Children’s Books Spring 2021 CONTENTS YOUNG ADULT TITLES 3 MIDDLE-GRADE TITLES 12 PICTURE BOOKS & ILLUSTRATORS 30 CONTEMPORARY CLASSICS 37 CONTACTS 42 YOUNG ADULT TITLES YOUNG ADULT FICTION THE EIGHTH LIST by Marissa Howard We Were Liars meets Panic in this riveting and devious thriller where students become the players in a teacher’s deadly game. Eight desks. Eight lists. One teacher. The lesson? Become everything your list says you are. Tallin Ramsay likes the colour pink, cashmere sweaters, strawberry jam, makeup, and being right. Agent: Silvia Molteni At least, that’s what it says on her list. On submission: Spring 2021 When Tallin is driven to a pointed house in the middle of the woods, she has no memory of her life before. Age: 14+ There is only now – the pointed house, seven other Genre: Psychological thriller teenagers who wait inside, and a man who calls himself the Teacher. He says he’s going to help all of them remember who they used to be. He says they each have a list; black print typed neatly onto white pages, which reveal their likes, their dislikes, and their fears. The Teacher gives the students only one simple task, surrounded by woods and snow and nothing: check everything off their lists, one by one, until they become them. But it only takes one bite of a cracker with sticky strawberry jam for Tallin to realize: she is nothing like her list. None of them are. After graduating from Colorado State University, Marissa Howard worked as the speech writer for a prominent dignitary and had hundreds of articles published in local newspapers. Her love of creative writing, short chapters, and unpredictably simple endings resulted in The Eighth List, a psychological thriller aimed at young adults. 4 YOUNG ADULT FICTION PERFECT GIRL A quick-paced, own voices thriller that uniquely incorporates slam-poetry into the narrative, Perfect Girl is an exploration of disability and ‘perfection’ for fans of Sarah Crossan and Jason Reynolds. I don't understand why Agent: Lucy Irvine I am alone in this world Everyone is normal On submission: Spring 2021 But me. Age: 12+ What would you do if you were replaced by a perfect version of yourself? Genre: Contemporary, thriller Wannabe slam poet Dannie finds her life turned upside down when she is kidnapped from the park after an argument with her mum. After escaping her captors, she is horrified to realise that she has been replaced by a cloned replica of herself—a clone who, unlike Dannie, doesn’t have cerebral palsy. Believing her mum to be responsible for the switch, Dannie enlists the help of her best friend Mitch and estranged cousin to get her life back, in the process unearthing a horrifying plot to ‘cure’ conditions like Dannie’s. Told through the medium of slam poetry, Dannie finds herself facing her own weaknesses and the secrets that have divided her family as she explores what it means to be perfect. David Thorpe is an award-winning writer of scripts, novels and non-fiction. His prize-winning SF novel Hybrids was called “stunningly clever” by The Times. He is director of the One Planet Centre CIC and lives in South Wales near his favourite bookshop, The Dragon's Garden, with a large fluffy cat. 5 YOUNG ADULT FICTION A CURSE OF SALT by Sarah Street Beauty and the Beast meets Pirates of the Caribbean in this gripping tale of forbidden love set aboard a cursed pirate ship. Bodies are washing ashore in eighteen-year-old Ria’s seaside village and everyone knows exactly who’s to blame. Legends of the Heartless King shroud the continent in fear; they call him a pirate, a monster, a god. When his Agent: Lucy Irvine mercenaries raid her father’s merchant ship, Ria’s family is faced with a horrifying choice; his life, or one of his On submission: Spring 2021 daughters. Age: 12+ Determined to find answers and save her sisters, Ria launches herself into a world of pirates, bloodshed and Genre: Fantasy, Romance vengeance. But aboard the Heartless King’s ship, she discovers he is far more than the stories told. He is a man, with a human name and blood-stained hands, bound to the seas by a centuries-old curse. With her family, her future and the fate of a forgotten kingdom all hanging in the balance, Ria must face gods and monsters alike if she wants to uncover the ancient secrets of the deep and those who reign its surface. Sarah Street is a YA fantasy author who has been writing since before she could remember, forever inspired by her love of books and the sea. Born and raised in Australia, she is a student at the University of Sydney, currently studying English and Criminology. 