ages 14 and up), the start of a promised series. Silvera’s world-building is elaborate — a gritty New York City in which power-wielding celestials battle abusive specters and share subway space with the rest of us — but the novel shows that sexual identity is unremarkable.

“I never had to come out to my family,” says Emil, the 18-year-old heart of the novel. “But when I got older and found the word that best fits my romantic worldview — gay for the win — it was awesome for telling new people in my life, and most important, how comfortable the word felt on my tongue. It’s as normal as my hazel eyes and constant bedhead.”

Emil navigates a shifting chaotic world alongside his more ego-driven twin brother, Brighton, consumed by his numbers and likes on social media. Both are still reeling from the death of their father. When Emil shocks everyone by discovering his own latent powers, Brighton hates the idea of suddenly being unremarkable and left behind. Silvera shoots off his plot like a gun and writes action sequences as if they were car chases — relentless, quick-cutting, sparks flying.

“We grew up on books and movies where ordinary teens discover they’re special — chosen ones, long lost wizards, whatever. It rarely plays out that way in real life, but who knows,” Brighton says. Is it too dreamy to imagine Emil battling a specter on the big screen? Or Lavinia and Alifair’s romance? Or Echo Brown’s love letter to her childhood self? If “Black Girl Unlimited” is made into a movie, may Gabrielle Union not play her mother because she’s already busy shooting another in which she plays someone average — and all the more special for it.