Strong Hearts Are Mandatory

Strong Hearts Are Mandatory is a series centering in an animal-dominated land known as Media. All of the land's residents are gifted with intelligence, and a few even with the forbidden practice of magic. Within the contents of Heart of Glass, we follow the perspective of the main hero, a little noble cat known as the Radio Star. Radio is chosen to collect the fragments of a crystal heart left by a mysterious spider monkey only known as the Jester. She is accompanied by two companions, Pictures and Video, joining her in finding the shards scattered across all of Central Media in their occupations of surveillance and courier work, respectively. The opportunity to find the fragments of this broken heart is Radio's first chance to venture out into the world that she's only ever been able to listen to from the safety of her windowsill, and she's going to make every heartbeat count. She's just left to hope that Video and Pictures feel this opportunity is as beneficial for them, as it is to her.

In further adventures within the borders of Media, Video has found herself hunted by the ones she trusted most. Running on limited time due to a false accusation, Video has to find the answers that will bring her enemies to justice, teaming up with the some of the most powerful influences of Media's subjects to succeed. Growing up with the idea that sorcery is sinister, Video works against the last remaining mage after the overthrow of magic. However, when the whole land is against her, she's left confused on who to count on. Who will use her actions against her, knowing the real story of Media's recent past, and who will show what's real when it comes to the truth behind magic? Video takes Film, one of the highest ranks surveillance directors in Media, as her travel companion to get her answers. The two work as a unit on the mission to clear Video's name, but even with Film's assistance, Video is also driven by her last assignment. She seeks help from her family to take down the mage that framed her, determined to save Media from it's clutches.

Examines the traits that define most people who achieve success, heart, smarts, guts, and luck, and helps readers to determine which traits they possess.

The first Graywolf Press African Fiction Prize winner, a story of a girl’s fantastical sea voyage to rescue her father The House of Rust is an enchanting novel about a Hadhrami girl in Mombasa. When her fisherman father goes missing, Aisha takes to the sea on a magical boat made of a skeleton to rescue him. She is guided by a talking scholar’s cat (and soon crows, goats, and other animals all have their say, too). On this journey Aisha meets three terrifying sea monsters. After she survives a final confrontation with Baba wa Papa, the father of all sharks, she rescues her own father, and hopes that life will return to normal. But at home, things only grow stranger. Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s debut is a magical realist coming-of-age tale told through the lens of the Swahili and diasporic Hadhrami culture in Mombasa, Kenya. Richly descriptive and written with an imaginative hand and sharp eye for unusual detail, The House of Rust is a memorable novel by a thrilling new voice.

Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.

"When new boy in school, Alec, sweeps Zephyr off her feet, their passionate romance takes a dangerous and possessive turn when Alec begins manipulating Zephyr"--

When Claudia accidentally eavesdrops on the epic breakup of Paige and Iris, the it-couple at her school, she finds herself in hot water with prickly, difficult Iris. Thrown together against their will in the class production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with the goofiest, cutest boy Claudia has ever known, Iris and Claudia are in for an eye-opening senior year. Smart, funny, and thoroughly, wonderfully flawed, Claudia navigates a world of intense friendships and tentative romance in Emma Mills's Follish Hearts, a young adult novel about expanding your horizons, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and accepting—and loving—people for who they really are.