November 1, 2024

Eyes on the Ice

In 1963 Czechoslovakia, a hockey game could mean life or death. Ten-year-old Lukas and his brother Denys want nothing more than to play hockey. The family is poor, but hockey is the one bright light for the boys. Then their father, who works for a newspaper, is arrested. No one knows where he has been taken or when he might be coming home. Now Lukas and Denys realize they are being watched, too, and when the secret police promise them information about their father if they help throw a game against a visiting Soviet team, Lukas must make some difficult […]
November 1, 2024

Sweetest Darkness

A teenage psychic is drawn deep into the honeycomb of an abandoned hotel—and into a cat-and-mouse game with a predatory entity—in this supernatural horror novel. Everyone in Gypsum, Texas knows the Hotel Alvarado changes at night—especially Quinn. A teenage clairvoyant, he’s been having dreams about it… dreams that call him to its dark, abandoned halls. The hotel is a monument to the town’s more prosperous past, when celebrities flocked to the mineral spas and films were shot in the desert. The Great Depression killed all of that, it killed the Alvarado and frankly it killed Gypsum, too. Now, when the […]
September 9, 2024

Defy

Seventeen-year-old Darius lives in the city of Zalmon, where every Life Event is predetermined in accordance with the Book of Zalmon: where you’ll work, who you’ll marry and at the end of it all, when you’ll die. Natural Deaths are to be avoided at all costs. Why risk the pain of a random demise when you can live out your remaining days at the Quiet End where you’ll be released peacefully? But when Darius learns that his little sister, Mahlah, will be assigned an imminent Death Date on her thirteenth birthday, he infiltrates the system to save her. The search […]
July 5, 2024
there is no map for this

There Is No Map For This

A high-adrenaline story of what it really means to man up. Seventeen-year-old Ren Adams feels lucky to be living with his brother, Levi, and Levi’s girlfriend, Ellie ― a welcome escape from his mother and her fundamentalist husband. Ren finally feels able to breathe, even if Levi and Ellie insist on trying to make him push his limits, live up to his potential ― “man up” … whatever that means. Ren does his best to keep up ― until Levi is killed in an avalanche on one of their follow-the-leader dares. Overcome with grief, Ren feels unmoored, while Ellie embraces […]
July 5, 2024

The Picture Visitors: A Case for the Van Gogh Agency

Thirteen-year-old Vincent has a very special talent: He can jump into paintings and move around inside them. When the painting The Thunderstorm by an old Dutch painter is stolen from a London mansion, Vincent decides to track it down. During his search, to his great surprise, he meets Holly, who can dive into paintings just like him. The two make a bet: Whoever finds The Thunderstorm first, wins. Vincent is sure he will be faster, but the search turns out to be difficult, and then something is wrong with Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night. Why is it that when Vincent […]
July 5, 2024

The Forest Demands Its Due

Regent Academy had a long and storied history in the small town of Winslow, Vermont. But so does the vast forest that surrounds its campus. While the school is known for molding teens into world leaders, its past is far more nefarious–and even more entangled with the forest–than anyone would suspect. Seventeen-year-old Douglas wants nothing to do with Regent’s king-making; he’s just trying to forget his previous life and survive his present. But then a student is killed, and no one except Douglas and the groundskeeper’s son, Everett, remembers him ever existing. As Douglas begins to research what he finds […]
July 5, 2024

Locked In

The company “Locked In Escape Rooms” is offering prize money for whoever can successfully escape the room. Four very different teenagers answer the call. But as the game begins, the room turns out to be stranger than expected, and they suspect someone might have ulterior motives in coming here. Can the teens overcome their prejudices and differences and trust one another in order to escape in time?   This easy-to-read novel has short chapters, simple sentences and an accessible format to appeal to reluctant readers. It’s written at a second- to third-grade reading level for an interest level of ages […]
May 3, 2024
forty days in hicksville

Forty Days in Hicksville

Kate doesn’t want to spend one minute in the “Hicksville” her mother moved them to. Zach, the boy who lives next door, tries to befriend Kate even though she ignores him. Then they find the crevasse on her grandfather’s property and the skeletons hidden inside. Kate and Zach start working together to solve the cold case that has silenced her mother for thirty-five years. Kate doesn’t want to be here; she’s been forced to leave behind an extensive Youtube following of her urban exploration videos, to move with her mom to what might as well be the end of the […]
May 3, 2024
patron saints of nothing

Patron Saints of Nothing

A powerful coming-of-age story about grief, guilt and the risks a Filipino-American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin’s murder. Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte’s war on drugs, and no one in the family wants to talk about what happened, Jay travels to the Philippines to find out the real story. Hoping to uncover more about Jun and the events that led […]
May 3, 2024
the thing about my uncle

The Thing About My Uncle

Although ten years have passed, Rhett Littlefield has always blamed himself for his father abandoning him and his family. When the troubled fourteen-year-old gets kicked out of school for his latest run-in with the vice principal, his frazzled single mother sends him to Eastern Kentucky to stay with his Uncle Theo, a man of few words who leads an isolated existence with his loyal dog, Chekhov. Resigned to make the best of his situation while still longing for the day when Mama will allow him to return home, Rhett discovers that he and Uncle Theo share a connection to the […]