Saving Lucas Biggs

Perfect for fans of The Thing About Jellyfish, Echo, and Hour of the Bees, this charming time-travel story from husband-and-wife team Marisa de los Santos and David Teague follows one girl's race to change the past in order to save her father's future. Thirteen-year-old Margaret knows her father is innocent, but that doesn't stop the cruel Judge Biggs from sentencing him to death. Margaret is determined to save her dad, even if it means using her family's secret—and forbidden—ability to time travel. With the help of her best friend, Charlie, and his grandpa Josh, Margaret goes back to a time when Judge Biggs was a young boy and tries to prevent the chain of events that transformed him into a corrupt, jaded man. But with the forces of history working against her, will Margaret be able to change the past? Or will she be pushed back to a present in which her father is still doomed? Told in alternating voices between Margaret and Josh, this heartwarming story shows that sometimes the forces of good need a little extra help to triumph over the forces of evil.

Acclaimed author duo Marisa de los Santos and David Tague return with a heartwarming middle grade adventure about two misfits discovering the importance of just being themselves, perfect for fans of Counting By 7’s and Hello Universe. When thirteen-year-olds Aaron and Audrey meet at a wilderness camp in the desert, they think their quirks are enough to prevent them from ever having friends. But as they trek through the challenging and unforgiving landscape, they learn that they each have what it takes to make the other whole. Luminous and clever, Connect the Stars takes on some hefty topics of the day—bullying, understanding where you fit in, and learning to live with physical and mental challenges—all in a joyous adventure kids will love!

New York Times bestselling author Marisa de los Santos returns with Falling Together, an emotionally resonant, powerfully moving, and pitch perfect novel about friends, family, and love. It's been six years since Pen Calloway watched Cat and Will, her best friends from college, walk out of her life. Through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the vicissitudes of single motherhood, she has never stopped missing them. When, after years of silence, Cat—the bewitching, charismatic center of their group—urgently requests that the three meet at their college reunion, Pen can't refuse. But instead of a happy reconciliation, what awaits is a collision of past and present that sends Pen and Will on a journey around the world, with Pen's five-year-old daughter and Cat's hostile husband in tow. And as Pen and Will struggle to uncover the truth about Cat, they find more than they bargained for: startling truths about who they were before and who they are now. With her trademark wit, vivid prose, and gift for creating authentic, captivating characters, Marisa de los Santos returns with an emotionally resonant novel about our deepest human connections.

A 2015 Whitney Award Nominee! A powerful story of loss, second chances, and first love, reminiscent of Sarah Dessen and John Green. When Oakley Nelson loses her older brother, Lucas, to cancer, she thinks she’ll never recover. Between her parents’ arguing and the battle she’s fighting with depression, she feels nothing inside but a hollow emptiness. When Mom suggests they spend a few months in California with Aunt Jo, Oakley isn’t sure a change of scenery will alter anything, but she’s willing to give it a try. In California, Oakley discovers a sort of safety and freedom in Aunt Jo’s beach house. Once they’re settled, Mom hands her a notebook full of letters addressed to her—from Lucas. As Oakley reads one each day, she realizes how much he loved her, and each letter challenges her to be better and to continue to enjoy her life. He wants her to move on. If only it were that easy. But then a surfer named Carson comes into her life, and Oakley is blindsided. He makes her feel again. As she lets him in, she is surprised by how much she cares for him, and that’s when things get complicated. How can she fall in love and be happy when Lucas never got the chance to do those very same things? With her brother’s dying words as guidance, Oakley knows she must learn to listen and trust again. But will she have to leave the past behind to find happiness in the future? Sky Pony Press, with our Good Books, Racehorse and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of books for young readers—picture books for small children, chapter books, books for middle grade readers, and novels for young adults. Our list includes bestsellers for children who love to play Minecraft; stories told with LEGO bricks; books that teach lessons about tolerance, patience, and the environment, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

★ "Suspend all disbelief and enjoy." —Kirkus (starred review) From David Teague, the coauthor of the critically acclaimed Saving Lucas Biggs, comes a funny and sweet story about learning to have courage even when it feels like the world is ending. Oscar Indigo has never been good at baseball, so naturally he’s nervous when he has to fill in for his team’s injured All-Star, Lourdes. Luckily, Oscar has a mysterious gold watch that can stop time, which he uses to fake a game-winning home run. Now Oscar’s the underdog hero of his town and even Lourdes wants to be his friend. But the universe is a precarious place, and you can’t just steal time without any consequences. If Oscar doesn’t find a way to return the time he stole, the universe will unwind completely. Oscar wants nothing more than to ask Lourdes for help, but what would a baseball star like her think of a guy whose fake home run actually destroyed the universe? But as he and Lourdes grow closer, Oscar understands that it isn’t always what you do that makes you special—but who you are. And that confidence just might be the key to fixing the universe.

“Marisa de los Santos’s Belong to Me is my favorite discovery of the past years: a terrific page-turner that’s also poignant, funny, surprising and deeply heartfelt.” —Harlan Coben “Complex, engaging, and surprisingly moving.” —Boston Globe The sensational New York Times bestseller from Marisa de los Santos, Belong to Me is a gift for readers, an enchanting, luminous novel about the accidents, both big and small, that affect our choice of friend, lover, and spouse. A story centered around three very different suburban neighbors and what it truly means to “belong” to someone, this eye-opening, unforgettable book is the perfect book club selection—beautifully written, smart and sophisticated women’s fiction that invites discussion as it touches the heart—and the ideal companion to de los Santos’s previous blockbuster, Love Walked In.

Bella isn't evil. But even people with good intentions can end up doing bad things. Especially when they meet people with the power to persuade them to do almost anything, like John Wilkes Booth-the most charismatic and famous actor of his time. So when Booth sets his sights on Bella, an assistant seamstress to Mary Todd Lincoln, to help with his plot to kidnap President Lincoln, he is able to persuade her to betray her president and even turn her back on the boy she has loved her entire life. Bella believes Booth is only trying to force the North to release Southern war prisoners, and will not harm her dear friend Mr. Lincoln. But the kidnapping plot fails, and now Booth will stop at nothing--even if it means harming Bella in the process. Anna Myers has crafted a provocative new look at the Lincoln assassination through the eyes of both a young White House insider and the assassin himself. An author's note provides the historical background to this tragic event.

The minute she had opened the trunk, she knew there wasn't anything like hope in it. Just awful musty things, but each one with a kind of terrible dark halo around it. She picked up that piece of old lace. She saw that stain -- pale, brownish in color. She knew it was blood. Somebody's blood. There was violence in that trunk, and dark secrets, and she did not want to know them. Curious about the old homestead where she now lives, Jerry finds an ancient trunk in the basement that contains, among other things, an old piece of bloodstained lace, some letters, and a battered doll. The objects in the trunk have stories to tell -- stories about the Spanish Inquisition spanning nearly five hundred years and stories of secrets locked deep in the bloodlines of Jerry's ancestors. Kathryn Lasky's powerhouse novel is a dramatic historical saga that brings the reader face-to-face with some of the worst atrocities ever committed against humankind in the name of God. But above all, it is an unforgettable coming-of-age story about a girl who, in connecting with her own past and faith, is at last able to face her own demons and liberate not only herself but also future generations of her family from the long chain of suffering and silence.