Young Adult Fiction

Winner of the 2024 Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize for Young Adult Fiction

Cat and Josie belong to different worlds, but they share a lifeline – their small town’s high school cross country team. Can they set aside their differences to do what’s best for their teammates – and themselves?

Cat Shultz needs a fresh start. After spending several months at an eating disorder treatment facility, she comes home to the realities of her older sister leaving for college, her best friend growing distant, and the stress of sophomore year looming. When an unlikely invitation lands her a spot on Plain City High School’s cross country team, Cat discovers a natural talent for long distance running, and what she hopes is a step toward recovery. The only problem? She’ll have to lie – to her parents, her team, and ultimately herself.

Josie Romero lives for cross country. When Coach Davis – the closest thing she has to a father – announces this will be his last season, she believes a championship win against their rivals will convince him to stay. As team captain, Josie has always fiercely supported her teammates, but when Cat challenges her spot as the fastest runner, Josie must confront her own insecurities in order to become the leader they deserve.

As the championship race approaches, conflicts arise on and off the course, and suddenly winning feels less likely than ever. When Cat can no longer outrun her lies, Josie finds herself racing for something much more important than the finish line.

Wolfpack is a heartwarming tale of healing, hope, and learning that you always go farthest if you run as a pack.

“full of the rituals, routines, and rites of Black girlhood all while paying homage to Los Angeles neighborhoods that may not be trimmed in lights but always manage to shine rainbow bright.” – Bridgette Bianca, author of be/trouble

Plenty of things in Zora’s youth would seem strange to others, but they’re perfectly normal to her. Her mother’s fixation with germs, and parties, and the power of names. Her father, who Zora rarely sees, disappearing among the stars as his biggest claim to fame. Her role in explaining things to her younger sister, even as Zora works to discover her own philosophies of life. And her neighborhood, a one-way street with an entrance but no exit called "the Aves."

Zora wants more. More than an honorable name. More than glimpses of glory captured in window frames. Surviving childhood can be as intricate as the intertwined streets of Los Angeles. But as Zora grows, so does her story. And in the process, her desire for more is transformed into a tribute of the magnificent people who live alongside her.

“Close to perfect, beautifully limpid, but also with great power and that elusive quality of strangeness” Carnegie Medal Winner – Anthony McGowan

Through the eyes of her protagonist, Hazel Hawthorne, Faith Shearin shows us how one family can endure danger, illness, separation, and grief, using folklore as both escape and salvation. 

My Sister Lives in the Sea weaves together folklore and life on a barrier island; the Hawthorne family fights through divorce and loss as Bigfoot lurks nearby. 

"An insightful and beautifully rendered love-story about two rarely portrayed characters I hope we see more of."
Blair Fell, author of novels The Sign For Home  & upcoming Disco Witches of Fire Island

WHAT I FORGOT TO TELL YOU is an engrossing coming-of-age love story, sans any sugar-coating, about two neurodivergent young people dealing with the often unjust, ableist world and their right and ability to find love and joy. 

Insightful, touching, gut-wrenching, original and important. A book which gives voice to characters we rarely ever hear from in fiction. A story that is a resource to open our minds to other ways of experiencing the world and everyone's right to experience love and commitment.

A SPECULATIVE LITERATURE FOUNDATION AWARD WINNER

“Beautifully written and exquisitely conceived . . . an adventure for the coming climate change apocalypse. Jack leads readers through a forbidding continent of ice and other environmental consequences with little more than a willing heart and a fierce intelligence.” – Jane Rosenberg LaForge, author of The Hawkman

Jack, a 200-year-old intersex street kid, knows the world didn’t always look like it does now, with the Great Garbage Ocean spewing plastic and jellyfish along the shores and humanity on the brink of extinction.

As he travels through the desert in search of answers, his love, Joon, by his side, he remembers things from his lives before this one. The massive tidal wave that separated him from everyone he knew. His encounter with a trickster god. A world blanketed in never-ending ice, and his desperate trek across frozen lakes, through still-standing monuments to the past, and over roaring waterfalls to reach the salt sea.

In every life Jack has lived though, one thing has stayed the same: people’s will to survive.

“An inventive prequel to Jellyfish Dreaming . . . [with] post-apocalyptic settings that evoke more of Maurice Sendak than Mad Max, overcoming mounting cynicism about humanity to reactivate a sense of play.” – Michael J. Deluca, author of The Jaguar Mask

“In this strangely comforting skid into the apocalypse, D. K. McCutchen spins ice into electricity.” – Kirsten Mosher, author of Plea$e Steal Me for 100 Plus Dollar-zz

What happens to the child left behind? Jubair's family is stuck in Myanmar, until his mother escapes—with three out of four children. On the cusp of adolescence, the young boy—interned to a farmer—is filled with rage. Jubair is left to sleep in the woods and fend for himself. He does not know how to read and write, so why does his mother even bother smuggling in these letters? Jubair begins to express this anger in his own letters, as he develops a level of literacy, eventually becoming a reader and writer. An epistolary novel, Why No Goodbye? explores loss, grief and transcendence.
Blurbs
At times heartbreaking, at times shatteringly beautiful…. The rawness of Jabair's anger is all-encompassing and powerful…. Amid this pain are startling moments of joy and empathy. A beautiful meditation on forgiveness after great loss, and the unbearable pain of separation.”—Marie-Helene Bertino, author of 2 A.M. at the Cat's Pajamas
Based on true events, Pamela L. Laskin captures the anguished survival of a 13-year-old boy after he is abandoned by his refugee family in war-torn Myanmar…. In breathtaking free verse, Laskin explores the heart of this uneducated, desperate man-child as he struggles with feelings of betrayal and rage, all while experiencing the aching confusion of new love. Informed by her own daughter's on-location aid work with refugees from Myanmar, Laskin goes beyond the headlines to create a stunningly poignant tale of grief, struggle, and emotional redemption.—Suzanne Weyn, author of The Bar Code Tattoo trilogy
Laskin bravely and movingly tackles one of our decade's saddest and direst human rights crises. The protagonist of Why No Goodbye? must contend with a double loss: his family and his land. Laskin's use of letters written in verse convincingly portrays Jubair's dislocation and loneliness, while also ensuring that he and other characters remain flesh and blood, vital and very human. This is an extraordinary accomplishment.—Hasanthika Sirisena, author of The Other One, winner of The Juniper Prize for Fiction
There has been a lot written about the Rohingya crisis in recent years, but nothing quite like this. Why No Goodbye? is unique in form and heart-wrenching in content. Through verse, the author helps expose the painful wake of the world's newest genocide.—Matthew Smith, co-founder and CEO, Fortify Rights
The Author
Pamela L. Laskin is a lecturer in the English Department at The City College, where she directs The Poetry Outreach Center and teaches children's writing in the MFA Division. She is the author of five books of poetry and several picture books, most recently Homer the Little Stray Cat (2017). Harper Collins published Ronit & Jamil, a Palestinian/Israeli Romeo and Juliet in verse for teens, in 2017. She is a member of PSA, American Academy of Poets & SCBWI.

“Lost River is an extraordinary work of art. It has the feel of an instant classic.” Anthony McGowan, Carnegie Medal Winner for Lark

Lost River is the story of the Van Beest family, which inherits a house at the edge of a magical forest where the dead return from the afterlife. When 13-year-old Anne’s mother, a midwife, delivers a stillborn baby and her father, a mortician, accidentally brings that infant back to life, the Van Beests find themselves at the center of a drama that raises questions about the relationship between the living and the dead.