Where It All Lands

A Spring/Summer Pick by: Goodreads * PopSugar * Frolic * SheReads * Culturess* The Nerd Daily * Alma * J-14 "For fans of Sarah Dessen and Rainbow Rowell, a moving story about loss and love and finding out who you really are.” - Paige McKenzie, New York Times Best Selling author of The Haunting of Sunshine Girl A sob-worthy yet hopeful novel that reveals how our choices define us and how no matter the road, love finds a way. Stevie Rosenstein has never fallen in love. Constantly moving from city to city for her father's job, she can’t allow herself to grow truly close to someone. The pain of leaving hurts too much. Until she meets Drew... And Shane. Drew and Shane have been best friends through everything. The death of Shane's dad. The separation of Drew's parents. No matter what happens, they always have each others' backs. But when Stevie moves to town, a simple coin toss alters the course of their year in profound and unexpected ways – a ripple effect that also produces devastating consequences. Told in dual timelines, debut author Jennie Wexler's Where It All Lands delivers a heartbreaking, Sliding Doors-esque novel about missed opportunities, second chances, and all the paths that lead us to where we are. "This book succeeds in creating all the feels." - Kirkus

Georgia Peach Award Nominee • Florida Teens Read Award Nominee • ABC Best Books for Young Readers • Bank Street College Best Children’s Books of the Year • A Junior Library Guild Selection • Hugo & Locus award finalist In Other Lands is an exhilarating novel from bestselling author Sarah Rees Brennan about surviving four years in the most unusual of schools - friendship, falling in love, diplomacy, and finding your own place in the world — even if it means giving up your phone. Excerpt: The Borderlands aren’t like anywhere else. Don’t try to smuggle a phone or any other piece of technology over the wall that marks the Border — unless you enjoy a fireworks display in your backpack. (Ballpoint pens are okay.) There are elves, harpies, and — best of all as far as Elliot is concerned — mermaids. "What’s your name?" "Serene." "Serena?" Elliot asked. "Serene," said Serene. "My full name is Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle." Elliot’s mouth fell open. "That is badass." Elliot? Who’s Elliot? Elliot is thirteen years old. He’s smart and just a tiny bit obnoxious. Sometimes more than a tiny bit. When his class goes on a field trip and he can see a wall that no one else can see, he is given the chance to go to school in the Borderlands. It turns out that on the other side of the wall, classes involve a lot more weaponry and fitness training and fewer mermaids than he expected. On the other hand, there’s Serene-Heart-in-the-Chaos-of-Battle, an elven warrior who is more beautiful than anyone Elliot has ever seen, and then there’s her human friend Luke: sunny, blond, and annoyingly likeable. There are lots of interesting books. There’s even the chance Elliot might be able to change the world. Chapter illustrations by Casey Nowak.

SCIENCE FICTION. In a future that could be ours, Lizzie, a suicidal teen-age girl, barely navigates her own life. Then everything falls apart. In an apocalyptic land nearly deserted by disease, she lacks reasons to live until a shocking turn of events reveals a phone number. Her call pulls her dangerously cross-country to meet a stranger she thought was dead.

Covers world history and culture from prehistory through the Greeks, the rise of Christianity, up through the Middle Ages, as well as developments in China, Japan, Russia, Europe, Africa and the Americas up to the mid 1800's.

A witty epistolary novel, both heartwarming and heart-wrenching, about a dysfunctional family--led by a Jewish pig farmer in Israel--struggling to love and accept each other. As comic as it is deeply moving, Holy Lands chronicles several months in the lives of an estranged family of colorful eccentrics. Harry Rosenmerck is an aging Jewish cardiologist who has left his thriving medical practice in New York--to raise pigs in Israel. His ex-wife, Monique, ruminates about their once happy marriage even as she quietly battles an aggressive illness. Their son, David, an earnest and successful playwright, has vowed to reconnect with his father since coming out. Annabelle, their daughter, finds herself unmoored in Paris in the aftermath of a breakup. Harry eschews technology, so his family, spread out around the world, must communicate with him via snail mail. Even as they grapple with challenges, their correspondence sparkles with levity. They snipe at each other, volleying quips across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and Europe, and find joy in unexpected sources. Holy Lands captures the humor and poignancy of an adult family striving to remain connected across time, geography, and radically different perspectives on life.

