It is a June unlike any other before, with temperatures soaring to asphyxiating heights. All across the world, freak weather patterns—and the life-shattering catastrophes they entail—have become the norm. The twenty-first century has entered a new phase.
But Gabrielle Fox’s main concern is a personal one: to rebuild her life after a devastating car accident that has left her disconnected from the world, a prisoner of her own guilt and grief. Determined to make a fresh start, and shake off memories of her wrecked past, she leaves London for a temporary posting as an art therapist at Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital,
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Fatima Abdullah has exactly nine days left to live. For 992 nights, the eighty-five-year-old matriarch of a sprawling Arab American family has received nightly visits from the immortal Scheherazade, the bold and beautiful Persian queen who saved her own life with the spellbinding tales known as The Arabian Nights. Scheherazade has asked Fatima to share one story from her past on each visit. But on the 1,001st night, Fatima knows her storytelling—and her life—will come to an end. With time running out, Fatima still has many accounts to settle. She must find a wife for her openly gay grandson, teach Arabic to her wayward teenage great-granddaughter,
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“My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”
So begins the story of Susie Salmon, who is adjusting to her new home in heaven, a place that is not at all what she expected, even as she is watching life on earth continue without her — her friends trading rumors about her disappearance, her killer trying to cover his tracks, her grief-stricken family unraveling. Out of unspeakable tragedy and loss, The Lovely Bones succeeds, miraculously, in building a tale filled with hope,
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In her spellbinding new novel, Alice Hoffman shows us how loss and grief can be transformed into action, love, and hope. It is the tale of Green, who must learn to open herself to others in a post-disaster world. To do so, she must collect the stories of a number of “witches” and continue to write her own.
Ages: 12 and up
Grades: 7 and up
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Necessary Heartbreak tells the story of Michael, a single dad from New York who has lost his faith after his wife’s death and is struggling to raise his feisty fourteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. When Michael and Elizabeth stumble upon a trapdoor in their church basement, they discover a portal leading back to first-century Jerusalem during the tumultuous last week of Christ’s life. There they encounter Leah, a grieving widow; a menacing soldier who is determined to take Elizabeth as his own; Judas on the last night of his life; and a close-up of the man Jesus.
Unable to return to the present,
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If high school were a fairy-tale kingdom, Connelly Sternin would be Rapunzel, locked not in a tower by a wicked witch but in a high-rise apartment building by the SATs and college applications—and by the secrets she keeps. Connelly’s few friends think that her parents are divorced—but they’re not. Connelly’s father died when she was two, and she doesn’t know how.
If Connelly is the Rapunzel of her school, Jeremy Cole is the crown prince, son of a great and rich New York City family. So when he sits down next to her at lunch one day,
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