Archives par étiquette : Writers House

WINK de Rob Harrell

A hilarious and heartwrenching story about surviving middle school–and an unthinkable diagnosis–while embracing life’s weirdness.

WINK
by Rob Harrell
Dial Books for Young Readers, 2020
(via Writers House)

Ross Maloy just wants to be a normal seventh grader. He doesn’t want to lose his hair, or wear a weird hat, or deal with the disappearing friends who don’t know what to say to « the cancer kid. » But with his recent diagnosis of a rare eye cancer, blending in is off the table.

Based on Rob Harrell’s real life experience, and packed with comic panels and spot art, this incredibly personal and poignant novel is an unforgettable, heartbreaking, hilarious, and uplifting story of survival and finding the music, magic, and laughter in life’s weirdness. 

Rob Harrell created the Life of Zarf series, the graphic novel Monster on the Hill, and also writes and draws the long-running daily comic strip Adam@Home, which appears in more than 140 papers worldwide. He created and drew the internationally syndicated comic strip Big Top until 2007. He lives with his wife in Indiana.

SOMETHING LIKE HOME d’Andrea Beatriz Arango

From the author of Newbery Honor-winning book Iveliz Explains It All comes this moving novel in verse, in which a lost dog helps a lonely girl find a way home to her family . . . only for them to find family in each other along the way.

SOMETHING LIKE HOME
by Andrea Beatriz Arango
Random House, September 2023
(via Writers House)

Laura Rodriguez has a plan: No matter what the grown-ups say, she will live with her parents again. Can you blame her? It’s tough to make friends as the new kid at school. And while staying at her aunt’s house is okay, it just isn’t the same. But that’s all going to change. Because when Laura finds a puppy, it seems like fate. If she can train the puppy to become a therapy dog, then maybe she’ll be allowed to visit her parents. Maybe the dog will help them get better, and things will finally go back to the way they should. After all, how do you explain to others that you’re technically a foster kid, even when you live with your aunt? Most of all . . . how do you explain that you’re not where you belong, and you just want to go home?

Andrea Beatriz Arango is the Newbery Honor Award-winning author of Iveliz Explains It All. She was born and raised in Puerto Rico and is a former public school teacher with almost a decade of teaching experience.

WISH OF THE WICKED de Danielle Paige

Set in a lush, dangerous world woven with fairy tale mythology, New York Times bestselling author Danielle Paige launches a brand new Fairy Godmother origin story full of intrigue, magic, and romance.

WISH OF THE WICKED:
The Fairy Godmother Series
by Danielle Paige
Bloomsbury, November 2023
(via Writers House)

Bibbidi-bobbidi-blood. Everyone knows that a fairy godmother helped Cinderella get to the ball where she met the prince. No one knows that the fairy godmother’s motives for helping Cinderella might not have been as charming as they seem. Until now.
For centuries, the enchanted members of the Entente used their magic to keep the Thirteen Queendoms in harmony. Until the day that Queen Magrit outlawed magic, executed the Entente, and plunged the queendoms into war.
Only one Entente survives. Alone and magicless, Farrow dreams of nothing but revenge. And the best way to reach the queen is through her son, Prince Mather, who is nearing the age when he will need a bride. But the closer Farrow gets to the prince, the more she finds herself drawn to him. To reclaim her magic and destroy the queen, Farrow will have to question what-and more importantly, who-she’s willing to sacrifice.

Danielle Paige is the author of Stealing Snow and its prequel novellas Before the Snow and Queen Rising, as well as the New York Times bestselling Dorothy Must Die series. Before turning to young adult literature, she worked in the television industry, where she received a Writers Guild of America Award and was nominated for several Daytime Emmys.

ONLY IF YOU’RE LUCKY de Stacy Willingham

A sharp and twisty exploration of female friendship from the New York Times bestselling author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things.

ONLY IF YOU’RE LUCKY
by Stacy Willingham
Minotaur, January 2024
(via Writers House)

Lucy Sharpe is larger than life. Magnetic, addictive. Bold and dangerous. Especially for Margot, who meets Lucy at the end of their freshman year at a liberal arts college in South Carolina. Margot is the shy one, the careful one, always the sidekick and never the center of attention. But when Lucy singles her out at the end of the year, a year Margot spent studying and playing it safe, and asks her to room together, something in Margot can’t say no―something daring, or starved, or maybe even envious.

And so Margot finds herself living in an off-campus house with three other girls, Lucy, the ringleader; Sloane, the sarcastic one; and Nicole, the nice one, the three of them opposites but also deeply intertwined. It’s a year that finds Margot finally coming out of the shell she’s been in since the end of high school, when her best friend Eliza died three weeks after graduation. Margot and Lucy have become the closest of friends, but by the middle of their sophomore year, one of the fraternity boys from the house next door has been brutally murdered… and Lucy Sharpe is missing without a trace.

From the author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things comes a tantalizing thriller about the nature of friendship and belonging, about loyalty, envy, and betrayal―another gripping novel from an author quickly becoming the gold standard in psychological suspense.

Stacy Willingham is the New York Times bestselling author of A Flicker in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things. She studied journalism at the University of Georgia and holds an MFA from the Savannah College of Art & Design.

MY NAME IS IRIS de Brando Skyhorse

Brando Skyhorse, the PEN/Hemingway Award–winning author of The Madonnas of Echo Park, returns with a riveting literary dystopian novel set in a near-future America where mandatory identification wristbands make second-generation immigrants into second-class citizens—a powerful family saga for readers of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind.

MY NAME IS IRIS
by Brando Skyhorse
Avid Reader, May 2023
(via Writers House)

One day, Iris Prince, a middle-class, ideologically conservative Mexican American mother and wife, finds a mysterious wall growing outside her modest Southern California home. In addition to the maddening structure—which is impossible to remove and mutates at random—the rest of the world is also changing. A newly passed law suddenly denies basic rights like drivers’ licenses and steady employment to Americans who cannot prove at least one of their parents was born in the United States. Biometric wristbands are used to identify people who are “of verifiable origin” under the new system, while unverifiables are ignored or harassed with abandon.

Iris has always prided herself on being a model minority and assimilating into White American culture. She and her like-minded Mexican American husband Alex have raised their daughter Melanie to be bilingual, but there are strict rules about when Spanish is and isn’t acceptable, and about what other parts of their culture to selectively embrace. As Alex’s behavior becomes suspicious, Iris soon realizes she may not be eligible for the coveted wristband—at least not without going to dangerous, drastic lengths to get one. Meanwhile, the wall outside their home is growing, and their neighbors are watching more closely than ever…

A powerful story about family, identity, intolerance, and immigration, MY NAME IS IRIS is a brilliant and timely look at what it means to be American as seen through one woman’s tumultuous journey through a world that insists on telling her who she can and can’t be.

Brando Skyhorse’s debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, won the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, Take This Man, was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Books of 2014 and one of NBC News’s 10 Best Latino Books of 2014. Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine.