Archives par étiquette : Sterling Lord Literistic

BLOOD LIKE WATER de Jennifer Lynn Alvarez

A house party turns deadly in this tightly wound thriller set against an icy Alaskan winter.

BLOOD LIKE WATER
by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez
Delacorte, Fall 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic))

Finley, Mya, River, and Eli. They were inseparable as kids, running wild on Alaska’s vast wide-open spaces. Then tragedy struck, and Finley moved to the lower 48. But now it’s senior year, and Finley’s back in Anchorage. When Mya throws a house party on a snowy Valentine’s Day night, it’s supposed to be a chance for the friends to reforge old bonds. But an encounter with a mysterious stranger quickly turns the evening into a nightmare. What happened that night was an accident, right? Or was there intent? Either way, loyalty takes a dark turn when Mya, the group’s de facto leader, pressures the friends into a pact of silence, plunging them into a web of deception. Now a man’s missing, the police are involved, and Finley doesn’t know what to do or who to trust.

Jennifer Lynn Alvarez is the author of the young adult thrillers, Lies Like Wildfire, Friends Like These, and two middle-grade fantasy series, The Guardian Herd and Riders of The Realm. She earned her degree in English Literature from UC Berkeley and is the Sonoma County Coordinator for SCBWI. Jennifer lives in Tennessee and often travels to Northern California.

THE PRINCESS PROTECTION PROGRAM d’Alex London

A new middle-grade series about a boarding school where a fairy godmother hides fairytale princesses (and one prince) who don’t like the endings to their timeless tales.

THE PRINCESS PROTECTION PROGRAM
by Alex London
HarperCollins / Greenwillow, 2024 – 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Book 1: THE PRINCESS PROTECTION PROGRAM (February 2024)

The valiant prince quested long and hard to reach the castle where the sleeping princess lies. The last thing he must do is awaken her with a kiss. He has played his role in the story perfectly. But Princess Rosamund does NOT think a kiss from a stranger is a very pleasant way to be woken up! At all!

When Rosamund flees her prince, a Door of Opportunity opens, and she steps through to the HEA. In this new world, HEA stands for Home Educational Academy, not Happily Ever After. Rosamund has found the Princess Protection Program, where fugitive fairy tale princesses escape unwanted affections, untimely ends, and all the other perils of their stories. Verna, the kindly fairy godmother who runs the academy, keeps them all safe. Safe from their stories, and safe from the monstrous Uponatimes who lurk outside the school’s gates, eager to swallow the girls whole and return them to their tales.

As Rosamund adjusts to life in the real world and makes her first real friends, she has more and more questions.

THE PRINCESS PROTECTION PROGRAM is for fans of the Never Afters and the Descendants series, The School for Good and Evil, and the Fairly True Tales series.

Book 2: AFTER EVER AFTER (February 2025)

The second book in Alex London’s delightful middle-grade fantasy duology that plays with the traditional fairy tale story.

Rana loves her friends, loves her school, and loves punk rock. One she thing she does not love is frogs…especially demanding frog princes who follow her home. She left her story because of one and has no plans ever to go back. When her frog prince shows up at the Academy for wayward fairy tale royalty, she’s not happy about it, and when dozens of duplicate frog princes follow him to her world, she’s downright alarmed. Worse still, a shadowy monster is in hot pursuit and to save everyone she cares about, Rana will have to do the one thing she vowed she’d never to do. She has to return to her Once Upon Time and face more than just the frogs she left behind. All her fears are waiting for her, right where she left them.

Alex London is the author of over 25 books for children, teens, and adults, with over 2 million copies sold. He’s the author of the middle grade Dog Tags, Tides of War, Wild Ones, and Accidental Adventures series, as well as two titles in the 39 Clues. His latest middle grade series, Battle Dragons, a cyberpunk romp pitched as The Fast and the Furious meets How to Train Your Dragon, is out from Scholastic. For young adults, he’s the author of the cyberpunk duology Proxy, an ALA Top Ten Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Readers, Best Fiction For Young Adults, and Rainbow List selection and the epic fantasy trilogy, Black Wings Beating, an NBC Today Show Pick, a Kirkus Best Young Adult Fantasy selection, a Seventeen Magazine best of 2018 pick, and a We Need Diverse Books 2018 Must Read, and a 2020 Rainbow List selection. He’s been a journalist and human rights researcher reporting from conflict zones and refugee camps, a young adult librarian with New York Public Library, an assistant to a film agent, and a snorkel salesman. He lives with his husband, daughter, and hound dog in Philadelphia, PA.

LIBERTY’S DAUGHTER de Naomi Kritzer

Set in a distinctive world with a charismatic protagonist, “the political critique is sharp and the mystery is gripping” (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review).

