Gracie feels like a minor character in her own life story–until a mysterious journal turns her fictional stories into reality.
It’s 1987, and sixteen-year-old Gracie Byrne wishes her life were totally different. Shy and awkward, she has trouble fitting in at her new school, she’s still reeling from her parents’ divorce, and her grandmother Katherine’s Alzheimer’s is getting worse. So when Gracie finds a blank journal in Katherine’s vanity drawer, she begins writing stories about herself–a more popular version of herself, that is. But then the hot guy in her art class describes a dream he had about her–the exact scene she wrote about him in her journal–and Gracie realizes that she can create any reality she wants,
read more
National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson brings readers a powerful story that delves deeply into life’s burning questions about time and memory and what we take with us into the future.
It seems like Sage’s whole world is on fire the summer before she starts seventh grade. As house after house burns down, her Bushwick neighborhood gets referred to as “The Matchbox” in the local newspaper. And while Sage prefers to spend her time shooting hoops with the guys, she’s also still trying to figure out her place inside the circle of girls she’s known since childhood. A group that each day,
read more
For lovers of Meg Wolitzer, Maria Semple, and Jenny Offill comes this raucous, poignant celebration of life, love, and friendship at its imperfect and radiant best.
Edith and Ashley have been best friends for over forty-two years. They’ve shared the mundane and the momentous together: trick or treating and binge drinking; Gilligan’s Island reruns and REM concerts; hickeys and heartbreak; surprise Scottish wakes; marriages, infertility, and children. As Ash says, “Edi’s memory is like the back-up hard drive for mine.”
But now the unthinkable has happened. Edi is dying of ovarian cancer and spending her last days at a hospice near Ash,
read more
A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old.
I do not believe that all the world is darkness.
In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket’s, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled; fourteen years in amerike has taught him that his native tongue is not known beyond his people. And yet here is suave Charles–fingers stained with ink, an easy manner with the barkeep–a Black man from the Seventh Ward,
read more
From master storyteller Kate DiCamillo comes an original fairy tale–with enchanting illustrations by Julie Morstad–in which five puppets confront circumstances beyond their control with patience, cunning, and high spirits.
Shut up in a trunk by a taciturn old sea captain with a secret, five friends–a king, a wolf, a girl, a boy, and an owl–bicker, boast, and comfort one another in the dark. Individually, they dream of song and light, freedom and flight, purpose and glory, but they all agree they are part of a larger story, bound each to each by chance, bonded by the heart’s mysteries.
read more
A girl who struggles to breathe befriends a boy who seems shrouded in dust, in this unmissable tour de force from bestselling and award-winning author Dusti Bowling.
After Avalyn nearly died from an asthma attack, her parents moved her to the clear, dry air of Clear Canyon City, Arizona. And for the last ten years, she’s been able to breathe. That is, until Adam showed up.
Quiet and unkempt, Adam is an instant target for the bullies who have plagued Avalyn and her friends. As Avalyn gets to know him, she begins to suspect that the sudden,
read more
