A rollicking, action-packed adventure of laser tag and fierce sibling rivalries, this is the first book in a commerical middle grade fantasy series by Julie C. Dao.
TEAM CHU AND THE BATTLE OF BLACKWOOD ARENA
by Julie C. Dao
Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Macmillan, July 2022
(via Context Literary Agency)
Clip and Sadie Chu couldn’t be more different. Popular, athletic Clip wants to become his school’s first seventh-grade soccer captain, while brainy star student Sadie is determined to prove that she can do anything her boastful brother can.
They have just one thing in common: they love laser tag. Like, really love it.
When the Blackwood Gaming Arena comes to town, bringing virtual reality headsets and state-of-the-art courses, they couldn’t be more excited—or competitive. But then a mysterious figure appears and claims to be a part of the game, forcing the Chus and their friends to save themselves from a sinister force lurking inside the simulation. Together, they must fight their way through epic battlegrounds that will test their speed, skills, and smarts . . . but will Clip and Sadie learn that they’re far better off working together than competing for the ultimate victory?
Julie C. Dao is the acclaimed author of Forest of a Thousand Lanterns, Kingdom of the Blazing Phoenix, and, Song of the Crimson Flower (Penguin Random House/ Philomel) as well as the upcoming Broken Wish (Disney/Hyperion). She leads many workshops, for places like the Highlights Foundation, and is a master of school visits. She lives in New England.
Behind every powerful man is a trained woman, and behind every trained woman is the Society. It started with tea parties and matchmaking, but is now a countrywide secret. Gossips pass messages in recipes, Spinsters train to fight, and women work together to grant safety to abused women and children. The Society is more than oaths―it is sisterhood and purpose. In 1926, seventeen-year-old Elsie is dropped off in a new city with four other teenage girls. All of them have trained together since childhood to become the Wife of a powerful man. But when they learn that their next target is earmarked to become President, their mission becomes more than just an assignment; this is a chance at the most powerful position in the Society. All they have to do is make one man fall in love with them first.
Chava is a golem, a woman made of clay, able to hear the thoughts and longings of the humans around her, and compelled to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire now imprisoned in the shape of a man, perpetually restless and free-spirited. Having met as two unlikely immigrants in 1899 Manhattan, their lives have become deeply intertwined, but they must decide what, exactly, they mean to each other—all while living disguised as humans, constantly fearing they’ll be exposed as monsters. Meanwhile, Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad has left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. There she meets a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe for her own untreatable condition. And in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem that she names Yossele. When she is sent to an uptown orphanage, the hulking golem will become her only friend and companion. Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the 20th century to the beginning of World War I, THE HIDDEN PALACE follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other? Or will their own natures and desires conspire to tear them apart—especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other creatures of their own kinds?
In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the bonds that held all the various nations of Eastern Europe together as Soviet satellites have dissolved, calling into question what exactly connects them, and whether there was ever any such place to begin with. But, Mikanowski argues, there really was something more to Eastern Europe than shared political subjection. Eastern Europe had a particular character, and this book will name and describe the peculiar flavor of the place, from the Baltics to the Balkans, from Prague to Kiev. Part history, part travelogue, part reading of the disparate canon of Eastern European literature, GOODBYE EASTERN EUROPE will be a work in the tradition of Ian Frazier’s 
When a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hits California, Ruby is trapped in a laundromat with Charlie, a boy she had her first conversation with only moments before. She can’t see anything beyond the rubble that she’s trapped beneath, but she’s sure someone will come save them soon. As the hours and days tick by, Ruby and Charlie struggle to stay hopeful—and stay alive. Ruby has only Charlie’s voice and her memories to find the hope to keep holding on. Will the two make it out alive? And if they do, what will they have lost to the earthquake? Riveting, tense, and emotionally complex, AFTERSHOCKS weaves together the terror and hope of a catastrophic event while showing the ways that disasters can change and unite us.