The Universe Against Her

From the author of The Art of Lainey and Liars, Inc. comes a fresh, contemporary story about one girl’s tragic past and a boy who convinces her that maybe her luck is about to change. Perfect for fans of Sarah Dessen or Jenny Han. Maguire knows she’s bad luck. No matter how many charms she buys off the internet or good luck rituals she performs each morning, horrible things happen when Maguire is around. Like that time her brother, father, and uncle were all killed in a car crash—and Maguire walked away with barely a scratch. But then on her way out of her therapist’s office, she meets Jordy, an aspiring tennis star, who wants to help Maguire break her unlucky streak. Maguire knows that the best thing she can do for Jordy is to stay away, but staying away may be harder than she thought.

The children of the Stratford were free from the shackles of their adults, but Ceri and her crew had only solved one problem. The biggest one remained—how to deliver their sleeping passengers to the colony planet that awaited them. This situation weighed on everyone, but no more heavily than it did on Ceri. With no way to repair the Stratford’s navigation system, her dream was lost. Then, contact. A ship, the Devant, replies to their emergency beacon. Their chief engineer offers a means to Ceri’s desires, but the Devant’s commander demands a price too steep to pay—total obedience to a new set of adults. Will Ceri once again bow to adults to give the Stratford’s passengers their dream, or will she become the leader her crew wants her to be and fight?

Charming biochemist Ana Mitchell has a lot on her mind—she’s about to leave on a covert mission to colonize Mars. She enlists local art student Jolie Dann to keep her high-tech farmhouse in order while she’s at training camp. Jolie soon finds herself falling for the secretive and fascinating Ana, despite knowing she may never return home. Their relationship is challenged when the mission’s timeline is suddenly accelerated. Will Ana choose to put the universe between herself and Jolie, or will she take a chance on the one person who can keep her on Earth?

This “delightfully whimsical novel riffs on the premise that ordinary lives stubbornly resist the tidy order that a fiction narrative might impose on them” (Publishers Weekly). Can a story save your life? Meg Carpenter is broke. Her novel is years overdue. Her cell phone is out of minutes. And her moody boyfriend’s only contribution to the household is his sour attitude. So she jumps at the chance to review a pseudoscientific book that promises life everlasting. But who wants to live forever? Consulting cosmology and physics, tarot cards, koans (and riddles and jokes), new-age theories of everything, narrative theory, Nietzsche, Baudrillard, and knitting patterns, Meg wends her way through Our Tragic Universe, asking this and many other questions. Does she believe in fairies? In magic? Is she a superbeing? Is she living a storyless story? And what’s the connection between her off-hand suggestion to push a car into a river, a ship in a bottle, a mysterious beast loose on the moor, and the controversial author of The Science of Living Forever? Smart, entrancing, and boiling over with Thomas’s trademark big ideas, Our Tragic Universe is a book about how relationships are created and destroyed, how we can rewrite our futures (if not our histories), and how stories just might save our lives.

This fast-paced action novel is set in a future where the world has been almost destroyed. Like the award-winning novel Freak the Mighty, this is Philbrick at his very best.It's the story of an epileptic teenager nicknamed Spaz, who begins the heroic fight to bring human intelligence back to the planet. In a world where most people are plugged into brain-drain entertainment systems, Spaz is the rare human being who can see life as it really is. When he meets an old man called Ryter, he begins to learn about Earth and its past. With Ryter as his companion, Spaz sets off an unlikely quest to save his dying sister -- and in the process, perhaps the world.

Having uncovered the secrets that lay behind the spookily pristine town of Perfect, Violet and the townsfolk are enjoying their new freedom from the maniacal rule of the evil Archer twins. But have they really seen the last of Edward Archer? Why is Boy acting strangely? And who is masterminding a scary zombie army?