A teen girl, backed by a secret society of powerful women, competes to make an 18-year-old future President fall in love with her in Sheena Boekweg’s compelling new YA novel.
A SISTERHOOD OF SECRET AMBITIONS
by Sheena Boekweg
Feiwel & Friends/Macmillan, June 2021
(chez Context Literary Agency – voir catalogue)
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.
Sheena Boekweg, author of Glitch Kingdom, grew up reading books with tree branches peeking over her shoulder. She studied theatre at Weber State University, married a handsome nerd who taught her about video games, and then had three kids who stole her heart and her controllers. She lives in Utah with her family and the world’s most spoiled puppy.

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?
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.
Everyone knows Miz Poppy, the vibrant reviewer whose commentary brightens the New Orleans nightlife. But no one knows Hollyn, the real face behind the media star…or the fear that keeps her isolated. When her boss tells her she needs to add video to her blog or lose her job, she’s forced to rely on an unexpected source to help her face her fears. When aspiring actor Jasper Deares finds out the shy woman who orders coffee every day is actually Miz Poppy, he realizes he has a golden opportunity to get the media attention his acting career needs. All he has to do is help Hollyn come out of her shell…and through their growing connection, finally find her voice.