A lost princess. A dark puppet master. And a race against time—before all is lost.
SISTERS OF THE SNAKE
(Ria & Rani #1)
by Sarena & Sasha Nanua
HarperTeen, June 2021
(chez Park & Fine – voir catalogue)
The law in Abai—the last known magical kingdom—does not look kindly on street thieves, but for eighteen-year-old orphan Ria, stealing isn’t a choice of convenience: it’s a matter of survival. So when she and her friend Amir devise a plan to steal priceless jewels from the kingdom’s royal palace and use them to bribe their way into a new kingdom, it seems a new life may finally be within reach. Then, while sneaking into the palace, Ria runs into the princess, and everything she knows about herself is turned on its head—because Princess Rani looks exactly like Ria, down to the freckle. Running into her doppelgänger, Princess Rani doesn’t see her long-lost twin or a dangerous, thieving intruder. She sees an opportunity: a chance to escape the tight confines of her gilded prison before her marriage, and a chance to find the wife of her late, beloved tutor, recently executed for treason, so that Rani can give her the valuable possessions he left behind. After Ria and Rani strike a deal to temporarily switch places, Rani discovers that her father’s kingdom is not the place of prosperity she once thought, and that it’s hurtling toward a dangerous war. Living with the Raja and the queen, Ria learns that they—her family?—have their own dangerous secrets, and that there’s a treasonous conspiracy brewing in the royal court. Neither life inside nor outside the palace walls are safe, and Ria and Rani are in a race against the clock to unravel a conspiracy and stop a war with wits and magic—or else allow the kingdom of Abai to sink into ruin.
Sarena Nanua & Sasha Nanua are twin sisters living in Ontario, Canada. Born on Diwali ten minutes apart from each other, they grew up loving stories about twins and magic, and began writing books together when they were nine years old. They are graduates of the English and professional writing programs at the University of Toronto and are also the authors of the Pendant trilogy.
Eleven-year-old Maybelle Lane collects sounds. She records the Louisiana crickets chirping, Momma strumming her guitar, their broken trailer door squeaking. But the crown jewel of her collection is a sound she didn’t collect herself: an old recording of her daddy’s warm-sunshine laugh, saved on an old phone’s voicemail. It’s the only thing she has of his, and the only thing she knows about him. Until the day she hears that laugh—his laugh—pouring out of the car radio. Going against Momma’s wishes, Maybelle starts listening to her radio DJ daddy’s new show, drinking in every word like a plant leaning toward the sun. When he announces he’ll be the judge of a singing contest in Nashville, she signs up. What better way to meet than to stand before him and sing with all her heart? But the road to Nashville is bumpy. Her starch-stiff neighbor Mrs. Boggs offers to drive her in her RV. And a bully of a boy from the trailer park hitches a ride, too. These are not the people May would have chosen to help her, but it turns out they’re searching for things as well. And the journey will mold them into the best kind of family—the kind you choose for yourself.
Mateo Garcia and his younger sister, Sophie, have been taught to fear one word for as long as they can remember: deportation. Over the past few years, however, the fear that their undocumented immigrant parents could be sent back to Mexico has started to fade. Ma and Pa have been in the United States for so long, they have American-born children, and they’re hard workers and good neighbors. When Mateo returns from school one day to find that his parents have been taken by ICE, he realizes that his family’s worst nightmare has become a reality. With his parents’ fate and his own future hanging in the balance, Mateo must figure out who he is and what he is capable of, even as he’s forced to question what it means to be an American. Daniel Aleman’s INDIVISIBLE is a remarkable story – both powerful in its explorations of immigration in America and deeply intimate in its portrait of a teen boy driven by his fierce, protective love for his parents and his sister.
Her destiny was death. The shadows brought her back. Wrongly accused of her brother’s murder, Sonara’s destiny was to die, sentenced to execution by her own mother. Punished and left for dead, the shadows have cursed her with a second life as a Shadowblood, cast out and hunted by society for her demon-like powers. Now known as the Devil of the Deadlands, Sonara survives as a thief on the edge of society, fighting for survival on a quest to uncover what really happened to her brother and whether he is even dead at all…
THE FIRE IN HIS WAKE recounts the journey of Arès Sbigzenou, a Congolese refugee left for dead in the wake of ethnic violence. Arès’ fate, like the fate of millions, sends him on a kinetic flight across northern Africa with Europe as his goal. He reaches Rabat, Morocco, where he binds himself to a desperate community of exiles, and meets Simon, a young UN worker, whose journey is altogether different but no less fraught. While Arès struggles to rebuild his life and come to terms with his past, Simon grapples with the moral compromises inherent in his profession and position. Part sweeping portrait of life in the Maghreb, part epic tale of hope and perseverance, THE FIRE IN HIS WAKE carries the reader from the administrative reckonings of the UN staff to the daily hazards faced by the refugees in the streets and on their risky crossings to Europe. When a storm gathers at the UNHCR, and the ghosts of the Congo’s violence unexpectedly surface in Rabat, the two men find themselves on a collision course, setting the stage for the novel’s unforgettable and genre-busting ending.