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Twelve year old Peter Lee and his family are avid baseball fans. Even his strict Chinese immigrant father Ba -who has Peter do homework on the way to games- has some regard for the sport. However, once tragedy strikes, and takes with it a cherished loved one, no one talks about baseball anymore. Peter’s mom stops talking altogether. Convinced that what brought them together before can keep them together now, Peter joins a Little League team. The only problem? The league is short one coach. Ba steps in to seemingly save the day, but his methods rub Peter and his teammates the wrong way. Now whatRead More →

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The Brothers of the Ikkuma Pit have fended for themselves since birth. They have no Mothers; only themselves and each other. When they arrive outside the Pit as babies, they must spend a whole night alone before they are welcomed inside to be cared for and guided by the Brothers that came before them. Every time a new Little Brother enters the Pit, a Big Brother must leave to make room for him. No Big Brother has ever returned after leaving to tell of what the outside world holds. Urgle is a Big Brother and he’s not very good at it. His Little Brother CubbyRead More →

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When they were fifth graders, May Harper—a budding writer—and Libby Deaton—a budding artist, created Princess X.  “A blue-haired girl in a puff-sleeved princess dress, wearing a big gold crown and red sneakers” (3), Princess X was born on a sidewalk as chalk art, but the two girls took her home and built an imaginary empire—filling notebooks and sketchbooks with her adventures.  “The princess became their alter ego, their avatar, their third best friend” (8). Several years later, as the girls were entering high school, Libby and her mother were in a mysterious car accident.  Separated from her best friend, May couldn’t shake the dream that toldRead More →

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Lover of speed, flying, and his mother’s blackberry cobbler, ten-year-old Henry Stevens also idolizes his dad, Max.  In 1926, when Henry’s dad gets a job as an aviation mechanic with Howard Hughes “making the future,” Henry’s world changes dramatically, along with life as he knew it. Before Tomorrowland by Jeff Jensen, Brad Bird, Jonathan Case, and Damon Lindelof is a science fiction mystery-thriller that is as much Henry’s story as it is the story of Lee Brackett and his mother Clara, who is terminally ill with brain cancer.  As the two stories intersect, the reader learns about both possibility and the power of the imagination,Read More →

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Jess O’Fines was a “Save-the-Marriage Baby,” and she failed at that once her parents divorced when she was seven years old.  Now she’s twelve, and she has failed again.  While she was supposed to be babysitting her niece, Baby Ruby, someone stole the baby from the Brambles Hotel room in Los Angeles where the family—in all of its dysfunction—had gathered to celebrate the wedding of the eldest O’Fines daughter.    To be anything other than admired and loved, helpful and cooperative, or responsible and unselfish is out of character for Jess, according to her sister, Teddy.  But perhaps Jess is just tired of playing the partRead More →

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Carr “The Raptor” Luka lives in deep orbit on the far side of the moon on an inner ring of Valtego Station.  Although he’s from Earth, he has come to Valtego Station to train in the sport of zeroboxing.  Using a combination of boxing, martial arts, and wrestling moves, a zeroboxer fights inside a Cube in zero gravity conditions.  Similar to the mixed martial arts of cage fighting, zeroboxing receives some of the same criticism and is surrounded by similar controversy as that we see in contemporary times.  But that controversy is not central to Fonda Lee’s debut science fiction, sports novel, Zeroboxer.  Instead, theRead More →