It’s the last day of school for thirteen-year-old Leah, who lives with her mom and dad in Ormewood Park, a suburb of Atlanta where neighbors frequently gather together for cookouts and observe community traditions that date back years and years…. Read More ›
Grief
All Our Broken Pieces
Lennon (yes, you can easily guess where the name came from) is a young woman living with her divorced mother in Maine. She is beautiful, talented and creative (in sewing cosplay-type stuff), and she has OCD. In fact, she blames… Read More ›
Six Goodbyes We Never Said
There are two protagonists in this book: Naima Rodriguez, whose mother died at her birth and whose Marine father has been killed during a sixth tour of duty overseas; and Dew Brickman, who lost both parents at the same time… Read More ›
The Beholder
Here is a fairy tale set in an imaginary location and time period that creatively (and loosely) references known countries and areas, medieval and modern customs, weaponry, technology and some vocabulary, and that spans the development of feminism through the… Read More ›
Patron Saints of Nothing
Right before his last Spring Break before graduating from high school, seventeen-year-old Jay learns that his Filipino cousin Jun is dead, apparently killed as an addict and drug dealer in President Duterte’s war on drugs. Jun’s father, a regional police… Read More ›
Sorry for Your Loss
Pup Flanagan has spent most of his seventeen years as (in his mind) an undistinguished person compared to his seven older siblings. At school he is accepted by his classmates but generally ignored, neither liked nor disliked. He has no… Read More ›
Ordinary Girls
Here’s a modern day send-up of a Jane Austen novel: two young girls–their acclaimed novelist father deceased for many years–live with their inept artistic mother in a shabby but genteel Victorian house in a Philadelphia neighborhood. They subsist on royalties… Read More ›
famous in a small town
Ahh, summer days in a small midwestern town when you’re a high school junior-soon-to-be-senior working the usual low-wage jobs, attending summer band practice, planning for college and worrying about just how far away you want to get from home once… Read More ›
Girl Gone Viral
Opal, Shane and Moyo are classmates at the very prestigious Palo Alto Academy of Science and Technology (PAAST) and partners in entering the Make-A-Splash virtual reality contest, aspiring to win a million-dollar-prize, a channel of their own on WAVE (the… Read More ›
How to Make Friends with the Dark
The protagonist of this book, Grace (aka Tiger), is a high school sophomore living in a small Arizona desert town. She does not know who her father is/was, and her mother is secretive about most other parts of her past… Read More ›
Before You Buy YA 