6 YOUNG ADULT FICTION THE SUMMER WITHIN by Viviana Maccarini Wonder for the YA market meets I Am Not Okay With This. A coming-of-age, emotional novel set in the Italian countryside about the power of friendship and finding identity. How do you overcome the trauma of a disfigured face in the days of Social Media? Agent: Silvia Molteni A bad accident on a moped leaves Nina, 15, with scars and bandages all over her face and forces her to question Italian publisher: Rizzoli everything she’s ever known: friends she no longer feels connected to, a beautiful mother who’s always at the Publication: Summer 2021 mercy of the latest boyfriend, and a guy who broke her heart without even realizing it. Age: 12+ The solution for Nina is to escape. She leaves Milan and Genre: Contemporary, moves to the Piedmont’s hills to stay with her estranged coming-of-age father, an eccentric photographer who lives in a Language: Italian campervan parked in the garden of the old family home. It’s a whole new world compared to the buzz of the city she’s used to, full of strange but wonderful people: like Tommaso, a blunt and peculiar boy who knows all book endings by heart; or Alisha, originally from India, who dreams of becoming a comedian. Nina's only link to the past is her best friend Filippo, the only one from school who knows about the accident. During this unconventional summer, Nina will start to overcome her own trauma, exorcising the fear of her “new face” through the most implausible of the tools: the world of Social Networks. Nina will soon realise that to be heard in life, you first need to find your own voice. Viviana Maccarini lives in Milan; after graduating in Philosophy, she studied screenwriting and immediately made a career of it, working for the most important Italian production companies. She became a ghost writer and released four Best Sellers. This is the first novel in her name. 7 YOUNG ADULT FICTION WITCHES OF ASH AND RUIN by E. Latimer Modern witchcraft blends with ancient Celtic mythology in a mesmerizing story of dark magic that’s perfect for fans of V.E. Schwab’s Shade of Magic trilogy and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. ‘The action sequences are cinematic in scope, and rich interior characterizations add depth to an arresting story’ Publishers Weekly ‘A suspenseful supernatural story’ School Library Journal Agent: Silvia Molteni The gods are hunting. An ancient evil will wake. US Publisher: Little Brown The witches are gathering. Books for Young Readers Seventeen-year-old Dayna Walsh is struggling to cope US Editor: Liz Kossnar with her somatic OCD; the aftermath of being outed as bisexual in her conservative Irish town; and the return of Publication: 3 March 2020 her long-absent mother, who barely seems like a parent. (hardback);16 February But all that really matters to her is ascending and 2021 (paperback) finally becoming a full witch—plans that are complicated when another coven, rumored to have a sordid history Page extent: 384 with black magic, arrives in town with premonitions of death. Dayna immediately finds herself at odds with the Age: 14+ bewitchingly frustrating granddaughter of their coven Genre: Fantasy leader, Meiner King. Rights sold: And then a witch turns up murdered at a local sacred site, Audio US (Listening Library) along with the blood symbol of the Butcher of Spanish and Catalan Manchester—an infamous serial killer whose trail has long (Editorial Planeta) gone cold. The killer's motives are entangled in a complex web of witches and gods, and Dayna and Meiner soon find themselves at the center of it all. Because if they don't stop the Butcher, one of them will be next… E. Latimer lives in Canada. Her breakout success on the online writing platform, Wattpad.com, has resulted in a fan base of nearly 100K followers, with over 20 million combined reads. Her first MG novel, The Strange and Deadly Potraits of Bryony Gray was published by Tundra Books in February 2018. Witches of Ash and Ruin is her first Young Adult novel. 8 YOUNG ADULT FICTION THE UNDYING TOWER by Melissa Welliver The first instalment in a YA series set fifty years after the discovery of the ‘Undying’, a percentage of the population who mysteriously have stopped aging., The Undying Tower explores timely themes of discrimination, segregation, and ignorance. ‘Melissa Welliver has no problem inventing adventures and once she’s let loose she’ll run and run’ Jeanette Winterson Agent: Lucy Irvine Set in a future dystopian England, where a small amount of the population – deemed The Undying and banished to UK Publisher: Agora Books the fringes of society – has stopped ageing, The Undying Tower introduces us to Sadie, a sixteen-year-old who UK editor: Peyton suddenly finds herself separated from her ailing father and Stableford life as she knows it.