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Check out Ted Sanders’ Selfie with The Keepers: The Harp and the Ravenvine, the second in the magical series that began with The Box and the Dragonfly.

Happy 2015 to you! To start the year off right, we’d like to introduce our New Voices picks for Winter 2015. These debut novels entertained us, enriched us, intrigued us, and made us so excited to witness the beginnings of these authors’ sure-to-be-stellar writing careers.

Click on the links below to read the first chapter of each title, and make sure to keep an eye on these fantastic authors. We can’t wait to see what they do next!

BLACKBIRD FLY, by Erin Entrada Kelly, follows twelve-year-old Apple Yengko as she grapples with being different, with friends and backstabbers, and with following her dreams. Apple has always felt a little different from her classmates. She and her mother moved to America from the Philippines when she was little, and her mother still cooks Filipino foods, makes mistakes with her English, and chastises Apple for becoming “too American.” But it becomes unbearable in eighth grade, when the boys—the stupid, stupid boys—in Apple’s class put her name on the Dog Log, the list of the most unpopular girls in school. When Apple’s friends turn on her and everything about her life starts to seem weird and embarrassing, Apple turns to music. If she can just save enough to buy a guitar and learn to play, maybe she can change herself. It might be the music that saves her . . . or it might be her two new friends, who show how special she really is. Read the first chapter here!

THE KEEPERS: THE BOX AND THE DRAGONFLY, by Ted Sanders, is the first in a four-book middle-grade fantasy series about Horace F. Andrews, a quiet boy who discovers he possesses a power that can change worlds. When a sign leads Horace underground to the House of Answers, a hidden warehouse full of mysterious objects, he unfortunately finds only questions. What is this curious place? Who are the strange, secretive people who entrust him with a rare and immensely powerful gift? And what is he to do with it? From the enormous, sinister man shadowing him to the gradual mastery of his new-found abilities to his encounters with Chloe—a girl who has an astonishing talent of her own—Horace follows a path that puts the pair in the middle of a centuries-old conflict between two warring factions in which every decision they make could have disastrous consequences. Read the first chapter here!

NO PARKING AT THE END TIMES, by Bryan Bliss, is a thoughtful and moving story about losing everything—and about what you will do for the people you love. Abigail’s parents never should have made that first donation to that end-of-times preacher. Or the next, or the next. They shouldn’t have sold their house. Or packed Abigail and her twin brother, Aaron, into their old van to drive across the country to San Francisco, to be there for the “end of the world.” Because now they’re living in their van. And Aaron is full of anger, disappearing to who-knows-where every night. Their family is falling apart. All Abigail wants is to hold them together, to get them back to the place where things were right. But is that too big a task for one teenage girl? Read the first chapter here!

RED QUEEN, by Victoria Aveyard, is a sweeping fantasy about seventeen-year-old Mare, a common girl whose latent magical powers draw her into the dangerous world of the elite ruling class. Mare Barrow’s world is divided by blood—those with Red blood serve the Silver elite, whose silver blood gifts them with superhuman abilities. Mare is a Red, scraping by as a thief in a poor, rural village until a twist of fate throws her in front of the Silver court. Before the King, princes, and all the nobles, she discovers she has an ability of her own. To cover up this impossibility, the King forces her to play the role of a lost Silver princess and betroths her to one of his own sons. As Mare is drawn further into the Silver world, she risks everything to use her new position to help the Scarlet Guard—a growing Red rebellion—even as her heart tugs her in an impossible direction. One wrong move can lead to her death, but in the dangerous game she plays, the only certainty is betrayal. Read the first chapter here!

LITTLE PEACH, by Peggy Kern, is the gritty and riveting story of a runaway who comes to New York City and is lured into prostitution by a manipulative pimp. When Michelle runs away from her drug-addicted mother, she has just enough money to make it to New York, where she hopes to move in with a friend. But once she arrives at the bustling Port Authority, she is confronted with the terrifying truth: She is alone and out of options. Then she meets Devon, a good-looking, well-dressed guy who emerges from the crowd armed with a kind smile, a place for her to stay, and eyes that seem to understand exactly how she feels. But Devon is not what he seems to be, and soon Michelle finds herself engulfed in the world of child prostitution. It is a world of impossible choices, where the line between love and abuse, captor and savior, is blurred beyond recognition. This hauntingly vivid story illustrates the human spirit’s indomitable search for home, and one girl’s struggle to survive. Read the first chapter here.

SIMON VS. THE HOMO SAPIENS AGENDA, by Becky Albertalli, is an incredibly funny and poignant twenty-first-century coming-of-age, coming-out story—wrapped in a geek romance. Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical. But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now Simon is actually being blackmailed: If he doesn’t play wingman for class clown Martin, his sexual identity will become everyone’s business. Worse, the privacy of Blue, the pen name of the boy he’s been emailing with, will be jeopardized. With some messy dynamics emerging in his once tight-knit group of friends, and his email correspondence with Blue growing more flirtatious every day, Simon’s junior year has suddenly gotten all kinds of complicated. Now, change-averse Simon has to find a way to step out of his comfort zone before he’s pushed out—without alienating his friends, compromising himself, or fumbling a shot at happiness with the most confusing, adorable guy he’s never met. Read the first chapter here!

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: September 19, 2010

As the countdown begins for debut children’s novelist Lian Tanner’s Museum of Thieves, you must read this interview so that you can be in the know about the fantastical journey that awaits readers of The Keepers trilogy!

Q: Museum of Thieves is your debut novel in the thrilling trilogy The Keepers (release date: September 28, 2010).  Can you tell us what we should expect?

A: It’s a fantasy adventure set in the city of Jewel, where impatience is a sin and boldness is a crime. It’s the story of a bold girl, a mysterious boy and a living museum, whose rooms shift and change places, so that only a thief can find a way through them. It’s a story about wildness and risk, freedom and safety, secrets, treachery and magical creatures.

Q: The genre of ‘fantasy’ books is one of your favorites—this shows in your work. Which type of reader or personality type do you think your books will most appeal to?

A: I think it’ll appeal to middle-grade readers who like high-stake adventures, interesting characters, cliff-hangers, and worlds that veer off from ours in unexpected directions. In my experience so far, the book also seems to work for older kids, who read it at a deeper level for the things it says about our own society and the way we treat risk.

Q: ‘An old rubbish dump, so big that it’s a city. And everything that has been thrown away is there—memories, forgotten people, extinct animals.’ These are the words that you scribbled in your ideas book—they are the seed from which your series bloomed. What were the next steps that followed this initial idea?

A: Probably one of the most important steps was realising that the setting of the book was not going to be a rubbish dump, but a museum. I was reading a newspaper article about the Hermitage Museum in Russia, and a line jumped out at me, something about how, in all the great old museums, time stretches and becomes something more oceanic. That was a real ‘aha’ moment for me.

At the same time I was following a discussion in the Australian media about ‘bubble-wrap children’—children who are so over-protected by their parents that they miss out on a lot of essential skills. As soon as I realised that these two ideas—the museum and the over-protected children—went together, other things started to fall into place fairly quickly. Not just an ordinary museum, but a living museum. That was such an exciting thought! It was then that I started a scrapbook, pasting in pictures of faces that interested me, and names, and anything else that set off that inner spark. For me, this is one of the most interesting parts of writing, picking things out intuitively, then sorting through them until you find the ones that resonate most strongly with each other.

Q: Are you still working on Book 2: City of Lies and Book 3: Path of Beasts?

A: I’ve just finished