Articles

I just finished Rachele Alpine’s novel A Void the Size of the World, and I am still in awe. The book follows Rhylee, who’s forced to grapple with her sister Abby’s disappearance. The thing is that Abby’s disappearance is indirectly Rhylee’s fault. Abby caught Rhylee kissing Abby’s boyfriend Tommy and fled into the woods heartbroken…and […]

Micah Holland was just fifteen years old, and had not yet reached puberty, when life as he knew it changed forever. Curled up in a sleeping bag on the floor at his friend Brandon’s house, he was jarred awake at three in the morning by a group of police officers waving guns in his face. […]

In Rachele Alpine’s A Void the Size of the World, protagonist Rhylee has several problems. The first is that her sister, Abby, has disappeared. The second is that Abby disappeared because she caught Rhylee kissing Tommy — who’s Abby’s boyfriend. The third is that Rhylee likes Tommy, but the police strongly suspect that he might […]

Coming of age stories have been around for centuries, and with good reason! They’re stories everyone can relate to (unless you were born an old man like Benjamin Button, but we can’t help you with that). Blake Nelson is somewhat of an expert on coming-of-age stories, having penned Girl, the cult classic from the 90’s, and now he’s […]

I like to abide by the major safety rules: stay inside and wear a helmet. However, there are times where you have to put on pants and go outside. I would never end up on an island for spring break because I hate the sun, and I also spent every spring break locked in my […]

A never ending amount of work goes into each aspect of a book before publication. Just settling on the right title can take months of discussion, as it did for Our Story Begins: Your Favorite Authors and Illustrators Share Fun, Inspiring and Occasionally Ridiculous Things They Wrote and Drew as Kids. Read on to hear from […]

What if the Harry Potter series had featured a Harriet instead? Or what if Bobby Jones and not Bridget had released their diary for the world to gawk at? These are only some of the questions I agonize over on a daily basis. Gender flipping is at times controversial, but at the very least, is […]

I’m a HUGE Sherlock Holmes fan and I mean HUGE. I’ve read the book by Arthur Conan Doyle, watched the BBC’s Sherlock, CBS’s Elementary, and I even have a small Sherlock Holmes collection of various items (my favorite is my Out of Print Sherlock Holmes shirt). When I found out there’s a Young Adult retelling of Sherlock Holmes called […]

The Order of IV, a secret society devoted to mischief that rights wrongs and pays back debts, sounds pretty awesome. What could be better than gathering together with your closest friends and getting up to trouble under the cover of anonymity? Well, things take a turn for the worst for this group of four friends […]

The title for my upcoming book, First We Were IV, came to me almost as soon as the first impulse of “I want to write a book about four best friends who start a secret society to play vigilante-pranks, but it ratchets way out of control and twists into a weapon of revenge, costing all […]