Today on the site I’m delighted to welcome Kelsey B. Toney to reveal the cover of her bi Contemporary Middle Grade debut, Not Just a Stage, releasing April 20, 2027 from Crown Books for Young Readers! Here’s the story:
A funny, accessible upper middle grade novel about young performer Sunny, who is torn between her rock band and the theater world—and between her guitarist, Kennedy, and a castmate, Carlos.
Sunny Cavendish knows exactly who she is onstage.
Actually… she knows who she is on two stages. By day, Sunny is a musical theater powerhouse, fresh off her final middle school show and chasing a once-in-a-lifetime invitation to an elite summer workshop that could change her future forever. By night, she’s the lead singer of The Pulled Petals, an all-girl rock band on the verge of their biggest break yet.
The problem? Both dreams want everything. When Sunny’s band lands a career-making audition the exact same week she earns a callback for the workshop, Sunny decides to do the impossible: she won’t choose. She’ll juggle it all. Sneak between rehearsals. Say yes to every opportunity. Make everyone happy. What could go wrong?
As exhaustion mounts, lies pile up, friendships strain, and a crush on two very different people complicates everything, Sunny is forced to confront a truth she’s been avoiding: sometimes chasing every dream means risking the ones that matter most.
And here’s the cover, designed by Jade Rector with art by Emma Ream!
Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | PRH
Kelsey B. Toney writes humorous, heartfelt stories about the hope that exists after we’ve made our most laughably bad decisions. She is the author of the USA Today Bestseller, THE UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCE OF BLEEDING ON A TUESDAY which was a NYPL and Chicago Public Library Best Book of the Year, an ALA “RISE: A Feminist Book Project List” Top Ten Selection, an ALA Best Fiction for Young Adults Top Ten Selection, and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. In past lives, Kelsey has been a teacher, recording artist, and actress—always in pursuit of connection through art and empathy. Learn more about Kelsey at kelseybtoney.com, on her podcast, or in her newsletter.
Katherine Philips: the first woman to have a play commercially produced; a seventeenth-century poet writing about love, society and relationships during the tumultuous years of the English Civil War. But as with many early women writers, she has been largely forgotten by historians, and she slipped into obscurity a few decades after her death in 1664.
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Xan van Rooyen is an award-winning autistic and non-binary storyteller from South Africa, currently living in Finland. Xan has a Master’s degree in music, and–when not teaching–enjoys conjuring strange worlds and creating quirky characters. You can find Xan’s stories in the likes of Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Daily Science Fiction, and Galaxy’s Edge among others. They have also written several books including Waypoint Seven (Mirari Press), and My Name is Magic (Tiny Ghost Press). Xan is also part of the Sauútiverse, an African writer’s collective, with stories in the multi award-nominated anthology Mothersound as well as the forthcoming Sauúti Terrors anthology (Flame Tree Press). Xan has also had a number of non-fiction articles published, which you can find in the Locus Award winning Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction (Bloomsbury, Australia) among others. You can find Xan online here: