2016 is almost upon us (no, really…) and that means a whole new year of awesome, awesome new middle grade books.
All these awesome books will be out soon!
These are all books by debut authors, which is doubly, triply awesome.
So here are a few details of the books:
Bounders, by Monica Tesler
Published: January 5th, 2016
Twelve-year-old Jasper and his friends are forced to go up against an alien society in this first book in a brand-new adventure series!
Thirteen years ago, Earth Force discovered a connection between brain structure and space travel. Now they’ve brought together the first team of cadets, called Bounders, to be trained as high-level astronauts. But Earth Force have been keeping secrets, and when Jasper and his friends find them out, they have to decide whether to rebel against the academy that brought them together or fulfill their duties and protect the planet, no matter the cost.
Ten-year-old Manami did not realize how peaceful her family’s life on Bainbridge Island was until the day it all changed. It’s 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and Manami and her family are Japanese American, which means that the government says they must leave their home by the sea and join other Japanese Americans at a prison camp in the desert.
A moving debut novel about a girl whose family is relocated to a Japanese internment camp during World War II–and the dog she has to leave behind.
The year is 1816, the place is Mars. Home of pterodactyls, spies, and clockwork butlers…
All 12-year-old Edward Sullivan wants is to read his Thrilling Martian Tales in peace. But when a villainous archaeologist kidnaps his parents, Edward and his sisters must set out across the Martian wilderness to save them.
Together they must evade ruthless foes, battle mechanical nasties, and escape deadly Martian hunting machines. If they can’t, they will never uncover the secrets of the dragon tomb and rescue Edward’s family.
SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB is a thrilling, action-packed adventure story, full of humor, wild inventions, and terrible danger.
Fenway and his beloved short human, Hattie, are the perfect pair. She loves romping in the Dog Park, playing fetch, and eating delicious snacks as much as he does.
But when they move from the city to the suburbs, Hattie starts changing. She hangs out in a squirrely tree house. She plays ball without him. What could be happening?
Crushed and confused, Fenway sets out on a mission. He’s going to get his Hattie back and nothing will stop him.
The Remarkable Journey of Charlie Price, by Jennifer Maschari
Published: February 23rd, 2016
Ever since twelve-year-old Charlie Price’s mom died, he feels like his world has been split into two parts. Before included stargazing and Mathletes and Saturday scavenger hunts with his family. After means a dad who’s completely checked out, comically bad dinners, and grief group that’s anything but helpful. It seems like losing Mom meant losing everything else he loved, too.
When he follows his sister into a magical world he finds it is identical to their own with one key difference – Mom is alive. But this idealized other world holds terrifying secrets, and he’ll have to defeat monsters both real and imagined or risk losing himself, his sister, and the true memory of his mother forever.
The Last Boy at St. Edith’s, by Lee Gjertsen Malone
Published: February 23rd, 2016
Seventh grader Jeremy Miner has a girl problem. Or, more accurately, a girls problem. Four hundred and seventy-five of them. That’s how many girls attend his school, St. Edith’s Academy.
Jeremy is the only boy left after the school’s brief experiment in coeducation. And he needs to get out. Jeremy takes matters into his own hands: He’s going to get expelled.
Together with his best friend, Claudia, Jeremy unleashes a series of hilarious pranks in hopes that he’ll get kicked out with minimum damage to his permanent record. But when his stunts start to backfire, Jeremy has to decide whom he’s willing to knock down on his way out the door.
Things are only impossible if you stop to think about them…
While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she’s never met into a home for people with dementia. At first, Carol avoids prickly Grandpa Serge. But as the summer wears on and the heat bears down, Carol finds herself drawn to him, fascinated by the crazy stories he tells her about a healing tree, a green-glass lake, and the bees that will bring back the rain and end a hundred years of drought.
The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary, by Laura Shovan
Published: April 12th, 2016
When fifth graders learn that their school will be torn down and replaced by a supermarket, they take their teacher’s 1960s political teachings to heart and fight to save it.
Told through the poems of the eighteen students in fifth grade, the book follows each of them as they grow up and move on through the year.
When eleven-year-old Thyme Owen’s little brother, Val, is accepted into a new cancer drug trial, it’s just the second chance that he needs. But it also means the Owens family has to move to New York, thousands of miles away from Thyme’s best friend and everything she knows and loves. All Thyme can do is count the minutes, the hours and the days, and hope time can bring both a miracle for Val and a way back home.
My Seventh-Grade Life in Tights, by Brooks Benjamin
Published: April 12th, 2016
All Dillon wants is to be a real dancer. And if he wins a summer scholarship at Dance-Splosion, he’s on his way. The problem? His dad wants him to play football. And Dillon’s freestyle crew, the Dizzee Freekz, says that dance studios are for sellouts.
