Showing results by narrator "Laura Knight Keating" in All Categories

Iris concocts the perfect curse for Pike: one that will turn him into a witch. But just as she’s about to dispel it, a bird swoops down and steals the curse before flying away. If the bird dies, the curse will be unleashed—and the bird is a powerful amplifier, and unleashing the curse would turn not just Pike, but everyone in the region, into a witch. New witches have no idea how to control their magic and the consequences would be dire.

Cincinnati, Ohio, lives and dies by college basketball, with two elite Division I rivals separated by a mere three miles. Rory’s dad just secured a new coaching gig at the University of Cincinnati, so it means yet another school and move for her, only this time to her dad’s hometown. Rory’s life revolves around basketball; she’s never had a close friend outside of it. Could this be a chance for a fresh start?

In this clever YA rom-com debut perfect for fans of Kasie West and Ashley Poston, a teen obsessed with 19th-century literature tries to cull advice on life and love from her favorite classic heroines to disastrous results - especially when she falls for the school's resident Lothario.

Robin McKinley returns to the mythical setting of The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword in this “thrilling, satisfying, and thought-provoking collection” featuring two stories set in the world of Damar, plus three other fantasy tales featuring adventurous, pragmatic, and heroic young women (Publishers Weekly).

For Ivy, summer means roller-coaster season, spinning cotton candy at the Fabuland amusement park, and hanging out with her best friend, Morgan. But this summer is different. One morning, Morgan finds a dead body. It's their former classmate and coworker Ethan. To make matters worse, Morgan is taken to a hospital psych ward only days later, and she's not saying much - not even to Ivy. The police claim that Ethan simply took a bad fall, but Ivy isn't convinced and realizes it's up to her to get answers.

"No one gets something for nothing. We all should know better." Teenagers at Wisconsin's Nottawa High School are drawn deeper into a social networking site that promises to grant their every need...regardless of the consequences. Soon the site turns sinister, with simple pranks escalating to malicious crimes. The body count rises.

Blue Owens wakes up one day with the strangest feeling that something is very wrong. Everyone’s acting weird, and she’s found a note in her closet telling her to get on the Little Blue Bus at 7:45, which she does, meeting up with the exact person she was supposed to avoid: Adam Mendoza. Even though she has no idea who he is, something about him is so familiar. When the two are discovered by their families, the truth is revealed - Blue has paid to have her memories removed, and Adam is one of those memories.

No one thought that MacTrump - Lord of MacTrump Towers, Son of New York - would ascend to the highest position in the kingdom. Yet with the help of his unhappy but dutiful wife Lady MacTrump, his clever daughter Dame Desdivanka, and his coterie of advisers, MacTrump is comfortably ensconced in the White Hold as President of the United Fiefdoms, free to make proclamations to his subjects through his favorite messenger, McTweet. The Democrati, mourning the loss of their cherished leader O'Bama, won't give up without a fight.

When 17-year-old Calliope meets her new neighbor Max, their connection is instantaneous, but the revelation of her sperm donor’s identity changes everything. Calliope Silversmith has always had just two friends in her small Pennsylvania town, Ginger and Noah, and she's fine with that. She's never wanted anything more than her best friends, her moms, their house in the woods, and their family-run yoga studio - except maybe knowing who her sperm donor is. Her curiosity has been building for years, and she can finally find out this summer when she turns 18.

This modern, groundbreaking YA anthology explores the complexity and beauty of interracial and LGBTQ+ relationships where differences are front and center. When people ask me what this anthology is about, I'm often tempted to give them the complicated answer: It's about race and about how being different from the person you love can matter but how it can also not matter, and it's about Chinese pirate ghosts, black girl vigilantes, colonial India, a flower festival, a garden of poisons, and so, so much else.

In a haunting voice reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and the contemporary lyricism of David Levithan, Brynne Rebele-Henry weaves a powerful inversion of the Orpheus myth informed by the disturbing real-world truths of conversion therapy. Orpheus Girl is a story of dysfunctional families, trauma, first love, heartbreak, and ultimately, the fierce adolescent resilience that has the power to triumph over darkness and ignorance.

The Manhattan School for Magic is the newest kindling school in New York, but Maeve O’Donnell knows she doesn't deserve her place there. Though her sister, Izzy, is one of the school's founders and a hero to those who can now kindle, Maeve can't control her magic and she lives in fear of anyone—especially Izzy—finding out. When Maeve’s worst fears come true and her magic goes rogue, it damages not only the new school but Izzy’s reputation as well. While trying to repair what she’s broken, Maeve discovers a mysterious garden in the tenement neighborhood of the Tarnish.

One small fandom convention. One teen beauty pageant. One meet-cute waiting to happen. When Teagan and Kay bump into one another the first night, sparks fly. Their connection is intense - as is their shared enemy. If they’re spotted, the safe space of GreatCon will be shattered, and all their secrets will follow them home. The risks are great...but could the reward of embracing their true selves be worth it?

In Tag’s world, children are disappearing. “Youngers” who venture Outside are windswept—vanishing in the swirling snow—Tag’s sisters among them. Many have tried to find the lost children; all have failed. And since the Other Times, the Powers That Be seem intent on keeping it that way. Little remains from those times: snippets of songs, heaps of plastic trash, and a few banned texts—including a book of fairytales.

Felicity Becker loves watching an event come together. There’s something magical about crafting an experience people will remember. So when her mom gets engaged, Felicity sees the wedding as the perfect opportunity to show off her skills. After Felicity’s friend Nancy offers up her family’s apple orchard as a venue, wedding planning gets even better. But the more time Felicity and Nancy spend together dress shopping and hunting for mismatched china, the more it starts to seem like there might be something besides friendship between them.

The city is falling out of the sky. Morgan always thought it was just a saying. A metaphor. The words of the dying. But as they look up at the floating island that was their home, Pen and Morgan make a horrible discovery - Internment is sinking. And it's all Morgan's fault. Corrupted from the inside by one terrible king and assailed from the outside for precious resources by another, Internment could be destroyed because Morgan couldn't keep a secret.

One year after her family was in a tragic car accident that killed her teenage son, Lori Mendenhall returns home with a traumatic brain injury that has stolen the last eight years of memories from her. She is shocked to find that the life she was leading before the accident is unrecognizable. Her once-loving husband, Michael, is a distant workaholic she isn't sure she can trust and her once-bubbly daughter, Avery, has spent the last year hidden away in her room.

The Hope Juvenile Treatment Center is ironically named. No one has hope for the delinquent teenagers who have been exiled there; the world barely acknowledges that they exist. Then the guards at Hope start acting strange. And one day...they don't show up. But when the teens band together to make a break from the facility, they encounter soldiers outside the gates.

Eleven-year-old Imogene (Impy) has grown up with two parents working at the Renaissance Faire, and she's eager to begin her own training as a squire. First, though, she'll need to prove her bravery. Luckily, Impy has just the quest in mind - she'll go to public school after a life of being homeschooled! But it's not easy to act like a noble knight-in-training in middle school. When her new friends encourage her to do something mean, Impy goes along with it. Before long, Impy doesn't even recognize herself. Is she the dragon in her own story or the heroic knight?

Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.