Rory is an antihero for the ages. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, she confides in her audience, telling us exactly the lengths she’ll go to to secure the leading role in Bosworth Academy’s senior musical, confessing without shame that she is charming and conniving and brutally ambitious, that we will watch and root for her even as she manipulates and endangers those around her. And we do. Perhaps it’s because we don’t want to believe that she’s as relentless as she claims. Rory is an underdog, after all, a scholarship kid teased for her weight. Surely there will be redemption? Surely our dread and patience will be rewarded? Intricately plotted with an ingenious narrative that blends multiple viewpoints with script excerpts and an original musical score, Lindsay Eagar’s whip-smart, precision-crafted, and gleefully compulsive page-turner taps into the dark side of high-school theater production. A diabolically good listen, it forces our complicity as we wince and cheer for an arresting drama queen who just can’t help going full-tilt nasty in the pursuit of her dream.
“Yes, my angel, what a monster you are!”
Beaked. Feathered. Monstrous. Avita was born to be a star. Her circus tent sells out nightly, and every performance incites bloodcurdling screams. She’s the most lucrative act from Texas to Tacoma, the crown jewel of the Family Fortuna.
Avita feeds on the fear, the screams, the gasps. But when a handsome young artist is commissioned to create new posters of the performers, Avita is appalled by his rendering of Bird Girl. Is that truly all she is—a hideous monster, all sharp beak and razor teeth, obsidian eyes and ruffled feathers?
Avita’s ready to be more. But her father, Arturo Fortuna, proprietor and ringmaster of the Family Fortuna, won’t give up his most popular attraction without a fight.
And Avita’s not the only one clamoring to be released from Arturo’s manipulative cage. Her sister, her brother, and even her mother are all tired of sacrificing everything for Arturo’s ambitions and his craving for cash. Will their fragile family ties survive the tension of a circus showdown?
Delightful and disturbing, bawdy and breathtaking, horrific and heartfelt, this electric and exquisitely crafted story about a family like no other challenges our every notion of what it means to be different.
From the author of Hour of the Bees comes another captivating story that deftly blurs the line between reality and magic — and will leave you wondering What if?
The Loch Ness Monster. The Frogman. Bigfoot. Twelve-year-old Miranda Cho used to believe in it all, used to love poring over every strange footprint, every stray hair, everything that proved that the world was full of wonders. But that was before her mother’s obsession with monsters cost Miranda her friends and her perfect school record, before Miranda found the stack of unopened bills and notices of foreclosure in the silverware drawer. Now the fact that her mom’s a cryptozoologist doesn’t seem wonderful — it’s embarrassing and irresponsible, and it could cost them everything. So Miranda agrees to go on one last creature hunt, determined to use all her scientific know-how to prove to her mother, once and for all, that Bigfoot isn’t real. Then her mom will have no choice but to grow up and get a real job — one that will pay the mortgage and allow Miranda to attend the leadership camp of her dreams. But when the trip goes horribly awry, will it be Miranda who’s forced to question everything she believes?
When her parents, the great marine scientists Dr. and Dr. Quail, are killed in a tragic accident, eleven-year-old Fidelia Quail is racked by grief. But she is forced out of her mourning when she's kidnapped by Merrick the Monstrous, a pirate whose list of crimes stretches longer than a ribbon eel. Her task? Use her marine know-how to retrieve his treasure, lost on the ocean floor.
As Fidelia and the pirates close in on the prize, with the navy hot on their heels, she realizes that Merrick doesn't expect to live long enough to enjoy his loot.
Could something other than black-hearted greed be driving him? Will Fidelia be able to master the perils of the ocean without her parents - and piece together the mystery of Merrick the Monstrous before it's too late?
While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina-Carol-is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she's never met off his dying sheep ranch and into a home for people with dementia.
At first Carol keeps her distance from prickly Grandpa Serge, whose eyes are impossibly old and who chastises "Caro-leeen-a" for spitting on her roots. But as the summer drags on and the heat bears down, she finds herself drawn to Serge, enchanted by his stories about an oasis in the desert with a green-glass lake and a tree that gave the villagers the gift of immortality-and the bees that kept the tree alive.
When Serge weaves details of his own life into his stories and tells her to keep an eye out for the bees he is certain will return to the ranch and end the century-long drought, she chalks it up to dementia. But as the thin line between magic and reality starts to blur, Carol must decide for herself what is possible-and what it means to be true to her roots.
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