But as Dillon’s dancing improves, he wonders: what if studios aren’t the enemy? And what if he actually has a shot at winning the scholarship?
Today I woke up and realised that it’s just three months to go until SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB is officially published.
Ulp.
I totally wasn’t expecting this. In my head I had at least five months to go. Now it’s just three and IT’S NOT ENOUGH! I have this vague idea that I should be doing promotion, guest blogs, interviews, that kind of thing, but I haven’t thought about it at all!
In the meantime, a few reviews have started to come in for the book. Here’s what Kirkus Reviews had to say:
What, ho! This classic boys’ adventure on Mars has dastardly villains, dizzying feats of derring-do, and dragons.
Twelve-year-old Edward knows he’s the mainstay of his family. Absent-minded Papa thinks only of his inventions, Mama and sister Jane are bubble-headed social climbers, Olivia is a priss, and bratty little Putty follows Edward about, stealing his copies of Thrilling Martian Tales and having the absolute gall to be the clever one. Luckily Edward’s here to be the man of the house, especially when useless Cousin Freddie turns up on a busted cycle-copter. Why is Freddie acting so shifty? Why won’t he explain his absence from Oxford (on Earth!) instead of being a botheration at Edward’s crannybug-infested Martian home? Why does he want to see Papa’s water abacus? And why does his arrival immediately precede a series of home invasions by a nasty lordling and a metal-faced assassin? Samphire is clearly having the time of his life with this yarn, leavening character types with emotional honesty. It’s true Putty has most of the cleverness, Olivia the diplomacy, and Freddie the swashbuckling—while Edward gets knocked unconscious three times—but it will take all of them to save their family.
A bit Tom Swift-meets-early Heinlein (though without most of the -isms of those dated classics), joyfully modernizing space pulp for a new audience. (Science fiction/steampunk. 10-12)
And here’s an extract from the School Library Journal (it doesn’t seem to be online right now, so I probably shouldn’t post the whole thing yet!):
All of this is set in a perfectly delightful steampunk and fantasy world complete with clockwork automatic servants, dragon paths, and spaceships. Deeper topics of race relations and colonization are deftly explored through the political unrest among the British, the French, and the Martians. VERDICT A smart addition for middle grade collections; be prepared to purchase planned sequels.
One of the most awesome things about SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB (in my opinion) is that there is going to be lots of internal art, not just sketches but really nicely created art by the same person who is doing the book cover, Jeremy Holmes.
Jeremy posted a photo of one of the completed art works a couple of days ago, so I’m sharing it here.
Ophir City, by Jeremy Holmes (Click on image for larger version)
This is a picture of the airship / rail terminus in Ophir City.
Tall, closely packed wooden buildings in the old Martian style clustered in unplanned confusion, their turrets, spirals, and spires prickling the air like an enormous, crazy hedgehog.
Clockwork Express tracks swept high over the hills to the west in a glittering bronze arc and plunged down to the city. Pillars every couple of hundred yards held the railway above the ground. In the morning light, the tracks shone like thread in the Martian sky.
– From Secrets of the Dragon Tomb
You really should look at the art close-up (click on the image!) because it’s absolutely gorgeous. And, of course, get the book when it comes out for plenty more. :)
You know how it is when you stumble out of bed after only a few hours rest because the kids wouldn’t go to sleep, and you’re busy trying to spoon caffeine directly into your veins, in between getting breakfast for the family, trying not to put milk in the kids’ sandwiches, and wondering why no one seems to have any actual pairs of socks despite you buying new ones only last week, then you’re trying to remember to drive to school, not into a ditch, and then you get back and you’ve got an hour to write before you have get on with other stuff? You know that, right?
Somehow, you’re supposed to insert yourself into a completely new world, full of fully-formed people getting up to all sorts of nonsense and knock out a whole bunch of shiny words. Yeah.
Right then, inspiration is not exactly in great supply. But you’ve got to find it anyway.
That’s where Pinterest comes in. It gives you the chance to pull together a whole bunch of visual cues that I can look at to take me into whatever world I need to be in. Here’s the board I created for SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB and its sequel:
The moment I look at this, it tells me the mood and tone I want for the books and it puts me in the headspace I need to work on them. Not all the pictures represent any particular character or scene in the books, but they connect me to the books and that’s what I need.
Anyone else use Pinterest for this? Or do you use it to find ideas in the first place? Or for something else entirely? Whichever, if you do, post a link to your boards. I’d love to see them.
Things move on. The first pass pages of SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB have arrived!
A sabre tooth is an essential part of any editing process. For those deep cuts.
For those of you who don’t know what they are, the first pass pages are the pages of your manuscript laid out exactly the way they will appear in the final book. Now is the chance to go through and pick out any errors that might have been missed in the so many times you’ve gone through the manuscript before or which have been introduced at recent stages.
