Thirteen-year-old Ingrid’s been living a double life. At school, she’s the Girl With Dead Parents, her popular friend Rachel’s charity case. Online, things are different: she crushes it in her favorite MMORPG, geeks out in her favorite fantasy series fandom, and runs a popular social media account. If only real life were that easy. But when Ingrid finally stands up to Rachel and “starts drama,” it suddenly feels like she has no life at all … and nowhere to sit at lunch. Until she gets a supersweet wrong-number text from a mystery boy at her school, and everything starts to go right.

For over 400 years, the world has been a barren wasteland. The few humans that survive scrape together an existence in the cruel city of Pocatel—or go it alone in the wilderness beyond, filled with wandering spirits and wyrms. They don’t last long. 13-year-old pickpocket Leandro and his sister Gabi do what they can to forge a life in Pocatel. The city does not take kindly to Cascabeles like them—the descendants of those who worked the San Joaquin Valley for generations.

Alex is twelve, and he did something very, very bad. A judge sentences him to spend his summer volunteering at a retirement home. He hasn’t seen his mom in a year, and Shady Glen’s geriatric residents seem like zombies to him. Josey is 107 and ready for his life to be over. He has evaded death many times, having survived ghettos, dragnets, and a concentration camp—all thanks to the heroism of a woman named Olka and his own ability to sew. But now he spends his days in room 206 at Shady Glen, refusing to speak and waiting (and waiting and waiting) to die. Until Alex knocks on Josey’s door…

In this semi-autobiographical collection of poems, Renée Watson writes about her experience growing up as a young Black girl at the intersections of race, class, and gender. Using a variety of poetic forms, from haiku to free verse, Watson shares recollections of her childhood in Portland, tender odes to the Black women in her life, and urgent calls for Black girls to step into their power.

Cincinnati, Ohio, lives and dies by college basketball, with two elite Division I rivals separated by a mere three miles. Rory’s dad just secured a new coaching gig at the University of Cincinnati, so it means yet another school and move for her, only this time to her dad’s hometown. Rory’s life revolves around basketball; she’s never had a close friend outside of it. Could this be a chance for a fresh start?