LIBERTY’S DAUGHTER
by Naomi Kritzer
Fairwood Press, November 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Beck Garrison lives on a seastead—an archipelago of constructed platforms and old cruise ships, assembled by libertarian separatists a generation ago. She’s grown up comfortable and sheltered, but starts doing odd jobs for pocket money. To her surprise, she finds that she’s the only detective that a debt slave can afford to hire to track down the woman’s missing sister. When she tackles this investigation, she learns things about life on the other side of the waterline—not to mention about herself and her father—that she did not expect. And that some people will stop at nothing to keep her from talking about . . .

“Admirers of Chris McKinney’s Water City trilogy will be riveted.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“Kritzer’s got a sharp knife and she slips it in so smoothly that you barely notice that you’re bleeding. The best sf uses the future to make a point about the present, and Kritzer’s got today’s enshittified, profit-worshipping, sociopathic present’s number.” —Cory Doctorow, author of the Little Brother series and The Lost Cause

“This book offers a different kind of dystopia and a different kind of rebellion against it: a libertarian seastead that has managed to survive forty years while walking smack into all the expected bears, and a kid fighting those bears with all the strength of freedom and agency that the place has accidentally given her.” —Ruthanna Emrys, author of A Half-Built Garden

“LIBERTY’S DAUGHTER is a fast-paced, forthright, funny voyage through libertarian seasteads and teenage heroism.” —Marissa Lingen, Novel Gazing Redux

Naomi Kritzer has won the Hugo Award and the Locus Award and been a finalist for the Nebula (as well as finalist for the Hugo) for her short stories. Her young adult novel Catfishing on CatNet won the 2020 Lodestar Award and its sequel Chaos on CatNet was a finalist in 2022. Several of her stories and books have been optioned for film. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her family and a few cats. The number of cats is subject to change without notice.

THESE BODIES BETWEEN US de Sarah Van Name

A wistful coming-of-age story with a haunting twist about four friends who spend their summer learning to become invisible—but disappearing comes at a cost.

THESE BODIES BETWEEN US
by Sarah Van Name
Delacorte, March 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Four girls. Four girls skating home, both sides of the road, fearless. Four girls at the mouth of an infinite ocean, sugared and salted with sand and seawater, the tide licking their sunburned feet.

This summer, they’re going to disappear.

For seventeen-year-old Callie and her best friends Talia and Cleo, every summer in their small North Carolina beach town is as steady as the tides. But this year, Cleo has invited enigmatic new girl Polly to join them, creating waves in their familiar friendship. And Cleo has an idea, gleaned from private YouTube videos and hidden message boards: they’re going to learn how to make themselves invisible.

Callie thinks it’s a ridiculous, impossible plan. But the other girls are intoxicated by the thought of disappearing, even temporarily—from bad boyfriends, from overbearing families, from the confusing, uncomfortable reality of having a body altogether. And, miraculously, it works.

Yet as the girls revel in their reckless new freedom, they realize it’s getting harder to come back to themselves…and do they even want to?

“A lusciously crafted and achingly poignant story about girlhood with a haunting twist that readers will savor. You won’t soon forget it.” —Kathleen Glasgow, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces

“Spellbinding…Readers might be tempted to disappear alongside this kaleidoscopic foursome.” —K.L. Walther, New York Times bestselling author of The Summer of Broken Rules

“A gorgeous, wistful meditation on the pleasure and pain of adolescent girlhood, friendship, and the magic of summer.” —Dahlia Adler, author of Cool for the Summer

Sarah Van Name grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina and now lives and works in Durham with her family and dog. She is the author of two previous young adult novels, The Goodbye Summer (2019, a Junior Library Guild pick) and Any Place But Here (2021).

THE MOST de Jessica Anthony

A tightly wound, consuming tale for readers of Claire Keegan and Ian McEwan, about a 1950s American housewife who decides to get into the pool in her family’s apartment complex one morning and won’t come out.

THE MOST
by Jessica Anthony
Little, Brown & Co, July 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

It is an unseasonably warm Sunday in November 1957. Katheen, a college tennis champion turned Delaware housewife, decides not to join her flagrantly handsome life insurance salesman husband, Virgil, or their two young boys, at church. Instead, she takes a dip in the kidney-shaped swimming pool of their apartment complex. And then she won’t come out.

A consuming, single-sitting read set over the course of eight hours, The Most breaches the shimmering surface of a seemingly idyllic mid-century marriage, immersing us in the unspoken truth beneath. As Sputnik 2 orbits the earth carrying Laika, the doomed Soviet dog, Kathleen and Virgil hurtle towards each other until they arrive at a reckoning that will either shatter their marriage, or transform it, at last, into something real.

Jessica Anthony has been a butcher in Alaska, an unlicensed masseuse in Poland, and a secretary in San Francisco. In 2017, while writing Enter the Aardvark, Anthony was working as Bridge Guard, guarding the Maria Valeria Bridge between Sturovo, Slovakia and Esztergom, Hungary. Normally, she lives in Maine and teaches at Bates College.