A story about finding love, figuring out your place in the world, and learning to embrace the challenges life throws in your path.
DANCING BAREFOOT
by Alice Boyle
Text Publishing, Summer 2022
Patch feels out of place at Mountford College: she wears the wrong clothes, she’s on a scholarship, and she has an embarrassingly persistent crush on Evie Vanhoutte, popular girl and golden child. Evie has no idea Patch exists until one day, a chance encounter sparks a friendship that’s equal parts exhilarating, terrifying, and very, very confusing.
As if that weren’t enough to deal with, Patch is also trying to avoid a vindictive school bully, forgetting to be supportive of her transitioning best friend, Edwin, and worrying about a potential new stepmother turning out to be the evil Baroness from The Sound of Music.
Alice Boyle is an English teacher and author living in Naarm/Melbourne. She’s written for SBS Voices and the Stella Prize, and her short story ‘The Exchange’ was published in the anthology Growing Up Queer in Australia. In 2019 she was highly commended for the Wheeler Centre’s Next Chapter program.
There’s a new girl in town. Holly-Mei Jones is excited about moving to Hong Kong for her mother’s job. Her new school is right on the beach and her family’s apartment is beyond beautiful. Everything is going to be perfect . . . right? Maybe not. It feels like everywhere she turns, there are new rules to follow and expectations to meet. On top of that, the most popular girl in her grade is quickly becoming a frenemy. And without the guidance of her loving Ah-ma, who stayed behind in Toronto, Holly-Mei just can’t seem to get it right. It will take all of Holly-Mei’s determination and sparkle (and maybe even a tiny bit of stubbornness) to get through seventh grade and turn her life in Hong Kong into a great adventure!
All her life, eleven-year-old Farrah Noorzad has been desperate to make her father proud. But she only gets one day a year—her birthday—to spend time with him, before he jets back across the world to his real family in Abu Dhabi. This year, when her father gives her a box containing a mysterious, whispering ring, and tells her she can make a wish on it, Farrah doesn’t think twice. She takes the ring and wishes with everything in her heart to find a place in his world. But her wish backfires and her father vanishes before her eyes. Guided by the whispering ring, she meets Idris, a half-jinn with milky white eyes and hair, who reveals her true heritage: she is also a half-jinn…and her father is one of the seven great jinn kings. As if that weren’t unbelievable enough, he explains that her wish has trapped her father inside the ring, and the other six jinn kings will follow if she can’t find a way to undo her mistake. 
Le scénariste LaDarian Smith travaillera avec les studios 3000 Pictures à l’adaptation du livre middle-grade pour le grand écran, en partenariat avec la société de production Homegrown Pictures. La date de sortie du film n’est pas encore connue. (Lire l’
Navigating junior year, Michie is struggling to answer the question of who she is for her scholarship essays, the only chance she has at making it into Brown as a first-generation college student. Or maybe it’s not so much that Michie doesn’t know who she is as it is that she doesn’t like who she is: having been estranged from her mother from the age of five and surrendered to her grandmother, Michie has made an art of hiding, especially from herself. After all, if her own mother doesn’t think she’s worthy of love, who will?