When you hold a book in your hand, it has been through SO MANY rounds of editing and checking. For example, once I’d finished editing and revising SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB (which involved at least seven major drafts), it went through:
One round of revisions based on my agent’s feedback
Two major rounds of revisions based on my editor’s feedback
One round of copyedits
And now this set of first pass pages.
It’s possible (probable) that there will be more rounds to come (I assume that that is why it’s called FIRST pass pages).
Apparently, at some point in between all of this, writers are supposed to write other books too. :)
First pass pages are where you go through and check every word, every comma, every spelling and have the last chance to pick up anything important that has slipped through the net. You can’t blink or you can miss something. It’s kind of brain-intense.
Today, the Advance Reader’s Copies of my novel, SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB, arrived here. The are incredibly shiny, colourful and full of yummy chocolate goodness (well…)
Steph took some photos and a video of me opening the package (I wasn’t sure what was in the package, because I had no idea the ARCs had been printed yet). Here we are though:
And here is the video where you can get a better look at the ARCs! (My first attempt at a YouTube video…)
The cover and the internal illustrations are all by Jeremy Holmes!
Stephanie Burgis tagged me for this fun Ten Terrible Titles meme. Here are the rules:
Scroll through your manuscript and stop on a random place, ten times. Whatever you land on becomes one of ten terrible titles.
I did this for SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB. Basically, I opened the PDF of the galley, closed my eyes, scrolled and then dragged the cursor across before opening my eyes. Whatever was highlighted I chose (and, hey, I even found a typo on the way…)
The only changes I made were to make sure I had either full sentences or coherent clauses. Oh, and I left out one that would have been a total spoiler for the end of the book.
So, enough waffle, here they are, in no particular order (well, in reverse order, because, you know, just because I can):
We have improved upon them beyond recognition.
Smaller glass windows at the side. (Doesn’t that one sound exciting…)
The moons were high and the sky clear.
We plunged through the grass.
All I could see were the whites of her eyes.
The next moment, it regained its footing and came for me again.
Mama’s eyes flashed. “And as for you, Edward!”
A snapping serpent oak lunged out of the darkness.
Their enormous pale eyes staring like mad moons.
Hanging from a dragon’s claws far above the ancient Martian landscape.
Actually, SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB had quite a few terrible titles before I got the one I wanted, but none of them as bad as these, I hope.
So, today I got to see the cover for my book, SECRETS OF THE DRAGON TOMB, and it is completely and utterly awesome. It really is. It is colourful, exciting and just shouts adventure!
Sadly, I can’t share it with you right now. :( It is undergoing some final tiny tweaks, but in about a month, I shall be releasing it to fly free into the worlds on its little clockwork wings.
If you want to be the first to see the cover, though (well, apart from the artist, and my editor, and a bunch of people at the publisher, and me…) you can sign up to my brand new, spanking newsletter and I’ll email you the cover before I put it up anywhere else. Here’s the form (hopefully…)
Subscribe to this theoretically-awesomely-incredible newsletter.
First up, my book Secrets of the Dragon Tomb, and its sequel, The Emperor of Mars, have been resold for publication in Germany. They’re going to be published by Loewe Verlag. I have absolutely no details about when the books will be out (or really anything else, for that matter), but it is so cool that the books are being translated into German. I did three years of German at school and lived in Vienna for six months, so I’m going to make an attempt to read it in the German. Mind you, my German is kinda rusty.
It’s all completely cool and completely unexpected.
The morning after Vaidwattie left, Srilal found the first thing of beauty. It was lying on the damp pavement outside his house, where a thousand boots trod every day. The first thing of beauty was an origami bird so delicate and fine that when Srilal lifted it on the palm of his hand, he thought it might fly away.
NASA have just announced that Mars once had a vast ocean covering a large part of the northern hemisphere. In fact, oceans may once have covered 20% of Mars, up to a mile deep, meaning that abundant water would have been around for plenty of time for life to have evolved (certainly longer than it took for life to evolve on Earth). Here’s the video explaining it:
For me, this is utterly, totally cool, because, of course, my book Secrets of the Dragon Tomb is set on a Mars where there are oceans, animals, and of course all sorts of alien weirdness. In fact, the map I made (adapted from Google Mars) has oceans in similar places. Here’s my map:
My personal map of Mars adapted from Google Mars.
My map doesn’t show most of the ocean areas, because that’s not where the story takes place, but there’s some it showing.
I love it when things like this turn up and make me all excited for my novel. Now I really can imagine that there were pterodactyls flying through the sky, strange clockwork machines, and ancient dragon tombs. Because if I was right about the oceans… :D
