Current and Upcoming Books

Best friends Kayla and Mishalla know they will be separated when the time comes for their Assignments. They are GENs, Genetically Engineered Non-humans, and in their strict caste system, GENs are at the bottom rung of society. High-status trueborns and working-class lowborns, born naturally of a mother, are free to choose their own lives. But GENs are gestated in a tank, sequestered in slums, and sent to work as slaves as soon as they reach age fifteen.

When Kayla is Assigned to care for Zul Manel, the patriarch of a trueborn family, she finds a host of secrets and surprises—not least of which is her unexpected friendship with Zul's great-grandson. Meanwhile, the children that Mishalla is Assigned to care for are being stolen in the middle of the night. With the help of an intriguing lowborn boy, Mishalla begins to suspect that something horrible is happening to them.

After weeks of toiling in their Assignments, mystifying circumstances enable Kayla and Mishalla to reunite. Together they hatch a plan with their new friends to save the children who are disappearing. Yet can GENs really trust humans? Both girls must put their lives and hearts at risk to crack open a sinister conspiracy, one that may reveal secrets no one is ready to face.

It had to be the worst day of seventh grader Kevin Larson's life. First his little brother breaks his favorite blue bottle, then the school bully entertains himself by stomping on Kevin's hand. When the bully gleefully tells the teacher Kevin hasn't even started the history report due the next day, Kevin knows he's doomed. Even with the help of his buddies, Naomi, Michael and Tasha, he hasn't got a prayer of writing the ten-page report overnight. But when his friends gather with him in his room to help him write, fate has one more trick to play on Kevin. A visit to a strange Web site and the antics of Kevin's cat, Snowflake, launch the four seventh-graders on a remarkable adventure more than a century into the past. Trapped in the wrong time, sheltered by a young girl named Sarah, Kevin and his friends struggle to devise a way to return to the future. But when Kevin discovers Sarah's dark secret, he has a new mission-save Sarah from her abusive stepfather, even if it means being trapped forever in the past.

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