Middle Grade
When You’re Brave Enough by Rebecca Bendheim
Before she moved from Austin to Rhode Island, everybody knew Lacey as one half of an inseparable duo: Lacey-and-Grace, best friends since they were toddlers. Grace and her moms were practically family. But at school, being lumped together with overeager, worm-obsessed, crushes-on-everyone Grace meant Lacey never quite fit in—and that’s why at her new middle school, Lacey plans to reinvent herself. This time, she’s going to be cool. She’s going to be normal.
At first, everything seems to go as planned. Lacey makes new friends right away, she finds a rabbi to help her prepare for the bat mitzvah that got deprioritized by her parents in the chaos of the move, and she even gets cast in the lead role of the eighth-grade musical. Which is when things start to get stressful, because it turns out the students at her new school have a long-standing, unofficial tradition: No matter what the show is, in the final performance, the leads always kiss for real.
Lacey’s never kissed anyone before—she’s not even sure she’s ever had a crush. And in Bye, Bye, Birdie, there are a few different co-lead kiss possibilities for Lacey to choose from. There’s confident, cocky Andre. There’s sweet, friendly Jaden. And then there’s the other new girl at school: dryly funny, impossibly cool Violet.
But while her new friends and older sister create whiteboard wall charts and botched field trip schemes to help her decide, suddenly Lacey can’t stop thinking about Grace, who she was so sure she wanted to leave behind. When Grace comes back into her life, Lacey needs to decide if she’s brave enough to be who she really is, in front of the person who matters most.
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In dystopic Seattle, storms have devastated Earth’s population, a new virus is spreading, and the privileged live inside domes controlled by Aegis Corp. Healthcare is earned by hours accrued working in Aegis’s pharmaceutical factories. If you run short on hours, you’re sent to Harvest House for debt collection—a place from which no one returns.
RACHEL KITCH is a mixed-race Thai American speculative horror author with a love of writing unsettling, creepy books that still have a spark of light. Rachel has her master’s in design from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s from West Virginia University. As a generation 1.5 immigrant, Rachel loves to blend her heritage and incorporate Thai and Appalachian folklore into her projects. When not writing, she can be found designing author brands and websites, or reading books on her Kindle that would kill a Victorian child. Keep up with her at 
Bei Lin is a Chinese Canadian writer based in Vancouver. She has lived on three continents and visited over thirty countries. Travel and food are her passions, along with giving her characters their well-deserved happily ever after. When she’s not writing, she’s daydreaming about her next trip and eating chocolate cake.
Bishop left without a word. Shiloh never knew why. Four years later, neither of them has recovered.