Archives de catégorie : Young Adult

THE BABYSITTERS’ COVEN de Kate Williams

Adventures in Babysitting meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer in this funny, action-packed novel about a coven of witchy babysitters who realize their calling to protect the innocent and save the world from an onslaught of evil.

THE BABYSITTERS’ COVEN
by Kate Williams
Delacorte Press, September 2019

Seventeen-year-old Esme Pearl has a babysitters club. She knows it’s kinda lame, but what else is she supposed to do? Get a job? Gross. Besides, Esme likes babysitting, and she’s good at it. And lately Esme needs all the cash she can get, because it seems like destruction follows her wherever she goes. Let’s just say she owes some people a new tree. Enter Cassandra Heaven. She’s Instagram-model hot, dresses like she found her clothes in a dumpster, and has a rebellious streak as gnarly as the cafeteria cooking. So why is Cassandra willing to do anything, even take on a potty-training two-year-old, to join Esme’s babysitters club? The answer lies in a mysterious note Cassandra’s mother left her: « Find the babysitters. Love, Mom. » Turns out, Esme and Cassandra have more in common than they think, and they’re about to discover what being a babysitter really means: a heroic lineage of superpowers, magic rituals, and saving the innocent from seriously terrifying evil. And all before the parents get home.

Film/TV rights optioned to Nickelodeon.

Also available:
FOR BETTER OR CURSED (The Babysitters Coven Book 2) – Delacorte Press, December 2020
SPELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT (The Babysitters Coven Book 3) – Delacorte Press, Fall 2021

Kate Williams has written for Seventeen, NYLON, Cosmopolitan, Bustle, Vans, Calvin Klein, Urban Outfitters, and many other brands and magazines. She lives in Kansas.

A SHOT AT NORMAL de Marisa Reichardt

A powerful and timely novel about justice, agency, family, and taking your shot, even when it seems impossible.

A SHOT AT NORMAL
by Marisa Reichardt
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2021

Dr. Villapando told me to get a good attorney. He wasn’t serious. But I am. I’m going to sue my parents.
Juniper Jade’s parents are hippies. They didn’t attend the first Woodstock, but they were there for the second one. The Jade family lives an all-organic homeschool lifestyle that means no plastics, no cell phones, and no vaccines. It isn’t exactly normal, but it’s the only thing Juniper has ever known. She doesn’t agree with her parents on everything, but she knows that to be in this family, you’ve got to stick to the rules. That is, until the unthinkable happens.
Juniper contracts the measles and unknowingly passes the disease along, with tragic consequences. She is shell-shocked. Juniper knows she is responsible and feels simultaneously helpless and furious at her parents, and herself.
Now, with the help of Nico, the boy who works at the library and loves movies and may just be more than a friend, Juniper comes to a decision: she is going to get vaccinated. Her parents refuse so Juniper arms herself with a lawyer and prepares for battle. But is waging war for her autonomy worth losing her family? How much is Juniper willing to risk for a shot at normal?

Marisa Reichardt lives in Southern California with her family. Underwater was her debut novel.

THE WOODS ARE ALWAYS WATCHING de Stephanie Perkins

Another blood-chilling contemporary horror novel, the perfect companion to her New York Times bestseller There’s Someone Inside Your House, available now on Netflix.

THE WOODS ARE ALWAYS WATCHING
by Stephanie Perkins
Dutton, August 2021

Best friends Neena and Josie spent high school as outsiders, but at least they had each other. Now, with college and a two-thousand-mile separation looming on the horizon, they have one last chance to be together—a three-day hike deep into the woods of the Pisgah National Forest. Simmering tensions lead to a detour off the trail and straight into a waking nightmare … and then into something far worse. Something that will test them in horrifying ways.
Stephanie Perkins, the bestselling author of There’s Someone Inside Your House, returns with a heart-stopping, gut-wrenching novel about friendship, survival, and navigating unmarked paths even as evil watches from the shadows.

Stephanie Perkins is the New York Times bestselling author and anthology editor of multiple books, including There’s Someone Inside Your House, Anna and the French Kiss, Lola and the Boy Next Door, and Isla and the Happily Ever After. She has always worked with books—first as a bookseller, then as a librarian, and now as a novelist. Stephanie lives in the mountains of North Carolina with her husband. Every room of their house is painted a different color of the rainbow.

THE THOUSAND STEPS de Helen Brain

A smart and pacy dystopian thriller trilogy, in the vein of Divergent, with an original mythology that draws on the power of African ancestor legends.

THE THOUSAND STEPS
(Book 1 in the Elevation Trilogy)
by Helen Brain
Human & Rousseau/NB Publishers South Africa, May 2022 | Catalyst Press USA, January 2020

On the brink of execution, 16 year old Ebba den Eeden is unexpectedly “elevated” from the bunker deep in South Africa’s Table Mountain where she has lived all her life, believing—as do all the other teenagers who toil daily to make their food and power the bunker—that the world « Above » is uninhabitable due to a nuclear holocaust. Instead, she is heiress to a massive fortune―one that everyone wants to control. While dealing with the machinations of the High Priest, his handsome son Hal, and the rules and regulations of a society and religion she doesn’t understand, she must also try to save her three friends, still stuck in the bunker and facing execution any day.

Helen Brain was born in Australia in 1960 and raised in Durban, South Africa. After school, she studied music at the University of Cape Town. Before settling to a life writing and teaching writing online, she was a freelance journalist and editor, a screenprinter and crafter, and taught English, music, and Ancient Greek. A mother to three sons and grandmother to one grandson, Brain lives in Muizenberg, South Africa with her husband.

IF NOT US de Mark Smith

Mark Smith’s first standalone young adult novel following his hugely successful Winter trilogy. An impassioned plea for climate change action that will inspire and empower.

IF NOT US
by Mark Smith
Text Publishing Australia, October 2021

Hesse lives in a small coastal town, where a coalmine and power station are a part of the scenery, and a part of the ever-growing problem of climate change. His mother is a member of a local environmental group campaigning to close the mine and shut down the power station. It’s a no-brainer, of course, but Hesse is more interested in surfing—and in Fenna, the new exchange student from the Netherlands. But when someone seems to be trying to derail the campaign, and his friends’ families face losing their jobs, Hesse begins to realise that things are complex. Even though he’s reluctant to step into the spotlight, with Fenna’s encouragement he decides it’s time to make a stand. Because some things are too important to leave to everyone else. And even one small, nervous voice can make a difference. When Hesse agrees to speak at a protest meeting he has no idea of the storm he is about to unleash.

Mark Smith is an award-winning author. He lives, works and surfs on Victoria’s Surf Coast. The first book in his acclaimed Winter trilogy, The Road to Winter, is widely taught in secondary schools and loved by readers of all ages, and Wilder Country, the second book of the trilogy, won the 2018 Indie Book of the Year for Young Adults.