Fresh Ink: Spotlight on Debut Books of All Kinds

Maddie Fynn is a shy high school junior, cursed with an eerie intuitive ability: she sees a series of unique digits hovering above the foreheads of each person she encounters. Her earliest memories are marked by these numbers, but it takes her father's premature death for Maddie and her family to realize that these mysterious digits are actually deathdates, and just like birthdays, everyone has one.

Forced by her alcoholic mother to use her ability to make extra money, Maddie identifies the quickly approaching deathdate of one client's young son, but because her ability only allows her to see the when and not the how, she's unable to offer any more insight. When the boy goes missing on that exact date, law enforcement turns to Maddie.

Soon, Maddie is entangled in a homicide investigation, and more young people disappear and are later found murdered. A suspect for the investigation, a target for the murderer, and attracting the attentions of a mysterious young admirer who may be connected to it all, Maddie's whole existence is about to be turned upside down. Can she right things before it's too late?

A letter from Maddie:

I'm new to the group, but I'd like to take a moment to introduce myself.  My name is Madelyn Fynn - Maddie - and I'm currently attending Poplar Hollow High in Poplar Hollow, New York.  Don't worry if you can't find that on a map; Google doesn't seem to recognize it.

Anyway, ever since I can remember, I've seen the world a little differently.  I can see what no one else can.  When I look at someone - be it somebody standing in front of me, or in a photograph, or on a movie screen - I see a series of digits floating just above his or her brow.  I learned the hard way, after my dad was murdered, that the digits represent the date that person will die.  It's a terrible "talent" to have because in absolutely every face I look at, I see death.  Sometimes the person I'm looking at has far less time than they, or anyone else, might think.  I'm like the Grim Reaper incarnate, and it's awful.

Worse yet, telling someone their date has never had an effect on the numbers.  They've always remained stubbornly fixed, no matter how much warning I give a person, which is a whole other awful thing to have to live with.  If knowing when someone will die won't change anything, then why am I cursed with the ability?  Seriously, what's the point?

Still, Ma and I are trying to make the most of it.  We charge people a little money to tell them their date, and it helps to pay the bills, and maybe it gives them time to get their affairs in order, or to live a more fulfilled life.  Trouble is, Ma is drinking away most of the extra money, and recently a woman came to me asking about her young daughter, who is very, very sick.  I had good news about her daughter.  She'll get better and live a long life ... but the woman's middle son is a whole other story.  His deathdate was yesterday, and now he's gone missing, and the FBI just came to my school and wants to have a word with me. 

Things are about to go very, very bad, I think.

To read what comes next, maybe you'll pick up a copy of When, which comes out next Tuesday, January 13th. In the meantime, if you're intrigued by my ability, maybe you should ask yourself: if someone could tell you your deathdate, would you want to know?

Best wishes,

Maddie

YA Debuts Hitting The Shelves This Week

Julep Dupree tells lies. A lot of them. She’s a con artist, a master of disguise, and a sophomore at Chicago’s swanky St. Agatha High, where her father, an old-school grifter with a weakness for the ponies, sends her to so she can learn to mingle with the upper crust. For extra spending money Julep doesn’t rely on her dad—she runs petty scams for her classmates while dodging the dean of students and maintaining an A+ (okay, A-) average.

But when she comes home one day to a ransacked apartment and her father gone, Julep’s carefully laid plans for an expenses-paid golden ticket to Yale start to unravel. Even with help from St. Agatha’s resident Prince Charming, Tyler Richland, and her loyal hacker sidekick, Sam, Julep struggles to trace her dad’s trail of clues through a maze of creepy stalkers, hit attempts, family secrets, and worse, the threat of foster care. With everything she has at stake, Julep’s in way over her head . . . but that’s not going to stop her from using every trick in the book to find her dad before his mark finds her. Because that would be criminal.

Princess Snow is missing.
Her home planet is filled with violence and corruption at the hands of King Matthias and his wife as they attempt to punish her captors. The king will stop at nothing to get his beloved daughter back-but that's assuming she wants to return at all.

Essie has grown used to being cold. Temperatures on the planet Thanda are always sub-zero, and she fills her days with coding and repairs for the seven loyal drones that run the local mines.

When a mysterious young man named Dane crash-lands near her home, Essie agrees to help the pilot repair his ship. But soon she realizes that Dane's arrival was far from accidental, and she's pulled into the heart of a war she's risked everything to avoid.

In her enthralling debut, R.C. Lewis weaves the tale of a princess on the run from painful secrets . . . and a poisonous queen. With the galaxy's future-and her own-in jeopardy, Essie must choose who to trust in a fiery fight for survival.

 

 

The Accidental Highwayman is the first swashbuckling adventure for young adults by talented author and illustrator, Ben Tripp. This thrilling tale of dark magic and true love is the perfect story for fans of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride.
 

In eighteenth-century England, young Christopher “Kit” Bristol is the unwitting servant of notorious highwayman Whistling Jack. One dark night, Kit finds his master bleeding from a mortal wound, dons the man’s riding cloak to seek help, and changes the course of his life forever. Mistaken for Whistling Jack and on the run from redcoats, Kit is catapulted into a world of magic and wonders he thought the stuff of fairy tales.

Bound by magical law, Kit takes up his master’s quest to rescue a rebellious fairy princess from an arranged marriage to King George III of England. But his task is not an easy one, for Kit must contend with the feisty Princess Morgana, goblin attacks, and a magical map that portends his destiny: as a hanged man upon the gallows….

Fans of classic fairy-tale fantasies such as Stardust by Neil Gaiman and will find much to love in this irresistible YA debut by Ben Tripp, the son of one of America’s most beloved illustrators, Wallace Tripp (Amelia Bedelia). Following in his father’s footsteps, Ben has woven illustrations throughout the story.