The Steps is Riverdale meets The Inheritance Games. What I loved most about this book is that it’s perfect for young teen lit—12yo+ readers who are bridging the current middle grade and YA gap. We have a 14 yo protagonist< Ruby< whose family, from her grandmother matriarch to her absentee dad to her ex-bestie/cousin, is absolutely dysfunctional and makes you feel bad for her. But that just means she rises further from the ashes. Even when the ashes are literal. Lots of twists and deliciously psycho behavior.
Riverdale meets The Queen's Gambit in this fun, twisty thriller by an Edgar Award-winning author, featuring a deliciously dysfunctional family with dark secrets and shifting alliances.
Fourteen-year-old chess whiz Ruby Vossen tries to keep to herself. She refuses to be a pawn in her wealthy family's web of deception.
But ever since Ruby's mother and aunt died in a car wreck, the battle lines drawn within the Vossen clan have ruled her life. Ruby's father and uncle became irreparably estranged, and within months, Ruby's cousin/BFF was banished from her life, her father remarried, and she wound up with a gold-digging…
Plant and fungi -based magic witchy book? Yes please! Ava Morgyn’s The Bane Witch is Practical Magic meets Murders in a Small Town. Piers is clever, resourceful, and definitely misdiagnosed with pica as a child when in reality she comes from a powerful family of poison-eaters. I love it when the bad guys get their dues.
Practical Magic meets Gone Girl in Ava Morgyn's next dark, spellbinding novel about a woman who is more than a witch-she's a hunter.
Piers Corbin has always had an affinity for poisonous things-plants and men. From the pokeweed berries she consumed at age five that led to the accidental death of a stranger, to the husband whose dark proclivities have become. concerning, poison has been at the heart of her story.
But when she fakes her own death in an attempt to escape her volatile marriage and goes to stay with her estranged great aunt in the mountains, she realizes…
I have a thing for nature-based books. Especially when there’s a little magic involved. Nikki Van De Car’s The Invisible Wild is such a beautiful book on the flora, fauna, and legends of Hawai'i. I loved how the story is a wonderful blend of learning to speak up for yourself and for others who have lost their voice with the focus on environmental conservation and importance of preserving traditional stories.
An epic adventure steeped in Hawaiian lore, this enchanting novel explores the connection between our world and that of the spirits of the wood, from bestselling author Nikki Van De Car.
The indigenous people of Hawai'i are known as kanaka maoli, "true people." In the third century, they sailed over 2,000 miles across untraveled seas, traveling from the Marquesas to the most remote island chain in the world. According to legend, however, the true kanaka maoli were already there. They were two to three feet tall, squat and strong, good and kind, and bothered no one without cause-they were the…
If her brother could stop existing, could she too?
Sixteen-year-old Bea Pearl knows her brother isn’t dead. Even if her parents don’t agree. Even if the entire town doesn’t believe her. She knows it’s true. When orders came to evacuate Lake George due to rising floodwaters, Bea Pearl saw Jim head toward the river. She followed him. Only she returned.
When her parents have Jim declared legally dead, Bea Pearl decides it’s up to her to figure out where her brother could be if he is alive, and so begins to unravel the mystery of his disappearance. But it seems like someone else wants to know what he was hiding when his bedroom is ransacked. More clues come together: a scrap of paper, mysterious numbers that may lead to swamp monkeys, Jim’s shoes turning up in unexpected places. Bea Pearl can’t figure out what connects them all until she’s stolen from her bed in the dead of night. Bea Pearl’s insistence that Jim’s alive and her quest to figure out why he went down to a flooding river in the first place takes a toll on her shattering family. But she must unearth the truth surrounding her presumed dead brother. Otherwise, the rumors are true and she has killed him. Because if Jim can stop existing, could she too?
