Seventh grader Olivia feels out of place. Everyone in her life is focused on crushes and relationships, but she’d rather spend her time drawing and watching her favorite YouTuber. Her brother, Malcolm, who’s gay, is prioritizing his new boyfriend; her friends are obsessed with a new social media app called KruShh; and everyone’s talking about […]
Told entirely in Ruby’s voice, the story centers on the young pachyderm’s uncertainties around her Tuskday ceremony: a rite of passage that celebrates the appearance of an elephant’s front teeth. In the first-person narration, Ruby’s feelings—her anxieties about her emerging tusks, her traumatic memories of poachers, and her fears about growing up—all feel immediate. Judge’s […]
Aurora begins to hope that the eccentric doomsday preppers’ mansion could be her forever home, but when the endless rains come, she begins to have doubts. Niko and Jada have BOBs, or “Bug-Out-Backpacks,” stashed in different rooms, and they train Aurora in disaster survival techniques, all while repeatedly moving to higher floors in their home […]
While preparing for ballet class, Neela spies her Indian dance clothes. She loves ballet and the new friends she’s made since moving from India, but she misses the jingle of her ankle bells. They remind her of the raga her grandmother sang and the bansuri flute her uncle played—and of Kathak, an Indian classical dance. […]
One month ago, 16-year-old Jamie left Bible Hill, Nova Scotia, to earn a living playing the fiddle in Halifax. Noah’s parents spend their evenings driving to Halifax to look for Jamie, so Noah’s grandmother arrives from Cape Breton Island, soothing Noah with warm hugs, serving him chocolate cake for breakfast, and tending to his cold […]
Carter Rogers is on the case. His specialty? Looking into deceased and missing class pets. After his class pet, a naked mole-rat named Mr. Pebbles, mysteriously died, Carter teamed up with the snarky rodent’s disembodied spirit to find out why. Now Carter must track down a reptile gone rogue. A milk snake named Milkshake, Carter’s […]
People are ticked off these days, observe Culpepper and Lee, with “enormous wellsprings of pent-up democratic pressure just looking for a way to get out.” As their narrative opens, they examine a predecessor event that uncorked similar pressure: namely, the reaction against the meat industry when, in 1906, Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, documented the […]
Aya awakens, steps out of her hut, and sits by the campfire with her grandparents for breakfast. It’s a special day. Today, Grandpa will take Aya into the forest to see a bear—a first for her. They mount their horses and make their way through the woods, keenly aware of indicators of the shifting seasons, […]
Raised by her father in Silverpine, Oregon, after her mother moved halfway across the world, Dani’s separation anxiety ran deep long before Parker ghosted her, so when she runs headfirst into him at a bar in New York City, she promptly runs out rather than reopen a door for the former best friend who’d loved […]
In “Room,” an unnamed narrator finds herself locked inside a white room in Vienna, where she has come to finish a book, and becomes increasingly agitated. “Night,” the longest section by far, brings us another unnamed narrator in a room. This woman—a German writer—suffers from insomnia and spends her hours sifting through her own memories, […]