Brewster Gaines just wanted to make a video and get a million views—he didn’t count on needing friends to get there. From the author of Spontaneous and the Locker 37 series comes a heartfelt story of friendship, family, and filmmaking.
A MILLION VIEWS
by Aaron Starmer
Penguin Workshop, October 2022
(via Dystel, Goderich & Bourret)
Brewster Gaines loves everything about making videos. The planning, the filming, the editing, and especially the feeling of watching his YouTube views tick up and up. So what if he doesn’t have friends to film with or parents who are home every night for dinner? He’s got a phone and a tripod and a lofty goal: A million views. But when he enlists the acting chops of charismatic new kid Carly for a ten-second video, he gets more than he bargained for. Her intimidating friend Rosa soon steps in with funding to produce an epic fantasy trailer, and before long, their tiny team is adding cast and crew. What started as a simple shoot mutates into a full-fledged movie production, complete with method-acting cosplayers, special effects, and a monster made out of a go-kart. That’s when Brewster realizes that getting to a million views may be harder than he ever imagined . . .
Aaron Starmer was born in northern California and raised in the suburbs of Syracuse, New York. Before pursuing writing full-time, he worked in New York City for over ten years as an editor for a travel bookseller and as an operations director for an African safari company. His middle grade and young adult novels have been translated into multiple foreign languages and have appeared on best of the year lists from Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, New York Public Library, YALSA, Bank Street College of Education, Chicago Public Library and School Library Journal. He lives in Vermont with his wife and two daughters.
Sibyl loves possibilities, and at the Grand Mirror Hotel everything seems possible. It might even be possible that one day her grandmother will let her open the Book of Advanced and Dangerous Magic. Sibyl is the apprentice hotel witch. Under the watchful care of her grandmother she is memorising spell patterns to keep the hotel staff and guests happy. But the spells don’t always go exactly as planned: sometimes the spell to make the cakes rise works a little too well, and eclairs and chocolate cakes float up to the ceiling.
Four years ago, five kids started a game. Only four survived. Now, at the end of their senior year of high school, the survivors—Dax, Maddy, Emerson, and Owen—have reunited for one strange and terrible reason: they’ve been summoned by the ghost of Ian, the friend they left for dead. Together they return to the tunnel where their friendship ended with one goal: find Ian and bring him home. So they restart the deadly game they never finished—an innocent card-matching challenge called Meido. A game without instructions. As soon as they begin, they’re dragged out of their reality and into an eerie hellscape of Japanese underworlds, more horrifying than even the darkest folktales that Owen’s grandmother told him. There, they meet Shinigami, an old wise woman who explains the rules: They have one night to complete seven challenges or all of them, even Ian, will be stuck in this world forever. Once inseparable, the survivors now can’t stand each other, but the challenges demand they work together, think quickly, and make sacrifices—blood, clothes, secrets, memories, and worse. And once again, not everyone will make it out of Meido alive.
It’s 1979, and Jasmine Zumideh is ready to get the heck out of her stale, Southern California suburb and into her dream school, NYU, where she’ll major in journalism and cover New York City’s exploding music scene. There’s just one teeny problem: Due to a deadline snafu, she maaaaaaybe said she was Senior Class President-Elect on her application―before the election takes place. But honestly, she’s running against Gerald Thomas, a rigid rule-follower whose platform includes reinstating a dress code―there’s no way she can lose. And she better not, or NYU will rescind her application. But then, an international incident turns the election upside down: a group of students in Iran, fed up with the U.S.’s interference in Iranian politics, takes the American Embassy in Tehran―and the people within it―hostage. And, as the Iran Hostage Crisis dominates the nightly news, her opponent seizes the opportunity to stir up anti-Iranian sentiment at school and turn the electorate against her―with the help of her outspoken brother, who never stops talking about it. Now, as the white lie she told snowballs into an avalanche, Jasmine is stuck between claiming her heritage or hiding it, standing by her outspoken brother or turning her back on him, winning the election or abandoning her dreams for good.
Andie Rose has a plan. Transfer to the illustrious Blue Ridge State mid-Freshman year. Major in psychology. Become an iconic self-help figure. Create a lasting, positive impression on the world just like her larger-than-life, beloved talk-radio host mom