“Perhaps you can get used to anything. Perhaps you have to.” Whether she will live by this wisdom or fight it to the death is the test for twelve-year-old Dolores, the relentless protagonist of Liar’s Dice. Set in 1970’s Brazil,…
“No one knows where the Midnight Circus comes from—when it began or how…It comes for those who need it.” So opens Kasey LeBlanc’s debut novel, Flyboy, beckoning those who need a magical refuge as much as does the novel’s fierce…
“Society cannot exist,” the philosopher Edmund Burke cautioned, without “a controlling power upon will and appetite…men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” A similar warning may reside in The Rock Eaters, Brenda Peynado’s beautifully bizarre…
Thanks for sending me your manuscript—nearly finished, I hope! It’s certainly some kind of achievement to literally capture your audience inside this sprawling dystopia. Your stakes recall the four horsemen, even your scenes of grocery shopping contain conflict, and you’ve…
“When someone says you’re overreacting, but you know you’re right, keep reacting until it’s over.” That’s the motto of Cadie Kessler, the protagonist in Julie Carrick Dalton’s debut novel, Waiting for the Night Song. Cadie is desperate to prove an…