Elizabeth Crook's vast yet intimate novel of the Texas Revolution takes us beyond the traditional setpieces of the Alamo and San Jacinto to the other places where the war was fought—to the forest traces and prairies and Gulf Coast beaches, and to the hearts of the novel's vibrant characters. Among them: Domingo de la Rosa—the great Tejano ranchero, implacable and devout, for whom the fight against the Anglo "heretics" is nothing less than a holy war. Hugh Kenner—a physician whose son has run away to the war. Hugh will discover the heroic strength of his compassion, and also its brutal cost. Katie Kenner—Hugh's restless daughter, a refugee caught up in the massive human stampede known as The Runaway Scrape, who finds herself in love with a foreigner and responsible for the life of an orphan baby. Adelaido Pacheco—a dashing tobacco smuggler loyal to no cause but his own, a man without a country and in peril of becoming a man without a soul. Crucita Pacheco—Adelaido's beautiful sister who has lost her family, all but Adelaido, in the cholera epidemic of 1832. Feeling that God has forsaken her, she enters Domingo de la Rosa's employ as a spy against the Anglo rebels, and discovers an improbable love. Through these people and others, Promised Lands brings a myth-encrusted chapter of American history to authentic life. Elizabeth Crook demonstrates once again a stunning command of her period and a passionate regard for her characters. Promised Lands bears the hallmark of a master novelist: a grand vision, rendered on an unforgettably human scale.

In Paul Greci's The Wild Lands, Travis and his sister are trapped in a daily race to survive—and there is no second place. Natural disasters and a breakdown of civilization have cut off Alaska from the world and destroyed its landscape. Now, as food runs out and the few who remain turn on each other, Travis and his younger sister, Jess, must cross hundreds of miles in search of civilization. The wild lands around them are filled with ravenous animals, desperate survivors pushed to the edge, and people who’ve learned to shoot first and ask questions never. Travis and Jess will make a few friends and a lot of enemies on their terrifying journey across the ruins of today’s world—and they’ll have to fight for what they believe in as they see how far people will go to survive. The Wild Lands is a pulse-pounding YA thriller full of shocking plot twists. It’s the ultimate survival tale of humanity’s fight against society’s collapse. An Imprint Book “This rugged survival story places a group of teens in a dark, burned-out post-apocalyptic nightmare. Your heart will pound for them as they face terrible dangers and impossible odds. Gripping, vivid, and haunting!” —Emmy Laybourne, international bestselling author of the Monument 14 trilogy “A compelling story that wouldn’t let me stop reading. Greci has created both a frightening landscape and characters you believe in and want to survive it.” —Eric Walters, author of the bestselling Rule of Three series

In the tradition of his books On Beauty and On Ugliness and The Infinity of Lists, Umberto Eco presents an enthralling illustrated tour of the fabled places that have awed and eluded us through the ages. "Eco is one of the most influential thinkers of our time" Los Angeles Times From the epic poems of Homer to contemporary science fiction, from the Holy Scriptures to modern mythology and fairy tale, literature and art are full of illusory places we have at some time believed are real, and onto which we have projected our dreams, ideals and fears. Umberto Eco leads us on an illuminating journey through these legendary lands - Atlantis, Thule and Hyperborea, the Earth's interior and the Land of Cockaigne - and explores utopias and dystopias where our imagination can confront concepts that are too incredible, or too challenging, for our limited real world. In The Book of Legendary Lands the author's text is accompanied by several hundred carefully assembled works of art and literature; the result is a beautifully illustrated volume with broad and enduring appeal. Translated from Italian by Alastair McEwen