From the acclaimed author of the Chronicle of the Dark Star comes a riveting mystery, perfect for fans of Stranger Things, about a girl who sets out to find her missing best friend—and discovers her small town is hiding a dark, centuries-old secret.
DRIFTERS
by Kevin Emerson
Walden Pond Press, May 2022
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
Jovie is adrift. She’d been feeling alone ever since her best friend, Micah, left her behind for a new group of friends—but when Micah went missing last fall, Jovie felt truly lost. Now, months later, the search parties have been called off, and the news alerts have dried up. There’s only Jovie, biking around Far Haven, Washington, putting up posters with Micah’s face on them, feeling like she’s the only one who remembers her friend at all. This feeling may be far closer to the truth than Jovie knows. As strange storms beset Far Haven, she is shocked to discover that Micah isn’t just missing—she’s been forgotten completely by everyone in town. And Micah isn’t the only one: there are others, roaming the beaches, camped in the old bunkers, who have somehow been lost from the world. When Jovie and her new friend Sylvan dig deeper, they learn that the town’s history is far stranger and more deadly than anyone knows. Something disastrous is heading for Far Haven, and Jovie and Sylvan soon realize that it is up to them to save not only Micah, but everyone else who has been lost to the world and set adrift—now, in the past, and in the future.
Kevin Emerson is the author of the acclaimed novel Last Day on Mars and its sequels in the Chronicle of the Dark Star. He has written thirteen middle grade novels, including The Fellowship for Alien Detection, the Oliver Nocturne Series, and Lost in Space: Return to Yesterday (based on the Netflix series), as well as eight young adult novels, including The Atlanteans trilogy and Any Second. A former science teacher, Kevin is also a drummer and singer, most recently with his band Model Shop. He lives with his family in Seattle, Washington.
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A stinging, elegiac snapshot of contemporary Los Angeles, told, you guessed it, from the perspective of a queer, dangerously hungry mountain lion, isolated and struggling to survive in a drought-devastated Griffith Park. As it protects the precarious welfare of a nearby homeless encampment from its thicket, it confronts a carousel of temptations and threats, taking us on a tour that spans the city’s cruel inequalities to the toll of climate grief, all while grappling with the complexities of its own gender identity and memories of a vicious, absent father.
Lucas Goodgame lives in a small town in Pennsylvania, a community that has been torn apart by a recent tragedy at the local movie house. Everyone in town sees Lucas as a hero—everyone, that is, except Lucas himself. Lucas spends his time writing letters to his former Jungian analyst Karl, and he insists that his deceased wife Darcy visits him every night in the form of an angel. It is only when 18-year-old Eli, a young man who the community has ostracized, begins camping out in Lucas’s backyard that an unlikely alliance forms and the two begin a journey to heal their neighbors and, most importantly, themselves.
Eighteen-year-old Zarela Zalvidar is a talented flamenco dancer and daughter of the most famous Dragonador in Hispalia. People come for miles to see him fight in their arena, La Giralda. And one day La Giralda will be hers to run. During their five hundredth anniversary show, the family’s dragons mysteriously break free from their pens, causing death and destruction in the ring, and in the carnage, Zarela’s father is horribly injured. Facing punishment from the Dragon Guild, Zarela must keep the arena—her ancestral home and inheritance —safe from their greedy hands. She has no choice but to take her father’s place as the Dragonador of La Giralda. Seeking the help of Arturo Diaz de Montserrat, an infuriatingly handsome former Dragonador with his own secrets, she trains for the role of her life.